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-year-old station, poured across the platforms and engulfed the trains.
It was May 5, around 10 a.m. Surat was beastly hot, 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Thousands of migrant 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, who had arrived in 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, clattered in 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.
“Whatelse are wegoing to do?” Rabindra said. “Wehave nothing to eat and our money’s out.”
They were among tens of millions of migrant workers stranded without work or food after Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a national coronavirus lockdown in March. By spring and summer, these workers were so desperate that the government provided emergency trains to carry them back to their home villages. The trains were called Shramik Specials, because shramik means “laborer” in Hindi.
But they became the 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 supposed to be screened for COVID-19 before boarding, but few if any were tested.
Social distancing, if promised, 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 in Ganjam’s villages had no idea what coronavirus symptoms were — until people around them started dying.
“There was a very direct correlation between the active
COVID cases and the trains,” said Keerthi Vasan V., a districtlevel 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 migrant workers at the heart of Indian industry.
The government organized 4,621 Shramik Specials, moving more than 6 million people. As they poured out of India’s cities, which were becoming hot spots, manyreturnees dragged the virus with them, 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. During the journey, he complained of having a fever.
They stepped off in Ganjam on May 6, around 1 p.m., exhausted and dehydrated, among the first wave 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 splitting headache. Adoctor 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,” he whispered. “I need 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, but when authorities zeroed in on suspected carriers they found high positivity rates.
After Prafulla’s death, Rabindra and six other men who had traveled with himweretested. Six out of seven tested positive.