Heena Sharma Blog

Here is a selection of important Covid-19 -related articles in Indian news publications. From the informal Indian economy in the time of a pandemic, to making cities liveable for migrants after lockdown, and why Mumbai is still struggling to cope with coronavirus — read these and more in today’s India dispatch. Migrant labourers are the most disenfranchised invisible citizens: For a majority of migrant labourers, migration is either a livelihood accumulation strategy or survival risk-reducing strategy, whichever way we define the nature of migration. Migration studies also confirm that migrant labourers are the most exploited and disenfranchised invisible citizens. Read this interview with political scientist Ashwani Kumar, whose forthcoming co-edited book Migration and Mobility is to be out soon. Kumar speaks on migration, inter-state workers and amendment to the Inter-State Migrant Workers Act, 1979. Read More

Kala was 11 when she had her first menstrual period . She was at home preparing for her final exams and panicked when she found herself bleeding . “ My first reaction was to panic,” recalled Kala (name changed to protect identity), a college student in southern Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore district. “I thought I had contracted some serious illness and I was going to die. What would happen to my exams? Should I ask my father to take me to the doctor?” Kala had called out to her mother in panic. ” My mother did not come,” Kala said. Instead, the old woman who lived next door did. “After bustling about and getting me to bathe, she took me to a room near the cowshed, asked me to sit on a wooden plank, which had already been prepared for me and asked me not to move from there,” she said. Kala was given some food and water and left alone. It was evening before she saw her mother. “ Instead of comforting me and taking me home, my mother told me that I was a big girl now and that I sho