Akshara Anirjita /
ActionAid /
New Delhi, India /
As I wrap up my internship with ActionAid, I am trying to reflect on the bigger picture of the space I am leaving (in terms of a job title) and thinking of ways I can continue my involvement, and what that might look like. While the pandemic thwarted my initial plans of field research, it created other opportunities. I was able to learn from a wide variety of voices in our web workshops about various informal work categories and also used literature review to supplement my research.
The importance of social security nets and welfare measures have become apparent. MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) seems to be among few guarantees that informal migrant rural workers come to depend upon entirely. While lauded by many, though, this welfare act is problematically tied to one’s ability to work. As COVID-19 rates increase significantly in India, jobless and starving informal workers can have access to a livelihood, but this comprises construction projects that don’t use social distancing measures. Additionally, MGNREGA is viable only if migrants can manage to make it back to their rural homes.
Important provisions such as the Mid-Day Meal Schemes for children enrolled in schools have also been put on hiatus during this time. Development economists working in the field, such as Jean Dreze, acknowledge that while attrition reduces oppressed people’s ability to revolt, food riots become a possibility, with malnutrition possibly being a fatal “underlying condition.”
In his book, Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis, like many other historians, has stressed how natural disasters are never the (only) reason for mass deaths. It is also the policies that either obscure, alienate, or specifically marginalize certain sectors of society, causing unnecessary misery and death. Under a Brahmanical Hindu supremacist state, the following are being labelled as carriers of COVID-19 and are being vilified as intentional spreaders of it: migrant workers of “lower” castes, workers who belong to tribes, and Muslim workers.
COVID-19 is not the only pandemic affecting informal workers, however. Lack of food and shelter, basic means of subsistence, access to healthcare, trade unions, and governmental welfare mechanisms (due to the intensification of neoliberalism) continue to be just as, if not more, fatal.