ABSTRACT
Amidst apprehensions and speculations, the Indian Prime Minister declared complete lockdown for 21 days on the evening of March 24, 2020. The lockdown was expected to be effective at the stroke of midnight of the 24th itself or, to be precise, after about 4 hours of the Prime Minister’s lockdown address. Majority of Bihari migrants, as International Growth Centre’s (IGC) study on rural-urban migration in Bihar suggests, are cyclical labour from vulnerable groups. This indicates that most of Bihari labour migrants possibly do not even have a regular arrangement for their short-term stay at the destination state. With a halt in construction work and no source of regular income during the lockdown, many informal sector workers, including the inter-state and intra-state migrants, are struggling to manage two meals for their families. One of the points raised by IGC study on Bihar’s migrant workers is that their status as seasonal migrants jeopardizes their access to social security benefits like ration card.
