Plight of Migrant Workers of India due to COVID-19

Abstract

The availability of jobs has been a great concern in developing countries like India, with exploding population, increasing urbanization rate and regional disparities in development. This results in migration from one to other cities, states in search of employment for improved livelihood. Migration has become essential, where population densities are high in relation to land. Frequent shortage of rainfall or suffer floods also forces people to move. Informality, circular migration, labour market and social discrimination, and segmentation go hand in hand. This puts these migrants vulnerable. The announcement of stringent lock-down at a notice of about four hours on 24, March 2020 in India in response to the Corona pandemic intensified the feeling of insecurity among the migrant labourers across various parts of the country. The loss in employment and incomes of the workers in the informal economy, some 93 percent of all workers, was almost complete in the first phase of the lockdown. The loss in employment and incomes immediately threatened their access to food and non-food essential items, rented accommodation and shelter in many places. The central government as well as many of the state governments failed to anticipate and understand the scale and nature of the problem faced by migrants. They chose to interpret and deal with the urgent issues as a law and order problem arising due to what it considered were planned spread of misinformation. With all forms of transport stopped completely at the initial stage of this lockdown, most of the immigrant labourers had no choice but to walk miles to their homes. This paper confines the study to internal labourers of India and uses secondary data sources and observations of the researchers during the lock down phase of COVID-19.