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Dr Ginu Zacharia Oomman, Visiting Professor and Founding Member of IIMAD, has been appointed as the Chairman of the State Food Commission.

Chair is a member of the Scientific Committee for the preparation of the 2025 International Forum for Migration Statistics (IFMS)

Special Issue: Climate and Development (hybrid open access journal): Publishes research on the interfaces between climate, development, policy and practice to make analysis of climate and development issues more accessible.

SPRINGER LINK Calls for Papers on the Topic, ‘Migration in a Changing Climate in India

Webinar on Perceptions and Realities of Academics Abroad with special focus on PhD in USA on October 12th, 2024 at 7:00 PM IST

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Internal Migration

Internal Migration and the Covid-19 Pandemic in India

Published on December 7, 2021

Details

The pandemic has led to mass destabilisation of economies and societies across the world. The exponentially rising cases of infections around the globe prompted national lockdowns and near-blanket bans on the movement of people from one place to another. This has had major ramifcations the work-life spectrum, but most notably on the lives of migrant workers, especially in India.

In the wake of India’s 25 March 2020 decision to impose a national lockdown, domestic migrants took desperate measures to reach home amid the pandemic and policies taken to contain it, at both the central and state levels. Migrants’ often long treks home were made in the most inhospitable of conditions, frequently with tragic results (Rajan et al., 2020a, b). In the end, we witnessed what some observers describe as ‘the largest movement of migrants since the partition’ (Ellis-Petersen & Chaurasia, 2020).

This chapter examines how the pandemic affected the lives and livelihoods of migrants in India. In doing so, we also critically examine the response of the governments at the central and state levels, thereby providing insights into how we can avoid such a dire situation in the future. In order to understand how these events came to pass, it is important to comprehend the size of the internal migrant population in India.