The Pandemic and Relief Work: Experiences from the Field

Abstract

COVID-19 continues to affect everyone. It cuts across all strata of the society. People lose jobs, get displaced, run out of savings, get stressed and even starve to death. Such calamity brings to the centre stage the ills of globalization and liberalization. However, if there is one section of the society which is prone to be much worse off than others in times like these, it is that of the daily wage earners. Their meagre resources dried up, livelihood vanished, and their worst fears unfolded. Many died in lurch of state’s welfare measures, some starved for days on end, some (migrant workers) resolved to walk a couple of hundred kilometres to reach their home towns—their desperation witnessed no bounds. In this paper, an ethnographic account of daily wage earners, migrant workers and others who were directly affected due to the lockdown highlights the dismal state of implementation of lockdown in order to curb the spread of virus. This paper seeks to record their experiences and while briefly analyzing the role of state during the crisis discusses how the civil society and citizen’s collectives stepped up and provided relief work to this section of the society.