Swati Narayan

“Fifteen million people were uprooted from their homes by India’s 1947 Partition. Seventy years later, during the pandemic, India was in the throes of its worst reverse migration. This time, the population exodus was estimated to be more than double. For two months, India’s national highways were filled with millions of migrants trudging hundreds of kilometres on foot, cycles, trucks and trains, back to their villages. For the ruling classes, these reverse migrants desperately walking home might as well have been ghosts. Most of them were returning from developed industrial cities and towns in southern and western India to their impoverished homes in the backward eastern states, Bihar among them. Due to poverty, unemployment, landlessness and hunger, more than half of Bihari households have at least one member who is a migrant, largely within India.”
― Swati Narayan, UNEQUAL: Why India Lags Behind Its Neighbours