Migrant labourers in time of corona: Jobless, homeless and miles to go to return home

Some are finding their own villages in Bihar blocking their entry; a few had to make trees their temporary homes in West Bengal; hundreds left relief camps and hit the roads in Kerala in protest. And thousands of migrant workers are still walking on highways and railway tracks even at the risk of getting quarantined.

This COVID-19 pandemic has spawned a new crisis in India -- of a mass exodus of migrant workers engulfing various parts of the country, including the national capital. Thousands of daily wagers and others having been rendered jobless and homeless due to a nationwide lockdown to check the spread of the deadly coronavirus appear determined to reach their home towns and villages.

One migrant worker died of heart attack after a long trek from the national capital on way to his hometown in Madhya Pradesh, while a large number of them were worried that they would die of hunger much before any disease.

Worried about this large-scale movement of people triggering a risk of mass infection, the central government ordered sealing of all state and district borders and said violators face a 14-day mandatory quarantine.

State governments also appealed to the migrant workers to stay put and announced special measures for providing food and other facilities to them, while a few arranged special buses to ferry them to their native places.

In Kerala, hundreds hit the streets on Sunday demanding transportation to travel to their native places. The state government deployed police forces and sent administrative officers to pacify the agitating migrant workers, who are called guest labourers in the state, and managed to send them back back to their camps.

They were promised all facilities for a comfortable stay in the state during the lockdown period, but their demand for travel facilities was rejected.

The Haryana government, on its part, said it has provided over 800 sanitised state roadways buses to Uttar Pradesh to ferry migrant workers stranded on the Delhi-Ghaziabad border to their villages.

On Saturday evening, chaos, confusion and a stampede-like situation prevailed at the Delhi-Ghaziabad border as hundreds of migrant workers fought amongst themselves to get seats on the limited number of buses the Uttar Pradesh administration operated to ferry them to the hinterlands.

Hundreds of migrant workers from Delhi, Haryana and even Punjab reached Anand Vihar, Ghazipur and Ghaziabad's Lal Kuan area after taking arduous treks of many kilometers on foot to take buses to their respective native places