-Livemint.com Weakening labour laws just when they need greater social cover shows a lack of empathy for them The migration of thousands of workers trying to reach their home states has woken up the State, media and the middle class to a new category of citizens: migrants. Ever since the lockdown was announced in the last week of March, they have travelled long distances, dodging the police in state after state, to...

-Livemint.com * Roughly 100 million migrant workers are directly responsible for 10% of the GDP. Why are they still so invisible? * There has been an unwillingness to collect better data on circular migrants and understand how they affect the economy. This is shocking for a country that runs on migrant labour BRIGHTON/ LONDON: Images of stranded migrants and their long arduous journeys back home will remain seared in our collective memories of...

-The Indian Express Cash is easy to carry and widely accepted. But, our analysis of nationally representative survey data, described below, suggests that these transfers will exclude many of India’s poorest and, for others, come too late. The vast majority of India’s poor rely on daily wage labour for sustenance. With the current lockdown and its likely extension, millions of daily labourers and their families can no longer earn the money they...

-Scroll.in The Migrant Exodus will undoubtedly hurt the economy. But that is no excuse for forced labour. The Indian government’s policies towards its vulnerable migrant worker population were already a mess. This week, Karnataka made it worse. The Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state decided to cancel trains that would allow working-class people from other states to return to their homes five weeks after a national lockdown to combat Covid-19 left them stranded, often without...

-NDTV Karnataka Lockdown: The trains to ferry migrants were started last week after much back and forth between the Centre and the states amid a countrywide exodus of labourers. Bengaluru: Special trains from Karnataka taking home thousands of migrants stranded by the coronavirus lockdown have been cancelled by the BS Yediyurappa government, which says workers are needed for construction activities that have resumed in the state. The BJP government is forcing the...