On Saturday, the Union ministry of External Affairs announced a change in the way Indians will travel abroad for work. Instead of regular blue passports, the authorities will issue special orange passports to Indians who fall in the Emigration Check Required category – those who do not have secondary education and are travelling to work in one of 18 listed countries, most of them in West Asia. The change of colour may seem like a minor detail but the orange documents willsegregate Indians travelling abroad by class, providing an explicit affirmation of the Indian state’s bias towards those citizens who leave the country to work as blue-collar labourers. The decision makes the discrimination inherent in the Emigration Check Required system even worse. Indians with ECR passports require permission from the Union government to travel abroad. This measure is taken ostensibly to protect them from evils like trafficking. However, there is little evidence that the system helps in any way and plenty to show that the red tape makes the already tough life of an Indian migrant labourer even more difficult. India’s migration process is managed by no less than three different Central ministries. Passports are issued under the Ministry of External Affairs, emigration clearance for migrant workers is done by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs and people departing from Indian airports are overseen by the Home Ministry. In this, emigration clearance is a significant bottleneck, given that the process for all of India’s 1.3 billion citizens is managed in only nine locations. The system encourages touts. Moreover, in West Asia, which has the highest concentration of Indian migrant labour, Indian embassies barely have the capacity to solve the many problems of their citizens abroad. In both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, only two Indian labour attaches look after the needs of around 20 lakh migrant workers. In their book on overseas recruitment practices in India, academics S Irydaya Rajan, VJ Varghese and MS Jayakumar recommend abolishing the Emigration Check Required system altogether. “An ECR passport, in reality, has become a stamp of deprivation and a passport to exploitation at every stage, apart from the fact that it is a passport that offers no privileges or additional rights to its holders,” they write. The orange passports, rather than abolishing this discriminatory system, only deepen the problems.