Description
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On March 24, 2020, the Indian Government announced a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19, effective with a few hours of notice. For an estimated 40 million migrant workers in the country, this resulted in loss of income, food shortages, and uncertainty about the future. Over 10 million returned to rural homes in one of the largest internal migrations in the country's history. Once returned, they faced stays in government-run quarantine centers, stigma, and uncertain labor prospects. Over the next year, migrants navigated shifting mobility restrictions aimed at mitigating the spread of the pandemic, widespread outbreaks, and patchwork of social protection schemes in order to make ends meet. These data were collected across four rounds of phone surveys with a random sample of 8,265 migrants that had returned from worksites to Bihar and Chhattisgarh shortly after nationwide lockdowns in order to understand the long-term labor and well-being effects of the pandemic on this population. The study sample frame was constructed drawn from from government records that attempted to catalogue all entrants in a given time period. These phone surveys included a repeated set of questions on employment and earnings, migration, access to social protections, and coping strategies, as well as single-wave modules on quarantine experiences, health behaviors and beliefs, household composition, migration networks, and discrimination. These data were collected with support from J-PAL's Jobs and Opportunity Initiative; the Institute of Labour Economics (IZA)/UK Aid (FCDO) Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low Income Countries Programme; and the Evidence-based Measures of Empowerment for Research on Gender Equality (EMERGE) program at University of California San Diego.
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Related Publication
| Allard, J., Jagnani, M., Neggers, Y., Pande, R., Schaner, S., & Moore, C. T. (2022). Indian female migrants face greater barriers to post−Covid recovery than males: Evidence from a panel study. EClinicalMedicine, 53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2022.101631
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