Documenting the pandemic struggle of India’s ‘invisible workforce’
EGC's Charity Troyer Moore and Jenna Allard, coauthors of a recent study on the pandemic's disproportionate impact on women workers in India, discuss what the results of their survey of more than 4,600 displaced Indian migrants revealed about pandemic coping in an interview for Yale News.
On March 25, 2020, India abruptly enacted a weeks-long nationwide lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus. The measure, implemented with less than four hours’ notice, forced millions of migrant workers to leave the cities where they made their living and return to their homes in rural areas without jobs or access to food, shelter, and other basic needs.
To understand how the lockdown and other pandemic-related challenges affected migrant workers, researchers from Inclusion Economics at Yale University — a collaboration between the Economic Growth Center and the MacMillan Center — quickly launched a large-scale research-policy project in two of India’s poorest rural states, Bihar and Chhattisgarh, in collaboration with government officials.