India, April 7 -- The disruptions due to the West Asia war has evoked fears of a repeat of pandemic-era disruptions. The government has done well to dispel such fears. There is no reason to believe India will impose a lockdown like during the pandemic. So far, the mitigation measures have been limited to a rationing of gas supplies. Currently, India is better placed than most emerging markets on this count. However, the war's supply shock seems to have triggered a reverse migration of Indian workers, though not at the pandemic scale. Most anecdotal accounts suggest that this is happening because the working-class migrant cohort cannot source LPG for their kitchens. Hard data is difficult to procure, but intuition suggests that most of them had been buying LPG from the informal market. With a supply crunch, this option is either unavailable or prohibitively expensive, so much so that it makes more financial sense for these workers to return to their villages - where non-LPG cooking options still exist - rather than spend their meagre incomes on cooking fuel. Industry bodies such as CII and the India SME Forum, speaking on behalf of MSMEs - they are the mainstay of industrial employment in India - are now confirming what started as anecdotal reporting about the problem. For industries that were already suffering from, or bracing for a supply-side disruption of inputs from the larger petrochemical economy, potential labour shortage is a double-whammy. As far as the government is concerned, it adds another problem to the list of many that need to be tackled. It has already taken steps to provide relief to MSMEs when US tariffs disrupted business and announced some measures because of supply-demand disruptions on account of the war. Oil companies can claim that they are hard-pressed to serve formal LPG consumers, and it is they who have the first right to cylinders. The solutions being advocated currently, such as getting PNG connections, will not work for such labour, which perhaps stays in slum or slum-like dwellings. The costs of inaction would be substantial. The only way is for the government, locally elected representatives, civil society and industry bodies to come together and provide relief to workers immediately. This is one thing which India's migrant workers did not get adequately during the pandemic lockdown. Do not blame them for being paranoid and leaving urban centres once again....