Forests and Reverse Migration in India During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Keywords: India, reverse migration, Covid-19 lockdowns, forest-based livelihoods, remote sensing
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

The early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in India were defined by massive urban-rural reverse migration. Following the announcement of India’s first lockdown in April 2020, an estimated 6.3 million people traveled from urban to rural areas, exiting cities where jobs and services had been curtailed. This presentation reports on an ongoing mixed-methods project designed to assess the socio-ecological ramifications of reverse migration in the states of Assam and Madhya Pradesh. The project focuses on understanding the extent to which forests have buffered lockdown-driven hardships for rural communities, and how lockdowns interacted with ongoing stressors on agriculture. The first part of the presentation will report preliminary findings from focus groups and surveys conducted in forest-adjacent villages, which suggest that forest products were particularly important for buffering food insecurity for some households during this period. The second half will consider some of the methodological challenges of collecting field-based data on migration, and of coupling these data with remote sensing analysis. These highlight the tradeoffs between, on one hand, robust data collection on time-sensitive topics, and on the other, increased surveillance of already vulnerable communities. The discussion of these tradeoffs has broader relevance for future research on climate-driven displacement of agrarian communities, in India and elsewhere.