(a) What are the sociological reasons and implication of "reverse migration" during the recent pandemic in India ? (20…

(a) Sociological reasons and implications of "reverse migration" during the pandemic

Reasons:

• Push from cities: the informal urban economy collapsed with the 2020 lockdown, causing loss of wages, evictions from rented rooms, no social security, no urban entitlements such as ration cards, and a sense of abandonment by employers and state.
• Pull of the village: kin networks, family land, shared housing and community support offered subsistence and belonging when the city did not; for circular migrants the village was always the base.
• Structural position: migrants are disproportionately from SC, ST and OBC groups and work without contracts, which made them the most exposed. Jan Breman's idea of footloose labour fits: needed when work exists, discarded when it does not.

Implications:

• Rural strain: record demand for MGNREGA work in 2020–21 (now succeeded by the VB-G RAM G Act, 2025), pressure on food, land and village health services, and a fall in remittances that supported rural households.
• Urban effect: labour shortages in construction, manufacturing and services followed, then distress-driven re-migration on weaker terms.
• Policy: it exposed the lack of portable social protection, a migrant database and effective enforcement of the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979 (now subsumed in the OSH Code, 2020), and prompted portability of ration cards under One Nation One Ration Card and the e-Shram registry.
• Social: it re-exposed caste and class hierarchies in who bore the cost of the crisis.

(b) The Ghurye–Elwin debate on tribal development

G. S. Ghurye (The Aborigines "So-Called" and Their Future, 1943) held that tribes are "backward Hindus", long in contact with Hindu society, so the issue was integration, not preservation. He criticised colonial protection and anthropological isolation as divisive, and favoured welfare and integration into the mainstream.

Verrier Elwin, in his early work, feared that rapid contact with caste Hindu society, moneylenders, traders and outsiders would destroy tribal culture and exploit tribal people, and favoured protection of tribal life, the "national park" idea. He later moved to a middle path: development guided by tribal "genius", with their rights over land and forest and minimal imposition. His views influenced Nehru's Tribal Panchsheel (1950s).

Assessment: neither pure isolation nor pure assimilation worked; the Constitution's Fifth and Sixth Schedules, the PESA Act (1996) and the Forest Rights Act (2006) attempt a synthesis of autonomy and integration. Displacement, alienation of land and cultural marginalisation show the tension is unresolved.

(c) Forms of untouchability in India, critically examined

Forms:

• Spatial: segregated hamlets and denial of access to wells, temples and common land.
• Ritual and commensal: temple-entry bans, the two-tumbler system, exclusion from shared meals.
• Occupational: confinement to degrading work such as manual scavenging, tanning and sanitation, despite the 2013 ban on manual scavenging.
• Everyday and urban: discrimination in rental housing, schools and workplaces, and caste-based violence against Dalits who assert status.

Critical view: Article 17 abolished untouchability, and the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 punish it, but enforcement is weak, conviction rates are low, and it survives in subtle forms. It intersects with gender and class, making Dalit women especially vulnerable.