Mitigating the Risks and Vulnerabilities during COVID-19 Pandemic: Emerging Solidarities With-in the Migrant Neighbourhood of Delhi, India

Abstract

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The article explores migrant children’s lives and emerging solidarities in the selected neighbourhood (a squatter-slum) during the early phase of COVID-19 pandemic induced lockdown. Children’s lives within the family, as community member and mutual relationship in the moments of risk and resilience are explored. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: Belonging to marginalised group, for children and their families, the COVID-19 lockdown period added multiple layers of disadvantage. Children’s lives are explored with ethnographic fieldwork (as part of the broader study initiated in 2017) and during the lockdown period (early 2020) with telephonic interviews. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The article establishes migrant children’s contribution who despite being doubly disadvantaged in an adult centric society, actively shape and co-build the social spaces. Drawing upon Walby’s work on crisis; the New Sociology of Childhood, children are reinstated as collaborators, presenting the adaptation strategies of children to sustain and cope during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. RESEARCH RESULTS: Risk and resilience have become normalised part of the lived reality of migrant children’s lives. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic the risks got elevated and with it the adaptive coping strategies at the level of family and neighbourhood emerged that helped in mitigating the risks to some extent. CONCLUSIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS AND APPLICABLE VALUE OF RESEARCH: The article demonstrates migrant children as collaborators and recommends (i) considering children’s voices and participation while framing policies, programmes, and schemes, and (ii) to view children as expert of their lives, active members, reiterating recognition of their role at various fronts.

Keywords

• migrant children
• slum
• COCID-19 pandemic
• risk
• resilience