Memory of migrants: Life and challenges of migrant workers in India during and after Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic created an unprecedented global crisis in 2020, significantly impacting people’s health and life. This essay reflects on the collective memory of the Covid-19 crisis, exploring how the trauma of displacement and the anxiety of an uncertain future left an indelible mark on the Indian migrant labour community, revealing systemic faults and human rights infringements that remained concealed until a crisis exposed and exacerbated the vulnerabilities of these marginalized communities. In India, the journey of the migrant labourers to their homes during the pandemic revealed how the sudden and poorly planned ‘lockdown’ transformed millions of internal migrants into internally displaced people (IDPs). Drawing on the qualitative analysis encompassing existing scholarly literature and mass media sources highlighting the pandemic and post-pandemic effects on Indian migrant labourers, this essay explores the extraordinary challenges faced by them – including economic deprivation, social ostracization, physical hardship and denial of fundamental human rights – amid their mass exodus from metropolitan cities to their native places. Thereafter, this study calls for a more inclusive approach to policymaking that considers the sensitivities and rights of migrant labourers, stressing on the importance of social unity and holistic development to prevent such humanitarian crises in the future. Through these analyses, the essay underscores the need to remember and address the plight of vulnerable migrant labourers during the Covid-19 pandemic as an issue of social justice and protection of fundamental human rights.