On 25 March 2020, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed the world’s largest lockdown in a bid to stem the threat of COVID-19. The stringent lockdown triggered a mass exodus from cities across India, with panic-stricken migrant workers desperately trying to leave for their homes in villages. The most conservative estimates suggest 30 million internal migrants in India. More realistic estimates peg the numbers at 100 million. If even half the most conservative figures are trekking back home, we are likely to be witness to the forced migration of at least 15 million people criss-crossing the country to get back to their homes. These numbers most likely dwarf the migrations wrought by the subcontinent’s blood-soaked 1947 partition, estimated between 10 and 12 million people.
As in many countries, COVID-19 exposed the fault lines searing through state and society in India. For the first time ever, the media, thinktanks and members of other privileged classes found themselves unable to ignore the existence of millions of migrant workers that fired the engines of India’s cities. India’s lockdown exposed the disjunctions between mobility and citizenship in India, exposing the immobile foundations of the former, the fragmented trajectory of the latter and the social distance of migrant workers from the state.
Precarious mobility
A vast majority of the migrant workers desperately trying to return home are in informal employment. According to the report of the Indian government’s Working Group on Migration, many migrant workers find employment in the country’s burgeoning construction industry and ancillary industries such as brick kilns, both notorious for their precarious labour conditions. While workers in general face wage repressions, with migrant workers being especially precarious, the vulnerabilities of circular labour migrants are particularly acute. Analysing official survey data, the demographers Kunal Keshri and Ram Bilas Bhagat demonstrate that circular labour migrants tend to concentrate in the lowest paid jobs. Furthermore, circular labour migrants tend to be disproportionately drawn from such historically oppressed communities as Dalits and Adivasis.
