‘We don’t need trains, just let us walk home’

‘We don’t need trains, just let us walk home’

Stranded workers say they don’t want to wait in shelters till they get a train or be quarantined once they get home

10/05/2020, JATIN ANAND, ,GREATER NOIDA

Migrant workers from U.P. and Bihar wait at the Yamuna E-way Zero Point in Greater Noida on Saturday. Jatin Anand

It may have abated for a while but the exodus of migrant workers from across the National Capital Region on Day 69 of the national lockdown is not only still going on but is seemingly underlined by more desperation than before.

A week after the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) allowed the movement of stranded individuals, especially migrant workers, to their home States on interState buses or special trains, visuals and news of others like them had renewed their hope before they realised there is more than one catch.

For groups of on-foot migrant workers, the possibly endless wait for more passengers headed their way on one hand and the certainty of two weeks’ quarantine on the other side of their journey in lieu merely of “free travel” arrangements by governments, they complain, is too steep a price to pay.

Even facing and contending with police batons on the way did not matter, they said, as long as they were able to inch as close to home as possible. “It is better if they just put us in jail and be done with it,” complained Om Prakash, a resident of Faizabad who undertook a nine-hour journey, mostly on foot, from Ballabhgarh in Haryana before landing up below the Yamuna Expressway.

“The police have told us that they will take us to a shelter camp where we will be required to stay till the administration is able to find more people headed along our route. Some of our relatives who have recently been able to make it home have told me that we will need to stay in quarantine for 14 days in a school outside the village. Are we supposed to spend our lives waiting?” he demanded.

One from a group of nine former factory workers from Ballabhgarh and Faridabad headed to their hometowns in Lucknow, Agra and Faizabad among others, Mr. Prakash said he and the others began their journey from Haryana at 3 a.m. on Saturday.

Prem Kumar, who was employed as a security guard at a wardrobe manufacturing unit, said the first installment of the national lockdown was announced on the eve of his first day at work. “The supervisor took care of us for as long as possible; for over two months. Then we thought we would try and make our way home. We tried to register ourselves on the U.P. government’s online portal but couldn’t. So we decided to start walking and get as close as we could on our own,” he said.

Seeing the group of nine from Uttar Pradesh waiting below the elevated highway encouraged close to two dozen people from Bihar, mainly construction workers, to position themselves on the other side of the street from them.

After a four-hour-long wait for food and arrangements for travel which they had hoped for, however, the gradually swelling number of migrant workers could only procure disappointment before setting out on foot for their destinations hundreds, and in the cases of some over a thousand, kilometres away.

“Did you hear about what happened in Nanded? The workers who were run over by the train? Why were they not on that train instead of below it? I am even ready for that kind of death if it happens near home. At least people will remember and talk about me. That will not happen if I stay here,” said Prabhas Kumar, a construction worker who wanted to travel to Saharsa in Bihar.

“We don’t need special trains; even tractors will do. If not tractors, just let us walk. We just want to go home,” he said.