Abstract
The COVID-induced lockdowns in India caused significant social, psychological, and economic dents in the nation's growth. The suddenness and lack of warning of the March 2020 lockdown announcement failed to consider the implications for 456 million migrant workers in the vast informal sector in India. This massive reverse migration in India posed several questions that demanded immediate answers and long-term revamping of the institutional setup and policies regarding migrant workers. Global and local discourse around the issue revealed that the implications of the sudden lockdown for the millions of migrant workers had not even been considered, revealing that this segment of India's population was virtually “invisible” to policymakers. The current study employs a two-phase empirico-inductive approach to further explore the concept and dimensions of such “invisibility” of migrant workers in India. First, the research identifies the different ways in which Indian migrant workers are invisibilized from the narratives of 15 domain experts. The second phase of the paper uses fsQCA to compare 24 narratives of migrant labour experiencing distress due to invisibility. Finally, we establish two multicausal paths for the acuteness of invisibility experienced by the migrants during the lockdowns. Structural, Social, Political and Economic invisibilities are treated as the causal factors for the plight of the migrants during the pandemic. The implications call for more inclusive, rather regionally regulated State structures to provide visibility to the migrant workforces.
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Upadhyay, S., Agarwal, M.N. (2022). The Revelio Charm: The Invisible Migrant Labour of India. In: Sharma, T., Sinha Ray, R., Mitra, N. (eds) Responsible Leadership for Sustainability in Uncertain Times. Responsible Leadership and Sustainable Management. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4723-0_8
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