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Paper short abstract

This paper examines health-induced migration among informal workers in Jharkhand, showing how chronic labour-related illness compels mobility while remaining unrecognised within occupational health and labour policy frameworks.

Paper long abstract

This paper centres on health-induced migration as a key analytic for understanding the relationship between labour and ill-health in rural India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and participatory rural appraisal (PRA) in Jharkhand, it examines how chronic pain, bodily exhaustion, and declining work capacity compel workers to move across rural–urban and inter-state circuits. Migration here is not merely an economic strategy but an embodied response to illness produced through prolonged engagement with informal, physically demanding, and unregulated labour. Workers often describe migration through experiential idioms such as “the body no longer obeys,” “work has eaten the body,” or “illness pushed us out of the village.” These narratives frame illness as a rupture in everyday labouring life, where the inability to continue working locally necessitates movement in search of treatment, rest, or less strenuous work. Yet institutional frameworks, such as occupational health regimes, labour policy, and migration governance, rarely recognise illness as a driver of mobility. Instead, migration is bureaucratically rendered voluntary, while work-related illness remains individualised and depoliticised. The paper argues that health-induced migration makes labour-related suffering visible while simultaneously obscuring its structural causes. Bodily breakdown becomes legible through movement, but the conditions producing illness in the form of precarious work, caste-based labour segmentation, and absent occupational health protections remain politically illegible. By foregrounding workers’ emic vocabularies of illness and mobility, this paper challenges economic framings of migration and narrow biomedical accounts of labour-related health, contributing to anthropological debates on labour, illness, and recognition in polarised contexts.