Lockdown displaces lakhs of migrants
Visuals of numerous workers wearing gamchas, carrying heavy backpacks and wailing kids, and walking on nationwide highways, boarding tractors, and scrambling for space atop multi-coloured buses became specifying images for days to come in India. To fight the novel coronavirus, States began imposing limitations on the movement of people. Then the Prime Minister announced an across the country 21- day lockdown This difficult procedure was met with worry, anger and disappointment in many parts of the nation, including Mumbai.
No transport, no jobs, no food
In its own capacity to contain the spread of COVID-19, the Maharashtra federal government put in place a series of limitations in the days leading up to the March 24 across the country lockdown. On March 20, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray enforced a lockdown in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad and Nagpur until March31 Unexpectedly, in simply a couple of hours, lakhs of migrant workers living in the city found themselves without work. To make matters worse, there was little or no assurance that they would get fundamental features such as food and water. This forced countless migrant labourers to flock to the city’s major train termini– the Lokmanya Tilak Terminus and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus– along with train and bus terminals in other cities. Following the Chief Minister’s statement, the Railways ran 14 unique trains on March 20 and 21, 8 of them from Mumbai, to numerous locations such as Patna, Howrah, Danapur, Gorakhpur, Manduadih and Balharshah. Long-distance guest services were at first shut just on March 22 on account of the Janata Curfew. The suspension of services was extended to March 31 and then to April 14 after the Prime Minister revealed the lockdown. Shahrukh Malik, a motorist of Ola and Uber taxis, said: “Had we understood this was going to last this long, we would have gone home much earlier and returned after two-three months.”
