“Elucidate the main problems and challenges faced by the migrant labourers in the recent ‘Lockdown period’.” (2021)
The nationwide lockdown from 25 March 2020 turned India’s circular migrants into the most visible casualties of the pandemic. The Labour Ministry told Parliament in September 2020 that over 1.04 crore migrant workers had returned to their home states. The crisis did not create a new vulnerability. It exposed one that Jan Breman had long described as footloose labour: workers who are neither peasant nor proletarian, circulating without a fixed employer and outside protection.
Economic problems
- Loss of wages and work overnight. The Stranded Workers Action Network surveyed 11,159 workers in the first weeks. It found that 89% had not been paid by employers, 96% had received no government rations, and 78% had less than ₹300 left.
- Rent, debt and contractor advances kept piling up with no income, while contractors and employers disappeared.
- Informal hiring through subcontracting chains meant there was no accountable employer, a gap Keith Hart‘s idea of the informal sector anticipates.
Problems of entitlement and citizenship
- Non-portable welfare. Ration cards, housing and health access were tied to the place of registration, so migrants were entitled where absent and absent where entitled.
- Statistical and legal invisibility. The Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979 depended on contractor registration that was rarely done, so states did not know how many migrants they hosted.
- Political voicelessness. Their vote lay in the village, so city governments had little incentive to protect them.
Mobility, safety and health
- With transport suspended, thousands walked hundreds of kilometres home. On 8 May 2020, sixteen workers sleeping on railway tracks near Aurangabad were killed by a goods train.
- Shramik Special trains from 1 May carried about 63 lakh people on over 4,600 trains, but there were disputes over fares, delays and deaths on board. The Centre told Parliament it maintained no data on migrant deaths.
- Quarantine centres were crowded. At Bareilly, returning migrants were sprayed with disinfectant. Returnees were stigmatised as carriers in their own villages.
Social and psychological strain
- Women migrants, especially domestic workers, lost work first and had least access to relief.
- Workers faced separation from families, uncertainty and humiliation. This is Émile Durkheim‘s anomie at the scale of a class: the normative order that tied labour to livelihood broke down.
Challenges after return
- Surplus labour in villages. MGNREGA demand hit record levels, and the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan (June 2020) offered 125 days of work in 116 districts of six states.
- Many had to re-migrate under worse terms, having used up their savings and taken on new debt.
State and judicial response
- The Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance in May 2020. Its judgment of 29 June 2021 directed One Nation One Ration Card by 31 July 2021, a national registry of unorganised workers, and community kitchens.
- Policy followed the same line: e-Shram (2021), with 31.89 crore registrations by August 2026, and affordable rental housing complexes. The labour codes in force since 21 November 2025 promise portable benefits.
- Karl Polanyi‘s double movement fits here: a market that treats labour as a commodity provokes demands for social protection.
Conclusion
The lockdown showed that India’s growth depends on a workforce it neither counts nor protects. Portable entitlements are a start. The deeper challenge is sociological: turning circular migrants from denizens into citizens, with a recognised employer, a voice in the city and security that does not end at the state border.