Indian migrant workers stranded amid lockdown
Print Edition
Police in western India fired tear gas to disperse a stone-pelting crowd of migrant workers defying a three-week lockdown against the coronavirus that has left hundreds of thousands of poor without jobs and hungry, authorities said yesterday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered India’s 1.3 billion people to remain indoors until April 15, declaring such self-isolation was the only hope to stop the pandemic.
But the vast shutdown has triggered a humanitarian crisis with hundreds of thousands of poor migrant laborers employed in big cities such as Delhi and Mumbai seeking to head to their homes in the countryside on foot after losing their jobs.
Many have been walking for days, some with families, including small children, on deserted highways with little access to food or water.
On Sunday, about 500 workers clashed with police in the western city of Surat demanding they be allowed to go home to other parts of India as they had no jobs left.
“The police tried to convince them that it is not possible since buses or trains are not available. However, the workers refused to budge, and started pelting stones at police,” Surat deputy commissioner of police Vidhi Chaudhari said.
She said the workers, most of them employed in the shuttered textile industry in Surat, were driven indoors by tear gas volleys and yesterday 93 of them were detained.
India has registered 1,071 cases of the coronavirus, of whom 29 have died, the health ministry said yesterday. The number of cases is small compared with the United States, Italy, Spain or China, but health officials say India is weeks away from a huge surge that could overwhelm its weak public health system.
A health official said the large-scale movement of people into the countryside risked spreading the coronavirus widely, compounding the challenge of containing the outbreak in the world’s second most populous country.
“It’s an evolving situation with daily new challenges coming up, like having migratory populations moving from one place to another,” said Dr SK Singh, director of the National Centre for Disease Control.
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