Till now, the biggest dark spot in India’s lockdown to prevent Covid-19 from spreading has been its lack of planning about migrant workers....
Till now, the biggest dark spot in India’s lockdown to prevent Covid-19 from spreading has been its lack of planning about migrant workers. While countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka ensured that most of their migrants were able to head back to their villages before cities were sealed off, India planned to keep the workers in place in the cities.
This has caused incredible misery for the migrants, some of whom were forced to walk hundreds of kilometres to get back home since the daily-wage jobs on which they depended for survival had disappeared. For those who were stranded in cities, the distress has in recent days begun to spill into the street: in Gujarat, their frustrations even escalated into mob violence.
Rich and poor states
The political fall-out of this distress has been a broad division between states that send out migrants and states that host them. While the hosts broadly want migrants to be sent back home, the home states themselves are reluctant to receive them, fearing that this movement would escalate the spread of Covid-19.
As part of this pattern, West Bengal on March 21 was the first state to formally ask for a complete stop of inter-state rail transport. On the same day, the state blocked all inter-state bus...
