Move to help migrant workers leave cities
Country outstrips China in tally as coronavirus infections mount
India will run more special trains and buses to allow millions of distressed migrant workers to leave big cities, the federal government said yesterday, as concerns grew in some states over rising infections from those returning home.
Workers are walking long distances to their homes in the countryside ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a vast lockdown in March to control the spread of coronavirus, shutting down all public transport.
After initially trying to keep them in their cities of employment, authorities are now helping them get home.
The federal home ministry said it was working with states to run special trains and buses, and set up rest stops for those on foot.
The move came as India’s confirmed cases surged past 101,000 yesterday, outstripping China, where the virus emerged late last year.
The concern is that migrants, who are leaving coronavirus hotspots such as Mumbai, New Delhi and Ahmedabad, could be carrying the virus into the hinterland.
Since early May, around 70 per cent of all coronavirus cases in the densely populated eastern state of Bihar have been linked to migrant workers, the state’s top health official, Sanjay Kumar, said.
“The top priority is the people who are coming from Delhi because they have the highest percentage of positive cases,” Kumar said.
In Odisha, also in the east, 851 out of 978 confirmed cases till yesterday were returnees, mostly migrant workers, according to state data.
In the state’s Ganjam district, more than 53,000 migrants have been screened and quarantined since early March, and another 200,000 are expected later this month, a health official said.
The official said managing such numbers was a challenge.
“Things are under control but we could have handled it much better had people been brought in smaller numbers in phases,” he said.
Health system strained
India reported 4,970 new cases over the previous 24 hours, taking its total to 101,139. Deaths rose by 134 to 3,163.
New cases in India have risen by an average of more than 4,000 a day over the past week, according to a Reuters tally based on official data, despite a severe weeks-long lockdown.
Health experts and officials are worried about the strain the epidemic is placing on India’s over-stretched and underfunded hospital system.
Dhruva Chaudhry, president of the Indian Society of Critical Care Medicine, told Reuters last month that India probably had only about 100,000 intensive care unit (ICU) beds and 40,000 ventilators.
Chaudhry warned there was not sufficient infrastructure or staff in the country of 1.35 billion people to handle a sharp spike in the number of critical patients.