“Only I have to help myself”: Indian Migrant Workers’ Plight During COVID-19 Lockdown

Qualitative research was undertaken (Creswell, J. W. 2013), content analysis was conducted on the video data and newspaper data, the data were available in public domain and open for all. Phenomenological research methodology (Moustakas, C. 1994) was adopted to understand the commonality of lived experience of migrant workers regarding what they experienced after lockdown, as the migrant workers shared the lived experiences on video camera to the reporters of news channels. The goal of this phenomenological approach was to arrive at the nature of the description of the phenomenon (Morrow, R., Rodriguez, A., & King, N. 2015), that they were experiencing on the ground (Creswell, 2013). Codes were identified and themes were found from the data. Due to lockdown, author could not go out in the field to speak to these migrant workers and collect primary data, hence the rich data available in the field in the form of videos captured by different news channels, and also some newspaper reports, which were available in public domain open to all, were utilised. Migrant workers communicated in native Hindi language; as reporters spoke to them and interviewed them (Bevan, M. T. (2014). The author well conversant with native Hindi language could understand the language well and could translate it in meaningful English language. To ensure the accuracy, it was also got checked by one more expert.