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Fearing 2020 rerun, migrants rush home
In Madhya Pradesh’s Bundelkhand, Alirajpur and Jabhua, close to 20,000 workers returned from the National Capital Region (NCR), Maharashtra and Gujarat in the past week with some of them losing their jobs.
Hariharan Yadav (34) is one of the several migrant workers who returned from Maharashtra’s Nagpur city to his village in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur, fearing the Covid-19 situation may turn from bad to worse and that he may lose his job amid a possible lockdown like last year.
Unwilling to go through the same set of troubles and pain he experienced last year, Yadav, who is a painter, said: “The pain and torture to which we were subjected during the lockdown last year is still fresh in my memory. I travelled for more than 200km on foot, faced police detention and almost died due to hunger. Hence, this year, I cannot take any chances as I have a family to look after.”
Besides Yadav, more than 200 villagers, who were involved in similar professions in Maharashtra, have returned till date to Rampur Rakba, which is referred to as the painter’s village. “Around 800 villagers work in different states as painters and half of them have returned,” Jai Prakash Paswan, former village head of Rampur Rakba, East UP, said.
Ravindra Pal Singh (38), a resident of Basti district, boarded a train home from New Delhi railway station last week. “I worked at a food processing plant in Bahadurgarh, Haryana. There was very little work, so I decided to return home and help my family in the fields. If the Covid-19 cases go down, I will go back,” he said.
Similarly, 50-year-old Nripendra Kumar, who has been living in Mumbai for over two decades, returned to his native village Jaffarpur in Purnea district of Bihar on Friday. “I lost my job and there was nothing left for me,” Kumar said, adding that a large number of people from Bihar were leaving Mumbai and other cities of Maharashtra, where daily Covid-19 cases have crossed 60,000.
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In Muzaffarpur, one of the districts that has a high migrant population in various states, reverse migration has started. Rohit Kumar (35), who managed to secure a job in Nagpur after a lot of difficulties in January this year, left his job and returned to his village in a special train on Saturday. “When the night curfew was announced in Nagpur, it reminded me of the pain we went through last year to return home. So, I decided to board the special train,” he said.
In Madhya Pradesh’s Bundelkhand, Alirajpur and Jabhua, close to 20,000 workers returned from the National Capital Region (NCR), Maharashtra and Gujarat in the past week with some of them losing their jobs amid the second wave.
While several state governments have decided to test migrant workers, they are yet to open quarantine centres and deploy rural health infrastructure personnel to track the returnees. Uttar Pradesh chief secretary R K Riwari announced that the government made Covid-19 test mandatory for all those entering the state.
A Bihar government official said those testing positive are either sent to isolation centres or they are home quarantined with medicines and they are under constant medical observation.
