Losing jobs, more worries: Lower, middle classes also heading home
LUCKNOW: Besides daily wagers, security guards, drivers, waiters, office boys, cooks, call centre workers, startup employees and others is also quitting cities and heading home due to uncertainty about jobs and practically no income.
However, these workers are pooling money to hire vehicles.
Rajesh Kashyap, who worked as a salesman in a multi-brand garment retail outlet in Lakshminagar of east Delhi hired a van with his cousins for Rs 60,000 to return home to Gorakhpur. “I earned Rs 18,000 monthly before lockdown was imposed. I have not received any salary in the lockdown. I think it will take a while for me to get my job back so I decided to head home,” Rajesh said.
He was returning home with his wife and two children, cousins and their families. There were 14 people in the van. “My cousins and I pooled in 20,000 each to hire this vehicle. There was no option but to return home,” he added.
The group left Delhi in the wee hours of Saturday and reached Gorakhpur by 7 pm.
More than 3,000 such vehicles crossed the toll booth in the past six weeks, almost all of them carrying families heading home.
“Most traveller vans are returning from Delhi, Gurugram and Noida. A few are also returning from places in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat,” said an employee at the toll booth on Lucknow-Agra Expressway on the outskirts of Lucknow.
Sudhakar Yadav, worker in a diamond polishing unit in Surat, Gujarat entered Lucknow via the same toll booth on Sunday. He was accompanied by six other workers of the same unit travelling in an SUV. “We were all very worried about the situation and decided to return home. We have all paid Rs 1 lakh to hire this vehicle till our house in Jaunpur district,” Yadav said.
A machine operator at the unit, Yadav was paid Rs 22,000 monthly. The salary was reduced to half in March when the lockdown was imposed and he was not paid in April.
A few desperate people, mostly youngsters, even called their relatives to take them home. Dileep Mandal of Bihar drove up to Delhi in his car to bring back his son and his friend from Gurugram. Mandal’s son was employed with a start-up tech firm in Gurugram that collapsed in the lockdown.
Economic experts believe that close to 10 million people from east UP and Bihar are employed in Delhi NCR who will have to face difficult times ahead. “More than half of these people will lose their jobs in coming days if proper financial aid is not provided. In such conditions they will be forced to return home creating a vaccum of skilled labour,” said Ramesh Shirodker, a Mumbai-based economist.