COVID-19 and Migrant Workers in India<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Avani S. Ashtekar<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking about an epidemic, while we all are living through one provokes a vulnerability to be confronted. Human life as well as death is quickly and singularly associated with individual biological conditions in the Coronavirus’s context. Human mortality, as we are made to think about it by mainstream news portals and other information systems, is only linked to a bacteriological and viral entity that encroaches upon the body and feeds on human life \u2013however, viruses and bacteria do more than simply modifying immunological information of the body and becoming entangled in etiological pieces of evidence.

As an epidemic renders morbidity as a part of the collective consciousness, it also exposes and at the same time reproduces injustices in socially lived places, within diverse contexts. Although viruses do have a “frighteningly arbitrary [tendency in] selection of victims” some populations at a micro and a macro or global level, are unequivocally more vulnerable (Rosenberg 1992, 296). In India for example, there is an ongoing exodus of migrant workers. As the daily wagers are hiking on foot on highways and jungles in the excruciating heat to reach home \u2013 the epidemic for them plays out differently, and quarantine means mass displacement instead of stagnancy within domestic milieus, making the active marginalization visible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n