Labour in the time of Covid–19: the intersecting struggles of India’s return migrants

Photo Credit: Sunil Kumar Aledia

Written by Avinash Kumar

Due to the global crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, almost every country in the world placed restrictions on economic activities and curbed the movement of people through the imposition of lockdowns. Migrant workers in the informal economy have faced immense challenges during this period of economic uncertainty and restricted mobility. What impact do job losses in the city have on their household incomes? What struggles do migrants face if they decide to return home? How do their households cope under these circumstances? This piece attempts to explore some of these questions drawing on interviews with return migrants across different states of India.

Perilous journeys to uncertain futures: migrant narratives

In India, a tragic situation arose during the first lockdown announced in March 2020. For internal migrant workers, many of whom are employed in the informal economy with no social security, lockdown implied immediate loss of jobs and shelter. Without access to proper transportation and resources, these workers were left with no choice but to return home on foot. The physical strain of these long journeys caused a huge loss of life among migrants and their families, including pregnant women, infants, and elderly people.

Recently, I conducted telephone interviews with ten returnee migrants based in different states in India with the aim of understanding how migrants manage their livelihoods after coming home from cities.[i] Many of the research participants discussed their treacherous journeys from cities to their homes. A resident of Uttar Pradesh described how he still feels the physical consequences of the journey. He said:

“Even after one year passed, I am still not well and there is a swelling in my leg because of the long journey on foot. I didn’t get food properly for 22 days while I was traveling. How do I work and feed my child and other members of my family? (March 28, 2021).

Others I spoke to mentioned that they have resumed agricultural work but are unable to make ends meet with such jobs. One said:

“The situation is getting worse because of unavailability of work. Sometimes I work as an agricultural laborer on someone else’s land and in return get Rs.60 a day which is not enough for survival with three children along with mother and wife” (May 17, 2021).

Many migrants informally employed in cities belong to Schedule Castes (SC), Schedule Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC)—groups with the least landed assets in the country. None of the return migrants I interviewed owned more than one acre of land, which is insufficient to produce the amount of grain needed to feed the family. A migrant, from Bihar said:

“I don’t have agricultural land so I work as a construction worker but work is not regularly available. It’s very difficult to manage the everyday household expenditure by working alone. Therefore, my wife also works on someone else’s land and in return gets some amount of grains” (March 15, 2021).

These narratives corroborate the fact that India faces a deep crisis in rural employment. Evidently, this crisis worsened during the pandemic in 2020. According to monthly Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy data, the rural unemployment rate in India shot up 7.69 percent in June 2019 to 21.11 percent in May 2020. This explains why most people I spoke to confirmed that they do not have any choice but to return to work in the cities.

Gendered impacts of reverse migration

The impact of reverse migration has notably affected the women of the household, their burden of housework and domestic violence has increased. The women I spoke with didn’t disclose their experiences of domestic violence[ii], but many spoke of an increased burden of housework. A woman resident of West Bengal explained,

“I am the only person who does all the household and agricultural work. I also have to take care of animals in the house. We have three children and mother in law to be taken care of” (May 17, 2021).

Another woman from Bihar working as a primary teacher in a government school explained that even though she is currently the sole-breadwinner in her family, providing unpaid reproductive labour is still expected of her.

“I am a school teacher but along with it, I also have to do all the household work. I have one child to be taken care of. My husband was working outside but he quit his job because of the covid crisis, no I am only earning member in my family. We cut our expenditure on food, traveling and clothes to manage the day-to-day household expenditure” (April 3, 2021).

Some women reflected upon the patriarchal norms that ensure that the burdens of day-to-day household work are not divided equally between women and men. A woman resident of Jharkhand argued:

“What does a man have to do? He only has to earn money. We have to do all the housework and look after the needs of the house. We also have taken care of our children” (May 18, 2021).

Concluding thoughts

The difficulties faced by migrants and their households during the Covid-19 pandemic provide an opportunity for policymakers to refocus their attention towards the wellbeing of migrants. For socially disadvantaged communities, staying at home renders them more vulnerable due to the unavailability of employment and being landless. Most SCs, STS and OBCs suffer due to their economic and social conditions despite various affirmative action programs. The government needs to prioritise the provision of special protection to them through caste-based social security support within existing labour laws in India. Similarly, women in the household are also victims of patriarchal discrimination; they are considered as free labourers at home and paid less in the workplace. Special emphasis on social, economic, and legal protection for women through various social security measures are needed to curb domestic violence and economic dependency on male members of the family.

Author Bio

Avinash Kumar completed his master’s degree in Development Studies at Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi in July 2020. His master’s dissertation titled “Migration, informality, and conditions of existence: A focus on Delhi”, examines the participation of socially disadvantaged groups (SCs, STs and OBCs) in informal migrant work and to examine their housing and living conditions. Currently, he is applying for PhD programmes.

Mouzayian Khalil : 27 Jul 2021 14:55 |  Tags: Coronavirus Pandemic Gender And Labour India Informal Economy Migrant Workers Shadow Pandemic |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

By the West, for the West: Deconstructing the Development Discourse

Photo by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen; licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Written by Shreyanshi Upadhyaya

The term development is hard to define because, over the years, it has come to connote different things: in the realm of economics as an objective such as modernisation, capital growth, poverty eradication; in the realm of ideas as a meta-narrative, discourse, or grand strategy; in the realm of development agencies as aid; and finally, for leaders of the developing countries development has meant a beacon of hope for prosperity. Despite these different meanings, in the realm of common-sense understandings, development has always had a positive connotation. Developing countries have adopted numerous development paths and the UN grandiose Development Goals. However, despite these makeovers, development has failed to produce any successful process of eradicating global poverty or inequality. Then why do we still believe that development works?

The invention of ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘global poverty’

In 1949, US President Truman advanced his Point Four Program wherein he made it the West’s self-ascribed agenda to deal with ‘poverty’ in ‘underdeveloped’ areas. It is in the context of the Cold War competition for world domination between the West and the East that the ‘grand strategy’ of Western-style development was advanced by the US, where development aid was sent to the newly independent countries in exchange for their loyalty.

The development discourse during the Cold War became a force that the leaders of the ‘underdeveloped’ world genuinely believed in. Development promised to them a world where they could be as prosperous as their former colonisers. Their colonial experience had taught them that there was no space for demonstrated weakness and vulnerabilities such as insecure systems of food, health, trade, etc., in the international arena, which was already taken care of in the developed West. To undo this insecurity, development presented a beacon of hope. Hence, as E.P. Thompson notes, the people who were objects of development during the colonial times and had ended up in a situation of depravity due to its very functioning, came to fight “not against development but about it”. Such was the hope that was eschewed by the ideology.

Even in the neoliberal era, bullied by the IMF and World Bank for decades, developing countries adopted American institutions and policies under Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) to learn “good” economic practices to get a sip out of the elixir of development which was the stronghold of the West. Even as they witnessed, for instance, during the East Asian crisis, the coercion of these fellow developing countries by the US and the IMF to reduce government welfare expenditure—even as it resulted in the resurgence of AIDS in Thailand and curtailed food subsidies for the starving in Indonesia—they were told it would be painful at first, but in the end, they will emerge ‘developed’. Adopting SAPs on the recommendation of these international financial institutions led to similar adverse consequences for the African economies, at times heightening unemployment and social insecurity. The developing world held onto the hope of development even as, a decade after, the same policies—increased government spending, massive deficits, bailing out of banks, interest rates as low as zero—that they were lectured about being against growth were adopted by the US to deal with its own 2008 crisis, aided by some of the same officials at the IMF and the World Bank. Why, despite this, did the non-West continued to follow the linear path to development?

With Truman’s speech in 1949, two billion people suddenly came to homogenously identify themselves as ‘underdeveloped’. Failing to note what they possessed—cultural diversity, talented population, and biodiversity—they came to see themselves in terms of what they were lacking: development. The term ‘underdevelopment’ had never before been used to classify entire populations into a hierarchy, where the developed were superior and the ‘underdeveloped’ inferior. The term was thus the creation of the development discourse advanced by the West. The development discourse helped solidify a specific perception into a fact that suddenly dichotomised the world and spoke to the vulnerability of the newly independent countries. Hence, the discourse of development was enticing because it not only made the achievement of Western-style development seem attainable for the ‘underdeveloped’, but also created the desirability of such development in the first place.

Similarly, global poverty—which rendered two-thirds of the world poor—was a phenomenon that was the construction of the development discourse. Poor people had always existed in all societies—which, as highlighted by Mustapha Kamal Pasha, kept devising vernacular methods for their support—but they had never become a feature that characterised countries in this manner before. Global poverty meant that the ‘underdeveloped’ countries came to be defined in relation to the standard of prosperity set by the ‘developed’ countries.

The development discourse led to the construction of ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘global poverty’, both of which ushered the creation of new discourses and practices that shaped the reality to which they referred. Faced with this new social reality where their existence came to be defined in terms of ‘poverty’ and ‘underdevelopment’, the discourse of development came to be naturalised as the necessary response for the leaders of the Global South, which they believed must be followed at any cost. Hence, development can be understood as a pervasive discourse, through which, the West influences and produces social reality for the non-West.

‘Benign’ Remodelling of non-Western Societies through ‘Science’ and ‘Objectivity’

At the heart of the Western discourse of development lies the normative need to compare non-Western societies to those of the West and frame the difference in terms of something the former is lacking and should aspire to achieve. It is what they lack, and the West possesses, is precisely what makes the non-West ‘underdeveloped’. Since the West holds, through virtue of experience (which itself is abstracted from history), the secrets to development, the path to development cannot be walked without an external intervention by the West.

Hence, the discourse of development encourages a study of the non-Western society by the knowledge-bearers and experts of the West. These interventions have produced descriptions and statistics—which cannot help but remind one of the colonial practices of census for resource exploitation—of the ‘underdeveloped’ that convey the various standards in which the non-West is lacking against entirely Western-centric rubrics. Therefore, the discourse of development has attempted to normalise the world in terms of the developed West’s experience and expectations.

However, the failure to meet these standards is not taken kindly to in the development discourse. Prescriptions given by development institutions, abstracted from any relation to colonialism, indicate that the ‘underdeveloped’ are oppressed by their own lack of initiatives, primitive societies, traditions, and overpopulation. These adjectives are also repeated endlessly as the root cause of ‘problems’ in the developing countries. For instance, framing of the ‘crises’ of African agriculture by the World Bank rests on the seemingly obvious connection between “more people/less land/ lower productivity/less food” which are merely vast generalisations that not only ignore the historical experience and difference in social structures but also end up caricaturing Africa because of its population.

Timothy Mitchel has shown that USAID’s development texts on Egypt have continually portrayed the Nile Valley and the peasantry living there as external to the political and economic transformations of the twentieth century, and hence, static over centuries. Portrayed as primitive and unchanging, then, agriculture at Nile Valley understandably needs the influx of Western technology and expertise. Jonathan Crush blames the development discourse for the propagation of the idea that societies evolved in a linear fashion, which then allowed development professionals to assume certain societies as static or being stuck in the past.

Given the ‘problems’ of the ‘underdeveloped’ countries in meeting the Western standards of development, the development discourse benevolently takes it upon itself to share its knowledge, science, and expertise to tackle them. Arturo Escobar highlights that development thinking has led to a conception of the social life in the non-West as a technical problem which requires the intervention of experts and science to rescue itself from its own stagnation. Every aspect of life—even the poor themselves—is subjected to the eyes of the experts and in military language, ‘action plans’ are drawn to impose on such societies. This trust in experts is combined with a blind faith in science, technology, planning, international organisations, and aid agencies, which are all seen as neutral and inevitably beneficial since their value has already been proven by the Western achievement of development.

Though development presents itself as essential, it seldom produces any new knowledge to tackle the problems it had set out to. Mark Duffield has shown that since 1950s, development reports carry the same recommendations: check population growth, modernise agriculture, reforestation, increase aid spending, renewed focus on poverty reduction, etc. Hence, the ‘technical’ study of societies through development analyses leads to a common diagnosis of problems in diverse societies, which, in turn, leads to the transfer of standardised policies from one country to another to tackle them.

This uniform application of development techniques has had irreversible consequences for the societies and cultures within the non-West. The use of buzzwords such as ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’ to denote the upliftment and involvement of communities in the development processes—which attach a moral feel-good character to the cause—has led to the legitimisation of many development interventions. However, the reality of the development discourse goes against the very idea of involving communities, who are continually ignored in the process. Stacy Leigh Pigg points out that in development planning, though it is widely assumed that villagers are “people who don’t understand”, there is an implicit sense that villagers must be labelled as ignorant not due to their absence of knowledge, but because of “the presence of too much locally-instilled belief”. Hence, the price of development has been the destruction of history and cultural traditions for two thirds of the world’s people.

The development discourse—by reducing people to data points, by destroying many historical practices of the non-West and tainting their cultures, by remodelling the non-Western societies according to Western standards, and by regarding percentage point decreases as an indication of poverty and inequality reduction—does violence to the very hope of a future without poverty and inequality. Thus, the development discourse advanced by the West works for the advancement of the West.

Author Bio

Shreyanshi Upadhyaya is a part-time Research Assistant at WICID and a full-time MA International Relations student at Warwick University. She draws inspiration from Postcolonial and Feminist International Relations theories, and her current research interests centre on optics, popular culture, and the construction of the national security environment in India.

Mouzayian Khalil : 15 Jul 2021 15:48 |  Tags: Development Development Discourse Global Poverty Underdevelopment |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Studying international development during the Covid–19 pandemic

Written by: Dana Unzicker and Fabian Tigges

Term One: International Development Group Photo (Source: authors)

The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020 radically changed the setting and conditions in which we study and think about international development. In this article, we want to reflect on how these extraordinary circumstances impacted our postgraduate studies in international development that took place at the University of Warwick. Despite the limitations on teaching that came with government guidance and national lockdowns, we made incredible progress as students of international development in an ambivalent study setting, where, on the one hand, we were virtually connected to students and scholars across the globe, but, on the other, were physically bound to our desks at home.

It is evident that the research object of development studies has been deeply impacted by the effects of the pandemic. Besides the obvious and disastrous impact on global health, the pandemic pushed more people into poverty, increased the global shortfall of employment, and reinforced and exacerbated existing inequalities. Furthermore, the interruption of global value chains challenged processes of ever-increasing global economic integration.

It was in this setting that we studied and discussed current issues and actors in international development, covering topics like globalisation, gender, poverty, inequality, trade, structural adjustment policies, food security, the everyday political economy of microfinance, and many more. All these issues were affected in one way or another by the pandemic. Some have experienced the acceleration of existing trends such as a shift in power relations in the globalisation debate, in others, the pandemicincreased awareness of already existing human crises as in the case of food security. Yet, the study of international development post-2020 goes far beyond the effects of the Covid-19 crisis, despite its unprecedented nature and omnipresence in public and academic debates. A key lesson learned from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic has been its effect of drawing our attention to the invisible. For instance, the pandemic has shed light on critical issues along the lines of race and gender inequality as well as economic inequality and (inter-)dependence in the construction of global value chains. Our wonderful professor taught us the importance of visibility in the study of international development; how paying attention to the numerous invisible actors and their relations to a visible decision-making elite is essential when reflecting upon power relations in the global political economy. Beyond that, in impacting the ways in which we study and research, the pandemic not only drew attention to visibility but also, and crucially, to who is heard in the discourse of international development.

While visibility of issues and actors in international development was the key take-away from this year of study during the pandemic, it also closely relates to the overarching concept of space that accompanied us throughout the year. While we started our programme in international development in face-to-face classes on campus in Coventry, the winter lockdown sent us back to online teaching for the whole of spring term, where different living rooms became visible – or not, when cameras remained switched off. Many student homes became a place of both rest and study, as our classroom transformed into a virtual space.

International Development Symposium (Source: authors)

Throughout the year, we engaged with scholars from across the globe, making our classroom virtual and also global. The year culminated in the Warwick Symposium for International Development in the last week of spring term at the University of Warwick, where we discussed the study of international development in times of Covid-19, listening to inspiring presentations and talks by students and scholars, and findings from the WICID everyday in lockdown project. The pandemic thus created a somewhat ambivalent offsetting for our seminars. On one hand, we remained connected to our coursemates (some in the UK, some overseas) as well as with scholars from different parts of Europe, Hawaii, Canada, and India. On the other hand, the national lockdown bound us to our desks at home, making it our place of study and living. Hence, we were in a position, in which we communicated with the world, discussing international development and the global economy, while we were unable to freely leave the house and explore our local cities.

This was and is, of course, a challenging situation. However, it also serves to emphasise that our perspectives are limited in certain ways, framed through agenda-setting of powerful actors, and focused on particular regions and actors in the world. It highlights that we tend to view the world through particular lenses and angles that facilitate and allow us to see and hear certain actors and challenges, while at the same time preventing us from seeing and hearing other voices that are marginalised by different means. In a sense, this draws attention to the importance of space: To reflect on where we stand in different spaces but also to re-think space in order to render visible or hide challenges and connections between them, and to amplify or exclude different voices.

From scholars in the field, we learnt that the pandemic required a reconsideration of the role of the researcher and different research methods. This allowed us as students and our teachers to reconsider how we study development. Shifting the classroom to the virtual space made it possible to connect with scholars across the world to exchange ideas and research findings. This experience gave us new ideas for how to overcome some barriers to the global conversation on development, connecting people from different cultural and geographical backgrounds, but also, and crucially, made us aware of the barriers that remain. For instance, we speak different languages, live in varying time zones, and not all of us are privileged enough to have access to the technology required to connect to the world or to the funds necessary to pay university tuition fees.Thus, some barriers – shaped by (postcolonial and gendered) power relations – remain, and we need to be aware ofthem, when studying and thinking about development.

In a nutshell, the past year of studying international development during a pandemic has stressed the importance of reflecting on our own positionality as well as on what is visible and whose voice is heard when thinking about and doing research in the field of development studies. It is a challenging time to study international development as the pandemic put numerous constraints on research and exacerbated pre-pandemic problematics. Nevertheless, the pandemic also opened spaces to render visible the invisible, to challenge power relations, and to provide a momentum for change. Finally, we are incredibly grateful for the opportunity to learn from our classmates, scholars from around the world and the opportunity to make the best out of a tough year!

Authors’ Bios:

Dana Unzicker is a Postgraduate student of International Political Economy at Warwick. Her research interests are centred around globalisation and inequality. She studied “Theories and Issues in International Development” as an optional module and is a member of the Warwick Global Development Society exec board. In October, she will continue her studies at the University of Konstanz to obtain a Double Degree in Politics and Public Administration from Konstanz and Warwick.

Fabian Tigges is a Postgraduate student of International Political Economy at the University of Warwick and of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. He is currently working on his MA dissertation with the title “From Austerity to Recovery Spending: Contemporary Economic Thought in Times of Crisis”. Since October 2020, he is an executive board member of the Warwick Global Development Society. He is also a student research assistant at the chair of political science and international politics of the University of Konstanz.

Mouzayian Khalil : 30 Jun 2021 10:55 |  Tags: Coronavirus Pandemic Studying During Covid-19 Studying International Development |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem