Aankhein teri matar ke jaise/ Muh tera gobhi ke jaise/ Haath tera gajar ke jaise/ He bhagwan ek hi dost maanga/ Wo bhi subzi mandi ke jaise (Your eyes are like peas/ Your mouth like cauliflower/ Your hands are like carrots/ God, I only asked for one friend/ You gave me a vegetable patch).
The five-year-old living under Delhi's Signature Bridge recites the poem cheerfully. He is one of more than 50 children whose parents, Hindus from Pakistan, fled religious persecution and sought refuge in India. The group, numbering more than 200 people, is supported by Humanitarian Aid International (HAI), a Delhi-based organization working on refugee and disaster management.
But their new "home" lies on a floodplain. Every year, when the monsoon arrives between June and Spetember, rising water forces them onto the footpaths of Signature Bridge. When the waters recede, they return to rebuild their homes.
There are, according to a 2024 report by the United Nations, roughly 304 million migrants worldwide. The word “migrant” does enormous work in that figure, grouping together the software engineer who relocated to Berlin for a better salary and the family that fled a village because their daughters were no longer safe walking to school.
Buried within that aggregate is another number: 123.2 million people who had been forcibly displaced by the end of 2024 (UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 2025). The distinction carries real consequences because systems built for voluntary migration often fail people whose movement was coerced.
The pressures that uproot people—armed conflict, persecution, political instability, economic collapse, natural disasters and slow-onset climate stress—are deeply intertwined. A country at war is often one whose economy is collapsing. A community repeatedly hit by floods is also one whose institutions are under strain. The World Migration Report 2024 is explicit: displacement drivers interact, and any analytical framework that treats them as discrete misrepresents the lived reality of the people experiencing them.
Low- and middle-income countries host around 73% of the world's forcibly displaced people (UNHCR, 2025)—countries that often lack the legal infrastructure for systematic refugee recognition, the fiscal resources to sustain asylum systems, and the institutional capacity for large-scale integration. The mismatch between where displacement occurs and where resources exist remains one of the defining structural problems in global migration governance.
India sits at the centre of this picture. Alongside hosting displaced communities including Tibetans, Sri Lankan Tamils, Afghan Hindus and Sikhs, Rohingyas and Chin from Myanmar, and Pakistani religious minorities, it also manages large-scale internal displacement caused by floods, earthquakes and industrial disasters.
Living in the gap
India has no domestic legal framework recognizing refugees as a distinct category entitled to specific protections. Nor is it a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. In its absence, UNHCR-issued documentation carries no legal standing, and administrative practice routinely conflates refugees with illegal migrants. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has repeatedly flagged this, with little effect.
Pakistani Hindus are among the communities caught in this gap. Many arrived on short-term pilgrimage visas and remained. Others have come under newer measures aimed at protecting persecuted minorities from neighbouring countries, including the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, and the Immigration and Foreigners Exemption Order, 2025. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Hindus in several parts of Pakistan, particularly Sindh province, face risks including abduction, forced conversion, and economic and social exclusion.
Ramesh Lal (name changed on request), 42, who fled a village in Sindh, says the local education system excluded his three children. “They stopped attending school because the only available education was madrasa instruction,” he says.
Another resident, Sunita, says, “We didn't come here looking for riches. We had stable livelihoods on our farms back home. We just wanted to live peacefully and didn't want our children to feel excluded in school.”
Under updated home ministry guidelines, citizenship applicants must declare the status of their native passports and submit specific foreign identity cards, land tenancy records or old border-crossing slips. For most of these families, their Pakistani passports expired years ago and were discarded. The application process is complex, and many fear that applying will expose their lack of valid documentation.
At the Delhi refugee camps, most adults survive through informal work—pushing handcarts, selling fried snacks or mobile phone accessories, or taking casual construction jobs. Some have no work at all. A police check, bad weather or illness can wipe out an entire week's income, with no social safety net to absorb the shock.
“Back home, we were farmers,” says one camp resident. “Here, I push a handcart through traffic every morning selling mobile covers. If it rains, I don’t earn a rupee. There is absolutely nothing to fall back on.” Another migrant who works as casual labour says, “In Pakistan, our work was secure even if our lives felt unsafe. In Delhi, we have the safety we wanted, but our hands are empty.”
In India, without Aadhaar, a person cannot open a bank account, obtain a SIM card, formally rent accommodation, access subsidised food, work in the formal sector or enrol a child in school. Yet these families cannot lawfully obtain Aadhaar because their citizenship status remains unresolved. The World Bank describes this as an “integration gap”, a situation in which the absence of one document makes it effectively impossible to obtain any others.
Social activist and author Harsh Mander documents this administrative trap in This Land Is Mine, I Am Not of This Land. He argues that many poor people lack documents such as birth certificates, school-leaving certificates and land deeds, and that when they are displaced by floods or communal violence, even those few records are often lost.
The mental health consequences are equally severe.
A research by the World Health Organization research finds that refugees and forcibly displaced people experience disproportionately high rates of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress, not only because of the trauma of flight, but also because of prolonged legal uncertainty, discrimination, fractured social networks and the constant fear of deportation.
One immediate policy priority would be to decouple access to primary healthcare, school enrolment and basic banking from citizenship status, allowing these services to be accessed on the basis of verifiable residence.
The families living beneath Signature Bridge did not settle in a flood-prone area by choice. They settled there because they had no better options. Many arrived believing that India would eventually recognize them as citizens. Whether that expectation is fulfilled will depend on whether the country's institutions can adapt to include them.
Hrishik Malhotra is a Grade 12 student at Sanskriti School, New Delhi.