Manufactured Maladies: Lives and Livelihoods of Migrant Workers During COVID-19 Lockdown in India
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Manufactured Maladies: Lives and Livelihoods of Migrant Workers During COVID‑19 Lockdown in India Anindita Adhikari1 · Navmee Goregaonkar2 · Rajendran Narayanan3,4 · Nishant Panicker3 · Nithya Ramamoorthy5 Accepted: 2 September 2020 © Indian Society of Labour Economics 2020
Abstract The 68 days of lockdown in India, as a measure to contain the spread of the COVID19 pandemic, resulted in an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, unlike any other in the world. In the first half of the lockdown, migrant workers were stranded with no food and money with severe restrictions on movement when a mass exodus of workers back to their hometowns and villages began. In the second half, the workers’ woes were compounded with a series of chaotic travel orders and gross mismanagement of the repatriation process. In this article, we draw on the work of Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN) with more analysis and perspective. SWAN was a spontaneous relief effort that emerged soon after the lockdown was announced in March 2020. In addition to providing relief, SWAN concurrently documented the experiences of over 36,000 workers through the lockdown. We highlight the inadequacy of the government and judicial response to the migrant worker crisis. We present quantitative data elaborating the profile of workers that reached out to SWAN, the extent of hunger, loss of livelihoods and income. We also present qualitative insights based on interactions with workers and discuss multiple, non-exhaustive, dimensions of vulnerability to which migrant workers were exposed. Keywords COVID-19 · Migrants · Labour · Lockdown · India · Inequality
All the authors are SWAN volunteers. However, this article is not a SWAN initiative and hence does not reflect the views of SWAN as a platform. Names of all the workers in this article have been changed for the sake of privacy. * Rajendran Narayanan [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Vol.:(0123456789) ISLE
The Indian Journal of Labour Economics
1 Introduction The first COVID-19 positive case in India was reported in Kerala, India, on 30 January 2020. A few hours later, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced the novel coronavirus to be a ‘global health emergency’. However, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare did not launch its COVID-19 awareness campaigns till 6 March 2020 (Sen 2020). Without any prior intimation or public consultation, on 24 March 2020, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, from a pulpit behind a camera announced a nationwide lockdown giving just four hours’ notice to the country. This caught millions of people—including the state governments and the bureaucracy—off-guard leaving them no time to plan for such an emergency. While the lockdown did not contain the spread of the virus as expected, it did spawn a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. India’s lockdown has been cited as one of the most ‘stringent’ and ‘stingy’1 lockdowns in the world shutting down the economy and movement with a meagre f
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