Covid 19: Migrants risk spreading of virus to rural areas
A day after total lockdown was announced by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, hundreds and thousands of manual workers took to streets to go home.
What’s migrant worker
A lot of people come to big cities from their villages in search of jobs and work. Most of them work as manual workers who earn daily wages, which means they get paid everyday according to the work they do.
What happened
After the lockdown, as offices and factories shut with everything else, these daily wage workers had no work, and no money to feed their families.
As the government has restricted movement across states, they couldn’t get any mode of transport also for their journey back home. Many of these workers come from far flung villages of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Karnataka to work in big cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore etc.
On foot
Due to lack of transport these workers decided to walk to their villages which are hundreds of kilometres away. The state governments did provide for their lodgings in spare school and government buildings but the workers wanted to be with their families.
This cluster movement also aggravated the fear of spread of the Coronavirus. However, now that many migrant workers have reached homes, the villagers are refusing to take them in due to the fear of Covid 19. It seems their woes would take much more time to end.
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