Abandoned by the state: the migrant crisis and public action in the time of Covid-19 in India

The mass exodus of migrants from India’s mega-cities induced by Covid-19 lockdowns brought their invisible lives to light. This paper analyses lives and livelihoods of the urban informal economy migrant workers in the state of Maharashtra amidst the Covid-19 pan-demic. The systemic faults in provisioning social protection, biopolitics of the pandemic and public action form the core of the analysis. Pre-existing precarity of informal migrant workers and the need for citizenship-based social entitlements are discussed in depth. The findings of this study indicate that the migrant crisis is a culmination of several underlying issues in labour, social protection and disaster management policies in India. The migrants face multiple layers of exclusion from the social protection regimes due to their multi-locality, class and caste identity, and vulnerability caused due to economic insecurity. The uncertainty, precarity and invisibility of the migrant labourers in the cities can be sys-tematically reduced with universal social protection, comprehensive labour regulations mak-ing the employers accountable and by creating and safeguarding democratic places for work-ers to raise and discuss their issues.