BUS FACILITY DRAWS SEA OF HUMANITY IN TIME OF VIRUS

NEW DELHI: Jobless, without money to pay rent or for food, thousands of migrant workers flooded the interstate Anand Vihar bus terminal on Saturday to board buses back home from across the border in Kaushambi, Uttar Pradesh — posing just the kind of risk India was trying to avoid with a 21-day lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (Covid-19).

Government and police officers on the ground estimated the gathering to be more than 100,000.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi called up Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday to discuss measures to clear the UP-Delhi border. The chief minister is learnt to have said the Delhi government had left no stone unturned in convincing people to stay back and adhere to the lockdown.

“Shelters have been provided and adequate food has been arranged. However, a large number of people refused, especially after the Uttar Pradesh government started providing buses. In Delhi, the deputy chief minister, Manish Sisodia, himself went to the city border to convince groups and partially succeeded. All MLAs were asked to step up relief operations for the poor. The CM informed the PM about all these steps,” said a senior officer in the chief minister’s office.

After the PM raised concern over the issue, the states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar and Delhi stepped up their coordination and arrangements to ferry migrant workers to their hometowns. “To decongest the Anand Vihar-Ghaziabad border, the UP, Haryana and Bihar governments are now planning to deploy around 2,000 buses tonight. The aim is to clear most of the people waiting at Anand Vihar overnight,” a senior official in the Delhi government said.

Carrying merely a few sets of clothes in their bags, and with leftover cash, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, migrant workers from across the city walked on the roads of east Delhi with their families and associates to join the 2km long queue at the Delhi-UP border to board buses back home.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath said in a statement that he has issued orders to district magistrates to ensure that the around 100,000 people who have crossed into the state be home quarantined.

The workers who stood in the queue on the road to cross the border had something in common: they had all lost their jobs.

Until last week, they lived in the factories or shops where they worked but all had been shut in the wake of the nationwide lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday evening as one of the measures to control the spread of the SarsCoV-2 virus. Their employers had asked them to return home.

The Delhi government pressed 570 buses into service to ferry such migrant workers from across the city to the borders but most officers on the ground said it wasn’t enough.