-The Indian Express With small land-holdings, hilly terrains, water scarcity and parched lands, farming is neither profitable nor a dependable source of income in many villages. Dahod: The ardous journey is not just what migrant labourers, who are returning in thousands from cities to their villages amid an unprecedented nation wide lockdown in view of the Coronavirus pandemic, are facing. Deeper economic uncertainties stare at many of them back in their villages. Sukhlal...
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India’s seasonal migrants have been invisible for too long. This crisis should be a wake-up call -Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
-Scroll.in This is an important reminder that policies with a 120 million-person hole at the heart of them are flawed. India’s chaotic attempt to go into a lockdown to combat the Coronavirus has had an unusual side-effect: it has the attention of the elites, ensconced in their homes during the three-week period, to the plight of the country’s massive migrant labour population. The Central government’s failure to adequately plan forced hundreds of thousands...
More »These migrants did not walk back home. They stayed and are now running out of food -Vijayta Lalwani & Ipsita Chakravarty
-Scroll.in Falling through the cracks of the public distribution system, they fear stepping out, even for food. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a national lockdown on March 24 and asked Indians to stay home in order to contain the spread of the Coronavirus, it triggered an exodus of migrant workers from the cities. With all work halted and public transport shut, they set off on desperate journeys, aiming to walk back...
More »Walking with the migrants, across four states, one story: What do we have here? -Dipankar Ghose
-The Indian Express As the national lockdown entered its second week, The Indian Express travelled across four states to track this unprecedented exodus, examine what social distancing and isolation means in towns and villages off camera and off the highway — and what could await the first COVID-19 patients here. Morena (Madhya Pradesh): They built homes, offices, even cities. They worked in technology companies. They cooked the food we ate, cleaned the...
More »Migrant workers distrust a state that does not take them into account -Partha Mukhopadhyay and Mukta Naik
-The Indian Express Invisible, largely, in the Census and in national sample surveys — and consequently to administrators — field studies have consistently claimed short-term labour mobility in India was significant. Of the many, many countries that COVID has now locked down, India stands, or rather, walks, alone. Bereft of transport, by road or rail, people are walking home, to nearby districts, and to far-off destinations several hundred kilometres away, the mother...
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