The Great Reverse Migration: Analyising Labour Law And Policy Lapses During The Covid-19 Lockdown
- IJLLR Journal
- Mar 19
- 1 min read
Mr. Navneet Raj Singh, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR Campus
Prof. Dr. Khushboo Malik, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR Campus
ABSTRACT
The author aims to present the legal and policy inadequacies that led to and aggravated the mass reverse migration of India’s migrant labour force during the central government's COVID-19 lockdown, which are discussed. This paper aims to discuss various issues that led to reverse migration. These issues may be summarized as (i) What legal, administrative, and implementation voids left the migrant workers unprotected during the lockdown? (ii) To what extent and how have state derailments at the state and local levels, including poor inter-state coordination, led to the humanitarian crisis? (iii) What legal changes should be made to turn lessons learned from the lockdown into future protection for migrant workers? The study includes lists of statutes, Labour codes, and government orders, along with qualitative content analysis of judicial narratives, official circulars, NGO field reports, and contemporary media records. The paper by analysing various sources will find a conclusion that reverse migration was not simply a public health externality but the natural consequences of a structural invisibility and governance shortfalls, fragmented statutory mandates for interstate migrants’ non-portability of welfare entitlements, weak formal access to Social Security benefits for informal sector workers, weak enforcement reforms, as well as the lack of statutory emergency migration action protocols.
Keywords: Migrant workers, Reverse Migration, COVID-19 Lockdown, Social Security, Portability.
