Forced to stay, workers now battle hunger

01/04/2020

Nearly 100 of them left for home. With no trains or buses, they just rode home in auto-rickshaws and cycle rickshaws, that on a normal day was the means of earning a living. Thirty-two of them pedalled cycle-rickshaws to cover a distance of 1,390 km to Katihar. Three days later, covering a distance of 554 km, they reached Lucknow on Tuesday morning. “Their mobile phones are switched off, so we don’t know if the police caught them or if they are still continuing on their journey,” Mohammed Nizammudin, another auto-rickshaw driver, whose distant relative is one of the 32 making the journey, says.

For the 80-odd who stayed back, each day is getting more challenging. Coronavirus, the lynchpin of this lockdown, doesn’t occupy much mindspace, though all of them are wearing masks, some readymade, some fashioned out of gamchas.

The group complains that the police posted outside the gates of the colony don’t let them step out. “They hit first and ask questions later. We are shooed back into the colony each time we try to leave. We heard on the radio that the Delhi government is providing food, but we don’t know where or how to get to it,” 38-year-old Abdul says. After a day without any food on Sunday, the Rozi Roti Adhikar Abhiyan provided ₹2,000 for emergency rations on Monday.