South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Trains helped to deliver pandemic
How lockdown chaos spread COVID-19 in India
SURAT, India — The crowds surged through the gates, fought their way up the stairs of the 160-yearold station, poured across the platforms and engulfed the trains.
It was May 5, around 10 a.m. Surat was beastly hot, 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Thousandsofmigrant laborers were frantic to leave — loom operators, diamond polishers, mechanics, truck drivers, cooks, cleaners — the backbone of Surat’s economy. Two of them were Rabindra and Prafulla Behera, brothers and textile workers, whohadarrivedin Surat a decade ago in search of opportunity and were now fleeing disease and death.
Rabindra stepped aboard carrying a bag stuffed with chapatis, an Indian flatbread. His older brother, Prafulla, clatteredin behind, dragging a plastic suitcase packed with pencils, toys, lipstick for his wife and 13 dresses for his girls.
“You really think we should be doing this?” Prafulla asked.
“What else are we going to do?” Rabindra said. “We have nothing to eat and our money’s out.”
Theywere among tens of millions of migrantworkers stranded without work or food after Prime Minister NarendraModi imposed a national coronavirus lockdown in March. By spring and summer, theseworkers were so desperate that the governmentprovidedemergency trains to carry them back to their home villages. Thetrainswere called Shramik Specials, because shramik means “laborer” in
Hindi.
But theybecamethe virus trains.
India has now reported more coronavirus cases than any country beside the United States. And it has become clear that the special trains operated by the government to ease suffering — and to counteract a disastrous lack of lockdown planning — instead played a significant role in spreading the coronavirus into almost every corner of the country.
The trains became contagion zones: Every passenger was supposedtobescreened forCOVID-19before boarding, but few if any were tested.
Social distancing, ifpromised, was nonexistent, as men pressed into passenger cars for journeys that could
last days. Then the trains disgorged passengers into distant villages, in regions that before had few if any coronavirus cases.
One of those places was Ganjam, a lush, rural district on the Bay of Bengal, where the Behera brothers disembarked after their crowded trip from Surat. Untouched by the virus, Ganjam soon became one of India’s most heavily infected rural districts after the migrants started returning.
Many people inGanjam’s villages had no idea what coronavirussymptomswere — until people around them started dying.
“There was a very direct correlation between the active COVID cases and the trains,” said Keerthi VasanV., a district-level civil servant in Ganjam. “It was
obvious that the returnees brought the virus.”
The tragic irony is that Modi’s lockdown inadvertently unlocked an exodus of tens of millions. His government and especially his COVID-19 task force, dominated by upper-caste Hindus, never adequately contemplated how shutting down the economy and quarantining 1.3 billion people would introduce desperation, then panic and then chaos for millions of migrantworkers at the heart of Indian industry.
The government organized 4,621 Shramik Specials, movingmore than 6 million people. As they poured out of India’s cities, which were becoming hot spots, many returnees draggedtheviruswiththem, yet they kept coming. Surat,
an industrial hub, sawmore than half a million workers leave on the trains.
The Behera brothers rode for 27 hours across the width of India, about 1,000 miles, in a second- class, non-air-conditioned train packed to capacity. The heat seemed to be getting to Prafulla. Duringthe journey, he complained of having a fever.
They stepped off in Ganjam on May 6, around
1 p.m., exhausted and dehydrated, amongthe firstwave of migrants to return.
The Beheras were told they would quarantine for
21 days at a center and each was given a toothbrush, a slice of soap, a bucket to wash with and a thin sheet to sleep on.
But the next morning, Prafulla awoke with a split
ting headache. A doctor didn’t think he had coronavirus but suggested that he be moved into the courtyard, away from the other men. The following morning, Prafulla could barely breathe and called his wife on his cellphone.
“Come and bring the girls,” hewhispered. “Ineed to see you.”
An hour later, he was dead. A subsequent test revealed that Prafulla Behera was Ganjam’s first coronavirus death.
Testing was still relatively low, butwhenauthorities zeroed in on suspected carriers they found high positivity rates.
After Prafulla’s death, Rabindra and six othermen who had traveled with him were tested. Sixout of seven tested positive.