Abstract
Implementing countrywide lockdown measures in India, from March 2020 to May 2020 was a major step to deal with the COVID -19 pandemic crisis. The decision of country lockdown adversely affected the urban migrant population, and a large section of them was compelled to move out of the urban areas to their native places. The reverse migration garnered widespread media attention and coverage in electronic as well as print media. The present study focuses on the coverage of the issue by print media using descriptive natural language text mining. The study uses topic modelling, clustering, and sentiment analysis to examine the articles on migration issues during the lockdown period published in two leading English newspapers in India- The Times of India and The Hindu. The sentiment analysis results indicate that the majority of articles have neutral sentiment while very few articles show high negative or positive polarity. Descriptive topic modelling results show that transport, food security, special services, and employment with migration and migrants are the majorly covered topics after employing Bag of Words and TF-IDF models. Clustering is performed to group the article titles based on similar traits using agglomerative hierarchical clustering.
Highlights
The global Coronavirus pandemic has led to serious structural and functional changes across nations
Though the lockdown strictly adhered to the norms of staying at home and restricted mobility, it resulted in a mass movement of the migrant population fleeing the urban areas back to their homes
We focus on applying topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and clustering-based approaches to determine the topics, opinion polarity and coherence among the topics discussed during the COVID-19 pandemic
Summary
The global Coronavirus pandemic has led to serious structural and functional changes across nations. India encountered its first coronavirus positive case in January 2020 and imposed lockdown and social distancing as steps towards tackling the pandemic India declared a nationwide lockdown on 25th March 2020 quarantining approximately 1.3 billion people to their homes (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52024239). According to Census 2011, there are 78.2 million rural-urban migrants in India, and work is the fourth major driver of migration to the urban areas, others being migration due to marriage, with household and after birth. According to the 2017–18 labour force survey, there are 415 million informal workers in India, making up 90 per cent of the total workforce, and 28 million rural-to-urban workers including small farmers, labourers, weavers and artisans, construction labourers and tradesmen, domestic workers, manufacturing workers, street vendors, transport sector and rag pickers [6]
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