Srabani Maitra was invited by the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education (CASAE) to speak at a webinar titled “The Impacts of COVID-19 on Adult Learning and Education: An International Panel”. The other participants in the panel were Associate Professor Dr. Salma Ismail and Ms Lyndal Pottier, Lecturer in Adult Education, from the School of Education at the University of Cape Town and Professor Ellen Boeren from the School of Education at the University of Glasgow.

Dr Maitra’s talk was titled, Dispossession, Displacement and Vulnerability: India in the time of COVID 19 and explored the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on the livelihood, training, and employment of one of the most vulnerable populations in India, the urban migrant industrial labour force. She presented how migrant workers (predominantly without formal job contracts) and their families are subjected to multiple insecurities (eg. finding accommodation/medical health costs) as well as intergenerational precarity. Such precarity would not only include certain obvious denial of access to resources such as healthcare but also the increasing social ostracization of elderly parents as burdens on strained family resources during this period of crisis. Additionally, vast sections of the Indian population are going through high levels of impoverishment because of national level stagnation of economy, continuing pandemic as well as the loss of livelihood and the opportunity to access the labour market in future through lifelong learning and skill training. How in future years the marginalised sections of the society will be able to orient themselves to a better future is difficult to predict given the compounded nature of the crisis. The webinar was held on Nov 27th, 2020 and the link to the presentation is https://www.casae-aceea.ca/webinars/

First published: 14 December 2020

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