The 68 days of lockdown in India, as a measure to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulted in an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, unlike any other in the world. In the first half of the lockdown, migrant workers were stranded with no food and money with severe restrictions on movement when a mass exodus of workers back to their hometowns and villages began. In the second half, the workers’ woes were compounded with a series of chaotic travel orders and gross mismanagement of the repatriation process. In this article, we draw on the work of Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN) with more analysis and perspective. SWAN was a spontaneous relief effort that emerged soon after the lockdown was announced in March 2020. In addition to providing relief, SWAN concurrently documented the experiences of over 36,000 workers through the lockdown. We highlight the inadequacy of the government and judicial response to the migrant worker crisis. We present quantitative data elaborating the profile of workers that reached out to SWAN, the extent of hunger, loss of livelihoods and income. We also present qualitative insights based on interactions with workers and discuss multiple, non-exhaustive, dimensions of vulnerability to which migrant workers were exposed.

This article presents a multidimensional account of the politics of resource extraction in two subnational regions of India in response to the question: what are the political conditions that facilitate extraction? Emerging from the same moment of state creation in 2000, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh are adjacent mineral-rich states with similar demographic profiles and comparable levels of economic development. The authors argue that despite these similarities and India's highly centralized legislative framework for natural resource governance, the two states have developed distinctive 'extractive regimes' in the years since statehood, which contrast in important ways across three dimensions: political organization and history, institutional effectiveness, and the nature and management of social resistance. The article offers the first in-depth, comparative account of how subnational territorial reorganization in India acts as a critical juncture enabling the formation of extractive regimes, which have also converged in important ways in recent years.1. Adivasis refer to the indigenous peoples of India, who are also broadly described as tribal and categorized as the Scheduled Tribes within the Constitution. We will use 'adivasi' and 'tribal' interchangeably in this article. Development and Change 51(3): 843-873.Scholars writing on the politics of extraction have challenged the hegemony of the 'resource curse' paradigm (Ross, 2015) in a number of ways. This 2. The Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005 allows citizens to file information requests on aspects of governance, which the state is legally bound to respond to.

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The idea of state responsibility for ensuring food security has gained ground, with strong popular mobilisations for the Right to Food around the world; but important variations prevail, both in the articulation of demands around food security interventions and in political responses to these. This paper takes a close look at India's Public Distribution System, a programme with a long history and clear national-level, legislative backing, but considerable differences in prioritisation at the subnational level. Through an empirically rich and innovative comparison of Chhattisgarh with Jharkhand-both created at the same time, in 2000-it asks why the opportunities afforded by statehood allowed Chhattisgarh to politically prioritise the PDS, but not Jharkhand. The paper finds that the explanation lies in the interrelated dimensions of political competition, the nature of pressures exerted by electorally significant societal groups, and political enablement of bureaucratic capacity. Finally, the analytical framework at the heart of the paper contributes to the emerging literature on the political conditions that allow the deployment of state capacity for the promotion of welfare.