At the station: Falling in line to get a ticket to ride home

Half his salary spent on an auto from Gurgaon, Sukra Kundla has been standing in a queue outside the New Delhi Railway Station for two days just to register for a train ticket back home to Assam.

The queue is long and winding and just the first of the many before Kundla, who worked as a sweeper in Gurgaon, gets a seat on a train that will take him to his family in Kokrajhar. And that will not be from the New Delhi station but the Old Delhi one.

After he gets a registration number, he will be herded into a bus to go for a basic medical check at the Ambedkar Nagar stadium, a few kilometres away. That will involve falling in line as well. Finally, if all goes well, he will join another line -- hopefully the last to enter the Old Delhi Railway station to board a homeward bound Shramik Special train started by the government on May 1.

It's all about lines and a weary, uncertain wait to get to the train. In between, the hundreds of people, pressed close together with no social spacing, queue up to get food being served by civil society members.

As the sun beats down on a hot May afternoon and hundreds of people move towards the counter in fits and starts, 30-year-old Kundla said his patience has not run out but his money just might before he meets his family.

I am left with hardly Rs 2,500 now. I never thought that there would be these long queues and that I would have to wait for this long. I didn't know I had to take a train from Old Delhi. I thought the tough part was reaching here, he said.

Kundla, who earned Rs 6,000 in his job at a paying guest accommodation in Gurgaon, spent Rs 3,000 in travelling the 25 km-odd distance.

I lost my job and don't have a place to live anymore. That's why I can't go anywhere. My only hope is I will get a ticket. My children call me every day and ask when I will be home