ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

MigrationSubscribe to Migration

Ontology of Being and Becoming

Home, Belonging and Memory in Migration: Leaving and Living edited by Sadan Jha and Pushpendra Kumar Singh, London and New York: Routledge, 2022; pp 312, `1,595.

Beyond Plastic Identifications

Due to centralised and infl exible infrastructures of state care involving upper-level bureaucratic decision-making and heavy reliance on documentary modalities, even the radically decentralised states such as Kerala are underperforming in their welfare responsibilities. A greater role for local governments needs to be re-envisioned.

Remittances Reach $100 Billion

Resilient remittances will help cushion the impact of volatility in foreign investment inflows.

A Case for Functional Social Protection Portability to Address Vulnerabilities of Migration-affected Children

Children from low-income migrant households are invisible in migration discourses. Despite existing provisions under various policies and schemes, access to social protection for migrant children has been fragile. Disruptions in education and inconsistent access to nutrition and primary healthcare sets them back further than non-migrant children from similarly disadvantaged backgrounds. COVID-19 has underscored that groups like migrants who face specific vulnerabilities are in acute need of tailored social protection programmes/measures. Functional portability measures that make opportune use of existing provisions in schemes are the first step towards this. Building on existing initiatives, policy frameworks must support adaptive social protection responses for this important segment of India’s population.

Traversing the Field of Development Studies

Reclaiming Development Studies: Essays for Ashwani Saith edited by Murat Arsel,Anirban Dasgupta and Servaas Storm, London and New York: Anthem Press, 2021; pp 300, $40.

COVID-19 and India’s Ongoing Migration Fiasco

Drawing on empirical research with migrant populations, this article identifies four interlinked issues critical to understanding and addressing the contemporary migrant crisis that unfolded in India in the wake of COVID-19. These are (i) labour market segmentation by class, caste, and gender; (ii) inaccessibility of urban housing and services that challenge urban survival; (iii) differential access to documentation, which shapes the hierarchies of citizenship; and (iv) ineffective data that lets migrants slip through the gaps of welfare provision.

 

Emerging Pattern and Trend of Migration in Megacities

Rural-to-urban migration, particularly between states, towards megacities continues to contribute to their overall growth, although the trajectory of migration is shifting towards smaller cities.

Closure of Schools and Migration of Adolescent Tribal Girls

This paper is an empirical study of the consequences of the prolonged closure of schools and other educational institutions for adolescent tribal girls, migrating to the construction sector of Surat in search of work.

COVID-19 and the State of Exception

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed that the shared taxis in Shillong are governed in an exception to the Motor Vehicles Act, thus rendering the lives of transport operators and users precarious. This precarity stands upon an underlining political consensus that gives power and authority to the executive to order the city even if in violation of the law that is supposed to govern it.

 

Pandemic Precarity

This paper focuses on the social experiences of migrant informal workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues how institutions in the realms of the state, market, and civil society interacted and created conditions of precarity unique to the pandemic. How dominant frameworks that explain the praxis of entitlements fail to capture such infringement arising from the overlaps and intersections between the state, market, and civil society are highlighted in this paper. 

 

Adequacy of Social Assistance Schemes during the COVID-19 Lockdown

Multiple social assistance schemes were launched during the first lockdown to help the poor in India, but not all eligible households took advantage of them. Studying slum households in Delhi to evaluate the efficacy of nine central and state government schemes show that the average gain was only `992 per household for a month. If all eligible households had received benefits, this figure would have been `1,956 per household, making the distribution much fairer. The schemes decreased the indebtedness of households by an average of 12.24%, but this would have been 24% if all eligible households had been covered.

 

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