Migrant Crisis during the Pandemic– Understanding Flux, Precarity and Citizenship

Keywords: Migration, Covid 19, Citizenship, Safety Nets
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 8

Abstract

In India, the pandemic induced lockdown came with devastating effects – millions of migrant workers found themselves in extreme precarity – without income, housing, food or any safety net. The human tragedy wrought by these circumstances has had intersectional effects – and they must be unpacked at the macro as well as the individual level. Derived from the embedded ethnographic work, surveys and interviews, I did at State Migrant Control Room, Jharkhand, India, during the year 2020. As an enquiry, the paper asks the following questions: a) What are the kinds of challenges that vulnerable migrant workers face? b) How did the lockdown and the subsequent economic downturn affect their situation? c) What were the key ways these workers coped, and what support systems did they tap into?
This paper looks at place-based policies and social safety nets and seeks to evaluate how planners and policymakers can resolve the situation. Documenting and retelling these lived stories are critical – not just to create archives of oral histories or to unpack the depth of structural failure in the face of precarity. It is also important to understand systemic failure and examine ways that place-based, as well as inter-state policies, can address these issues of structural violence, expulsion and forced invisibility.

References
• Abbas, R. (2016). Internal migration and citizenship in India. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 42(1): 150-168.

• Shome, Raka. (2021). The long and deadly road: the covid pandemic and Indian migrants. Cultural studies (London, England). Routledge.