P. Nakhawa, N. Singh, P. S. Ananthan, T. Mohammad, L.N. Murthy, A.D. Nakhawa and K.K. Asha
Abstract
This study maps global and Indian social-science literature on human migration and labour within postharvest food and seafood processing corridors over the past two and a half decades, using structural metadata from an open-source bibliographic database. An optimized multi-tier query architecture progressively narrowed the search from all human migration to the precise intersection of migration, labour and seafood processing, while Boolean exclusions suppressed non-human senses of migration such as the biological, chemical and data senses. Retrieval yielded several hundred thousand human-migration articles at the broadest tier and tens of thousands of migrant-worker articles, but only a few hundred food-processing labour articles, a few dozen seafood-processing labour articles globally, and a mere handful of indexed records for Indian seafood-processing migrant labour. All retrieved records were validated for authenticity in terms of structural integrity, identifier resolvability, venue legitimacy and outlier flagging. The corpus shows a sharp publication acceleration in the most recent period, driven by pandemic-related research and concentrated geographically in Thailand, the Nordic countries and North America, with India almost entirely absent. A critical thematic review of the sector studies across several broad themes, and a separate review of the prominent research methodologies and frameworks they employ, confirm a genuine evidentiary void rather than a retrieval artefact, and underscore the need for localized empirical research on Indiaâs coastal processing clusters. While global literature robustly documents severe musculoskeletal hazards, systemic healthcare exclusion, and intersectional gender and racial exploitation on the factory floor, the Indian context remains largely limited to macro-economic supply-chain shocks and isolated behavioural health studies. This stark absence of validated occupational health vulnerability models and micro-level ethnographic fieldwork underscores an urgent imperative for localized, primary empirical research to safeguard this structurally invisible workforce within Indiaâs coastal processing clusters.