This talk shall draw upon the field-research undertaken by our team at Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), India, focusing on narratives of daily emergencies, livelihood transitions experienced by vulnerable, unsecured shramiks (working communities) living across urban India. The work is most recently documented in my recent co-edited books: Vulnerable Communities in Neoliberal India: Perspectives from a Feminist Ethnographic Approach and Crisis Narratives: Pan-India Stories of Informal Workers During Covid 19 Pandemic , out with Routledge, Taylor and Francis (2024) and Palgrave MacMillan, Springer Nature (2024).

Deepanshu Mohan is Professor of Economics and Dean, IDEAS, Office of InterDiscplinary Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), India. His teaching affiliation for taught courses in areas of comparative political economy, development studies, research methods, is with the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities at the University (JGU), where he is also Director, Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), and Senior Research Fellow, International Institute of Higher Education (IIHED).