Navigating Hyper- Precarity: Im(mobilities) during the Covid Pandemic in India

Abstract

The hyper-precarity, enforced immobility and invisibility of India’s migrant workforce have been starkly in focus since March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began. The papers in this special issue explore migrants’ lived experiences of mobility and immobility during the Covid pandemic. They provide granular accounts of the translocal and temporal strategies of migrants as they navigate state controls, citizenship rights, patriarchal norms and barriers to accessing welfare schemes. The case studies empirically delve into the gendered subjectivities of exclusion and power and how these vary by caste and ethnicity. They provide unique insights into what it means to migrate, live and work in today’s India, where neoliberal values have undermined labour rights and protection. At the same time, migrants stories of everyday struggles and socialities reveal how they have created spaces of hope, aspiration and resistance.