Tens of millions of people were displaced by India’s first lockdown in 2020. Manoej Paateel/Shutterstock

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It’s reasonable to say that migrant workers became internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the process of reverse migration to their homes. Internal displacement refers to involuntary or coerced movement within the boundaries of a country. For example, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 displaced approximately 650,000 people within India.

The similarity between the tsunami in 2004 and COVID-19 in 2020 is that, in both cases, people moved involuntarily to another place within the country for their own safety. The difference between the two is that the people fleeing the tsunami were recognised as internally displaced and in consequence legally protected through evacuation and rehabilitation measures, whereas those who were fleeing COVID-19 continued to be identified as migrant workers and left to the mercy of fate.

People displaced by the devastating 2004 tsunami were given support and rehabilitation that has been absent from the COVID crisis. Prakash Singh/AFP

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The recognition of the victims of the 2004 tsunami as IDPs can be traced to India’s well-established legal framework of managing natural disasters, including the protection of affected populations from displacement through evacuation and rehabilitation measures.

Prone to frequent cyclones, India regularly uses its 2005 Disaster Management Act to prepare for impending natural disasters, assess risks, relocate people, and mitigate impacts after the fact. The government could have easily invoked the act in the wake of the first lockdown, because it applies not just to natural disasters, but also biological disasters including epidemics and pandemics.

The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, a non-binding international framework, provides a list of natural and human-made causes for displacement. Under the guidelines, biological disasters from public health emergencies such as pandemics and epidemics fall within the definition human-made disasters.

Yet the tragic reality is that, in India, there was not enough precedent in recent times to understand COVID-19 as a biological disaster capable of causing displacement.

There is, however, recent evidence from the aftermath of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Following the outbreak, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre identified five displacement trends: internal displacement from fleeing the virus, fleeing quarantine, seeking healthcare, forced evictions and fleeing stigma, and fleeing violence and rights violations.

From this analysis, we can infer that the flight of migrant workers from the COVID-19 lockdown was indeed a pattern of internal displacement, driven by the need for survival, the loss of livelihoods and the violations of human rights such as the right to food, shelter, and human dignity.

The recognition of migrant workers as IDPs opens a host of legal avenues to enhance their protection and assistance needs. Identifying migrant workers in India displaced by COVID as IDPs would align domestic practices with international obligations, including human rights law and humanitarian law.

With this awareness in mind, future governments decisions on disease management must have a greater focus on ways to extend legal protection to displaced vulnerable groups. We need to recognise the many nuanced drivers of disasters, including infectious disease outbreaks like COVID-19.

This article is part of a series on recovering from the pandemic in a way that makes societies more resilient and able to deal with future challenges. It is supported by a grant from PreventionWeb, a platform from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

Malavika Rao, PhD Candidate and Teaching Assitant, International Law, Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.