‘Delhi belongs to you’: Lieutenant governor Baijal urges migrants to not leave national capital during lockdown
As scores of migrant workers were seen leaving Delhi on Monday after the imposition of a week-long lockdown to check the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), lieutenant governor Anil Baijal on Tuesday urged them to not leave the national capital in panic. Taking it to Twitter, Baijal assured the migrant workers that the Delhi government will take care of all their requirements during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis.
“All necessary arrangements are being made for you (migrant workers). You run Delhi through with your tireless hard work and the city belongs to you,” he wrote on the microblogging site
Earlier in the day, Baijal had chaired an emergency meeting with chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and chief secretary Vijay Kumar Dev to take stock of the situation. He directed Kejriwal and Dev to take all steps possible to prevent a reverse migration. The chief minister is currently under self-isolation after his wife Sunita Kejriwal tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday.
The Delhi L-G also appointed the principal secretary (home) and the special commissioners as ‘nodal officers’ to handle the overall situation.
The government will open shelter homes and also provide free food to migrants in order to ensure they do not leave the city during the period when a lockdown is in place, officials told Hindustan Times on Tuesday. After making the announcement of the week-long lockdown on Monday, Kejriwal appealed to the migrant workers to stay put as it is for a short lockdown and assured that the government will take care of them.
However, the distressed migrants said Kejriwal should have given more time before closing down Delhi for a week till April 26. “You should have given us a time period of one to two days before announcing a lockdown so that we could go back home,” one of the migrants told news agency ANI on Monday night after thousands thronged Anand Vihar interstate bus terminal to go back to their native places.
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According to the lockdown rules, only essential services and government offices are allowed to operate and section 144 has been imposed across Delhi. Those employed with private offices have been told to work from home. Malls, spas, gyms and auditoriums will remain closed while groceries, dairies will be kept open.
Delhi has so far added nearly 878,000 cases and 12,361 deaths due to the Covid-19 disease. On Monday, 23,868 people were found to be infected while 240 succumbed to the disease- the highest single day spike in deaths since the begging of the pandemic last year.
