THE EXODUS AND AFTER

Stranded in cities with no jobs, homes or food, migrant workers across India are trudging home to their villages, burdened with their possessions and supporting hungry, tired children; or packed in buses with no scope of ‘social distancing’. Their drawn faces reflect the real toll COVID-19 has taken on people’s lives. What the government must now do to help them

- SHOUGAT DASGUPTA

There is no official number for those who have died as they trekked hundreds of kilometers from their cramped, basic rooms in cities to their home villages, but various reports tabulate at least 20 deaths, a likely underestimate. Panicked, hungry, and desperate, these migrant workers feel forsaken by their government. The scenes have been seen around the world, thousands walking in slippers, carrying their children, their few belongings, with barely enough to eat on journeys that will last several days. That is if they get that far. Most are being intercepted and held in camps, now that the Centre has told states to seal their borders. The images were especially jarring after the faux-festive clangour at five in the evening on the day of the Janta Curfew on March 22, when India responded to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to show appreciation for those fighting on the frontline of the so-called war against COVID-19 by banging pots. To see just days later, the drawn faces of those suddenly without homes, income, food and, in many cases, family, walking in the dark, in the heat of the afternoon, through the police gauntlet, was to see the real toll taken by COVID-19.