The study — Diverse Coping Strategies for Food Security: A Qualitative Study of Economically Precarious Households in India in the Context of COVID-19 — found that circular or recent migrant workers and daily wage-dependent families were among the hardest hit, with limited alternative support systems available.

The research team spoke with 86 families between December 2022 and March 2023.

Published in PLOS One, the study interviewed families who made “impossible choices”, including skipping meals, delaying medical treatment, taking loans and withdrawing children from school to meet expenses. It examined how vulnerable households that depended on daily wages coped when COVID-19 disrupted their livelihoods.

Government support through the Public Distribution System (PDS) and local social networks played a crucial role in helping households cope with the crisis, particularly those with limited access to alternative income sources, the study highlighted.

The research team conducted 343 interviews in Uttar Pradesh and Goa. From these, a subset of households experiencing severe and prolonged COVID-related hardships was selected to understand the pandemic’s impact on different household members, including men, women and children aged seven years and older.

The study found that migration status and existing structural inequalities, such as poverty, critically shaped families’ resilience. Coping capacity during COVID-19 depended less on income loss than on access to government support and social networks, both of which were rarely available to migrant workers, especially more recent migrants.

Stressing the interdependence of rural and urban economies, the study discusses how COVID-19 triggered a wave of reverse migration (migrants returning to their native places) to rural areas. This created intense pressure on already stressed rural economies and worsened inequalities.

As employment became irregular, the first strategies adopted by the interviewed households were to ‘smooth consumption’. This meant shifting to less preferred foods, reducing expensive items such as dairy and meat, and limiting portion sizes, with potatoes and cereals becoming primary fallback options. This, the research says, raises serious concerns about the nutritional impacts of the pandemic.

Women, who often enacted ‘maternal buffering’, were especially likely to absorb the impacts of food scarcity themselves by cutting down on their own meals to ensure children and men had ‘enough’.

Families sharing homes began cooking jointly to conserve cooking fuel and ensure children did not go hungry. Some children were sent to live with grandparents or relatives when managing finances became difficult.

As lockdowns further compromised livelihoods, more severe strategies such as borrowing money for food, skipping meals, selling assets and reverse migration to rural areas were adopted.

Some urban migrants within the study settings assumed they would have easier access to food in their rural homes due to agricultural stocks and established social networks.

However, for those with more limited resources, reverse migration placed additional pressure on single earning members, making it more difficult to provide for larger households.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government expanded support under the Public Distribution System (PDS) — a key food security scheme providing subsidised cereals and other staples to eligible households.

Cereal allocations were doubled, and additional items such as oil and chickpeas were introduced to promote dietary diversity. Complementary schemes were also launched to address heightened food insecurity amid livelihood disruptions.

These allocations, the research says, were crucial for maintaining access to food among vulnerable families during this period of crisis, highlighting the value of government support.

However, as PDS entitlements are typically tied to the place of registration, many migrant workers were unable to access rations at their destination, reflecting longstanding challenges around portability.

Lead author Dr Charumita Vasudev said in a statement, “In an increasingly uncertain world, it is important to understand that household responses to global threats are not just about the crisis itself, but the existing structural inequalities and vulnerabilities that people are already coping with.”

“Public policies like the PDS form the backbone of household’s resilience strategies. They, thus need to account for contextual vulnerabilities to ensure that short-term coping during crisis does not risk deepening of inequalities in the longer term.”