As the national lockdown entered its fifth week, an unprecedented cross-country evacuation exercise to bring back migrant workers and other people stranded in different states appeared to gather momentum on Saturday with Punjab sending 80 buses to ferry back Sikh pilgrims stuck in Maharashtra and UP preparing to bring back at least 9,500 labourers from Haryana by Sunday.
Around 100 Sikh pilgrims stranded at Takht Sri Hazur Sahib in Maharashtra’s Nanded left for their home states of Punjab, Haryana and New Delhi after a push from Punjab CM Amarinder Singh and a nod from Union home minister Amit Shah. Chief secretary Ajoy Mehta asked his counterparts in UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh to take back 3.5 lakh migrants from these states stuck in Maharashtra. Mehta said Maharashtra was willing to ferry migrants to the borders of their states and hand them over.
The Himachal Pradesh and Haryana governments, too, sent Kashmiri workers and those from UP back to their home states on buses on Saturday.
A total of 3,800 pilgrims from Punjab, Haryana and Delhi who had come to Nanded on March 23, a day before the nationwide lockdown started
