Rights of migrant workers

With the Chinese lunar New Year three weeks away, a large migration will take place as people hit the roads for family reunions.

A floating population of more than 200 million is the ready source of home goers before China's most important holiday that falls on Feb 3. The National Population and Family Planning Commission's report of the transient population in 2010 found that 100 million were young people working away from home. More than 16.32 million old people were left behind with young children in rural areas.

In the 1980s, China's economic reform opened the floodgates of migration from rural to urban areas. The migrants numbered around 2 million; today more than one-tenth of the nation's 1.3 billion are on the move. The number of migrants is expected to rise, with some analysts predicting that it will reach 300 million by the year 2015.