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