Nishaant Choksi, Sukanya Deogam and Kalpesh Rathwa’s research focuses on labor migrants from India’s “Scheduled Tribes”—mostly marginalized indigenous populations that depend on remittances. The authors look at differences both across and within two very different labor sending indigenous communities in terms of how they responded to the return of large numbers of migrants during the Covid-19 pandemic. One area of interest is the differing expectations of and orientations toward local government in the two communities in terms of handling dramatic socio-economic stresses caused by the reduction in remittances and the reintegration of migrants.
