Overview

Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia examines how the South Asian region has confronted the challenges of safeguarding labour rights and ensuring health provisioning for workers during and right after the COVID-19 pandemic. Bringing together comparisons across countries and regions, the volume draws on cases from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. These cases illuminate how states at multiple levels of government responded to COVID-19 and the ensuing economic crisis. With attention to the profound effects of cascading crises on workers' lives, individual chapters employ a wide range of methods - from statistical analysis to oral histories, written testimonies, and ethnographic accounts - to weave together state-level strategies with ground-level experiences of workers and labour collectives. Contributions from a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, spanning political science, economics, anthropology, human geography, sociology, and labour activism, provide a rich, multidimensional view of the pressures facing South Asia's working poor. Together, the chapters offer fresh insights into the region's diversity and the shifting relationship between states and societies during times of upheaval. The volume captures both the evolving nature of the political state and the resourcefulness, mobilization, and claim-making capacities of workers seeking recognition, protection, and justice. Contributors to the volume are Iffat Jahan Antara, Naomi Hossain, Touhidul Islam, Himanshu Jha, Priya Sajjad, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, Papia Sengupta, Chanchal Kumar Sharma, Jeevan Sharma, Maheen Sultan and Aardra Surendran along with the editors, Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Wilfried Swenden.

Full Product Details

9789523691452

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Kanchana N. Ruwanpura is a professor of development geography at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. With a PhD from the University of Cambridge, her scholarship has focused on conflict, post-disaster politics, post-war development, labour, the environment, and debt from a feminist perspective. Her publications appear in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and books and her most recent books are with Cambridge University Press (2022) and Routledge (2025). Her research has been funded by the ESRC, ERC, BA-GCRF, and NERC-AHRC-ESRC and she has held numerous fellowships in France, Germany, and Singapore, including from the Humboldt Foundation. ORCiD: 0000-0003-3570-6970 Wilfried Swenden is a professor of South Asian and comparative politics in the School of Social and Political Science and an associate of the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh. He works on comparative federalism, territorial party politics and intergovernmental relations in India and majoritarian nationalism in South Asia and has published widely in these areas. He was co-director of the Centre for South Asian Studies (2015-2018) and head of politics and international relations (2021-2022). Between 2021 and 2023 he co-led a British Academy Global Challenges Research Grant (with Kanchana N. Ruwanpura) on COVID-19 and the South Asian state. ORCiD: 0000-0002-8168-340X

Tab Content 6

Countries Available