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Paper short abstract:

This paper questions the extent to which data can drive policy when the digital, data-led initiatives - although intended to improve targeting of affected groups and achieve efficiency in social-service-delivery - are guided by a homogenized understanding of circuital migration, as flows of labour.

Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic unveiled the otherwise invisibilized, informal/unorganized sector workers in India, largely internal, circuital-migrants, who fell through the gaps of social-security. In response, a number of state-led initiatives were launched by leveraging on the platform-state - i.e., the state that enlists citizens on databases with a view to improving surveillance but also targets to provide protection and relief in times of crisis. This paper questions the extent to which data can drive policy when the digital, data-led initiatives - although intended to improve targeting of affected groups and achieve efficiency in service delivery - are guided by a homogenized understanding of migration, as flows of labour. Findings from Jharkhand, India, reveal that a majority of migrant-laborers are absorbed in sectors of work that are characterized by occupational-hazards, precarious working- conditions, insecure contracts of work (if available) and insufficient wages. The persistence of such acute levels of exploitation, in consonance with historical trends of ethnic/caste-based subordination in labour-markets, have meant that migrant-labourers have tried to negotiate such conditions by spreading themselves cyclically across multiple economies at the source and destinations, depending on their socio-political contexts and biographical contingencies. Such negotiations have given rise to variegated patterns of migration including multiple durations, erratic frequencies, laterally crossing over between sectors, etc. It thus, becomes important to rethink the homogenized definitions and methods of data-collection before using them to produce generalized data to inform policy-making, so that lived-realities of migrants are not at odds with the initiatives for digitalisation of social-protection for migrant-labour.