Borders of an Epidemic: COVID-19 and Migrant Workers

This collection of essays is “part reflections, part analyses, and part reportages” on the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic in India, with a focus on migrant workers.The book’s editor, Ranabir Samaddar, is director at the Manahirban Calcutta Research Group, a Kolkata-based organisation that published this volume in 2020. It contains the writings of 19 contributors, including social scientists, researchers and journalists. The essays revolve around four themes: implications of the epidemic for the global economy; labour, particularly migrant labour; the ‘care economy’; and race, caste, and gender “as fault lines of protection in the time of an epidemic.”The following are summaries of five of the publication’s 14 essays, which cover significant aspects of the pandemic’s impact on migrant labour:Essay 1: Corona Virus and the World-Economy: The Old is Dead, the New Can’t be BornIn this piece, Ravi Arvind Palat (of the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York), emphasises the unprecedented impact of the coronavirus pandemic on an ‘integrated world-economy’. During the Great Depression of 1929-33, manufacturing constituted a large share of economic output across the world, and inventories of accumulated products could be sold once economic conditions improved. Today, Palat notes, services form the bulk of economic output, and a haircut or a meal at a restaurant cannot be stored for the future. The author writes that the global financial crisis of 2008-09 left some ‘emerging market economies’ largely unscathed, but Covid-19 affects the entire planet.Palat states that poorer countries and sections of the population are more vulnerable to the impact of Covid-19 than others. Low-income countries lack the necessary infrastructure to deal with a global pandemic, and it is hard for residents of densely populated low-income areas to practice physical distancing. Pointing to the escalation of wealth inequality around the world, Palat writes that this pandemic has laid bare the need for “a fundamental change in institutional structures of the world economy.”Essay 2: Migrant Labor, Informal Economy, and Logistics Sector in a Covid-19 World Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali) discusses the condition of street vendors in Chandigarh Tri-city during the Covid-19 lockdown...