Introduction

With an exodus of workers never witnessed before in Indian history, COVID-19 has posed deep and grave challenges to people's understanding of labour, migration, differentiated citizenship, dignity, security, vulnerability, and deliberative democracy. In exploring the unfolding crisis and its long duree impact, people use ‘pandemic-lockdown’ as a hyphenated descriptor to denote the twin effects of the public health crisis and the forced displacement of the worker population as mutually reinforcing and inseparable from each other in any consideration of state action. In the pandemic, it is health which is fundamental to human experiences. The epidemiological approach, in the case of the pandemic, ought to address not only the ending of the coronavirus, but also the violence in domestic and public spaces where the dignity of the displaced worker has been eroded. Examining the intersecting vulnerabilities of migrant labour brings out the nature and magnitude of the faultlines, and the interconnections between layers of urban and rural sectors.