‘Stay home and stay safe’, the global slogan to contain the spread of coronavirus doesn’t sound too convincing to Mohammed Hakim and his associates who, unlike many other migrants, were forced to stay back and are battling hunger each day.
Their names are listed on ration cards but the cards, along with their families, are at home in Bihar. Living five to six persons in one windowless room at shanties behind the Jal Vihar bus terminal in the shadow of the posh Lajpat Nagar 1 colony in Delhi, they are now struggling to get one meal a day.
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“There are about 180 of us from Katihar who live here. Majority of us drive auto-rickshaws or pull cycle-rickshaws for a living. On March 28, many of us, by then having exhausted whatever little money we had, couldn’t get anything to eat. Then there were rumours that the lockdown will continue for three months. That jolted the others who still had some money to head home,” Mr. Hakim says.
For them it’s a race between the fear of an unknown virus and very real hunger pangs.
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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 peda