A lockdown to stave off a pandemic is turning into a humanitarian crisis in India.
On Monday, streets around the capital, Delhi, were filled with people walking to reach their villages in neighbouring states.
Most of them are daily-wage workers, who are now out of work after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a complete lockdown of the country on March 24 to halt the spread of coronavirus.
In the absence of money and jobs, they were desperate to reach their villages. Some found government-run buses to reach home and others just continued to walk.
Among the teeming refugees of the lockdown was a 90-year-old woman, whose family sold cheap toys at traffic lights in a suburb outside Delhi.
Kajodi was walking with her family to their native Rajasthan, some 100km (62 miles) away. They were eating biscuits and smoking beedis, – traditional hand-rolled cigarettes – to kill hunger. Leaning on a stick, she had been walking for three hours when she was met. The humiliating flight from the city had not robbed her off her pride. She said she would have bought a ticket to go home if transport was available.
Others on the road included a five-year-old boy, who was on a 700km (434 miles) journey by foot with his father, a construction worker, from Delhi to their home in Madhya Pradesh state in central India.
“When the sun sets, we will stop and sleep,” the father told journalist Barkha Dutt. Another woman walked with her husband and two-and-a-half year old daughter, her bag stuffed with food, clothes and water. “We had a place to stay, but no money to buy food,” she said.
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Then there was Rajneesh, a 26-year-old automobile worker, who was walking 250km (155 miles) to his village in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. It would take him four days, he reckoned. “We will die walking before coronavirus hits us,” the man said.
As the crisis worsened, state governments scrambled to arrange transport, shelter and food.
But trying to transport them to their villages quickly turned into another nightmare. Hundreds of thousands of workers were pressed against each other at a major bus terminal in Delhi as buses rolled in to pick them up.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal implored the workers not to leave the capital. He asked them to “stay wherever you are, because in large gatherings, you are also at risk of being infected with the coronavirus.”
He said his government would pay their rent, and announced the opening of 568 food distribution centres in the capital. Modi apologised for the lockdown “which has caused difficulties in your lives, especially the poor people”, adding these “tough measures were needed to win this battle.”
Whatever the reason, Modi and state governments appeared to have bungled in not anticipating this exodus.
Modi has been extremely responsive to the plight of Indian migrant workers stranded abroad: hundreds of them have been brought back home in special flights. But the plight of workers at home struck a jarring note.
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