Lockdown Diary: When The World Came To Halt And Migrant …

On March 27, 2020, three days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day national lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19, Uttar Pradesh was on alert mode. On that day, the Chief Secretary shot off two advisory letters, the first of which was addressed to his counterparts in all states bordering UP. In the first letter, the Chief Secretary requested other states to ensure that food and accommodation were arranged for migrants from UP living there.

The state, the most populous in the country, was alarmed that people in large numbers were entering its territory from other states in large numbers. In the second letter, the Chief Secretary instructed all police chiefs and District Magistrates of districts bordering other states to ensure that people stay put wherever they were. The migration of workers and labourers from major urban centres towards their native places was a violation of the lockdown in the eyes of the state.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath also issued an appeal to native workers of UP working in different states to remain at their place of livelihood during the lockdown. Facing starvation, joblessness, and uncertainty, the migrant workers did not pay heed to the government. They started fleeing big urban centres including Delhi and Mumbai to return to their native places.

The journey proved to be perilous for many. But these desperate migrant workers had little option or assurance to bank on.

Photo: Omar Rashid

Given the deluge of migrant workers entering UP, many of them on foot, the UP State Road Transport Corporation started deploying buses to transport people to their destination. In just the first three days of the lockdown, an estimated 1 lakh persons had already entered UP from other states.

Over the two waves of Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, 40 lakh migrant workers would return to the state. As a reporter based in UP then, I got the opportunity to meet and interact with some of these migrant workers as they tried to escape the lockdown. Here, I remember some of them.

March 28

The usually-bustling old market of Aminabad in the heart of Lucknow was deserted.

The only sign of life I came across for a while were two women walking in my direction. They were holding two ends of a bag. Then, there were two men pushing a third on a wheel-chair.

This was followed by three men, probably friends, walking at a furious pace. All three were carrying backpacks. A little ahead, the palatial Charbagh station looked neat in its white and red hues under the spotless blue sky.

I crossed a row of mobile DJ vans that were parked on one side of the road. Soon, I was at the Qaiserbagh bus station, which connects the state capital to Purvanchal -- Eastern Uttar Pradesh. There were confused faces all around.

They carried heavy bags and jholas. Most had their faces covered with handkerchiefs or gamchas. But their eyes betrayed their anxiety and distress.

All they wanted was to reach home -- not the shanties in big cities they survive in, but the dwellings in their villages where they felt they would be safer. And most importantly, they did not want to starve to death or succumb to a new illness that was creating widespread panic in the urbanscape. They craved social support -- something they were not assured of in the cities.

Photo: Omar Rashid

I came across Ramu Rawat and his friends.

The small group, originally from Rae Bareli, worked in Ghaziabad. They had walked over 100 kms before reaching a highway where a truck gave them a lift. Ramu doesn't remember where the truck picked them up.

It didn't matter to him. The truck dropped them on the outskirts of Lucknow. They then walked a few more kilometres to reach Qaiserbagh bus station but were told that the bus to Rae Bareli would leave from Charbagh bus station, two kilometres away.

The ordeal was still better than facing possible starvation in Ghaziabad, felt Ramu. "Na rehne ka jugaad. Na khane ka jugaad, sarkar ne kuch nahi diya (No means to stay or eat, the government did not do anything)," he told me.

A little ahead, another group of young men, with heavy backpacks, were walking in a line towards the Qaiserbagh bus station. One of them had wrapped a "I Love Nepal" cloth flag around his face as a mask. Neeraj Yadav, a mason, was among them.

He had arrived in Lucknow from Lakhimpur Kheri, which is in the Terai region bordering Nepal, just two weeks back to work at a site near the airport. But following the lockdown, the contractor who had employed Neeraj and his friends shut business. The workers were stranded without food or work.

"Do din ho gaye khana nahi mila abhi (we have not got proper food for two days)," exclaimed Neeraj, who had walked 20 kms to reach the bus station. Kind locals and police had been offering biscuits, water, and light snacks to these migrants. Confusion prevailed at the bus stations.

People didn't know where they would get their buses from. Since public transportation was shut, landing at the wrong bus station meant they had to walk back to the right one. At the Qaiserbagh bus station, bags were strewn on the ground as the migrant workers tried to figure out their transportation.

Young Prem Sharma couldn't wait to go back to Gonda. He worked in Lucknow as a hawker. He wore a black mask but it only covered his mouth.

He was disenchanted. "Where will I stay here without money," he asked me when I pointed out to him that both Adityanath and Modi had appealed everyone to stay home. In retrospect, I think that many like Neeraj Yadav and Prem Sharma, though victims of a sudden, callous, and unplanned official decision, were luckier than many migrant workers, who in addition to this ordeal also faced humiliation and, in some cases, physical harm. Many perished on the way.

Some in gruesome accidents. In Bareilly, migrant labourers who were returning to their homes from other cities were forced by the administration to take a mass open-air bath with a disinfectant before they were allowed entry into the district. Could the officials do that to the rich and privileged class?

This sort of humiliation was only reserved for the poor, the voiceless masses whose worth is accounted for only through the cheap labour their limbs provide us. The officials in Bareilly used a hose pipe to spray sodium hypochlorite, a disinfectant commonly used as bleach to remove stains, on the migrants as they were made to squat on the road near a checkpoint. In another incident a couple of days later, a Haryana Roadways bus driver, Khurshid Ahmed, who was asked to drop migrants returning home to their destination, was thrashed by the UP Police on the outskirts of Lucknow for merely asking directions.

He had picked up passengers from Ghaziabad and was headed to Gorakhpur. On April 2, when I spoke to him, he threatened to take legal action against the erring policemen. "It's the fourth day and I still have blue marks and pain. They beat me up so badly," he said.

March 29

Every migrant worker I met on the way, or at bus stations, had a different ordeal to share, but all tales were intertwined with state apathy, desperation, and uncertainty.

Each story waited to be unveiled. But I had little time. Reporting during such frantic occasions does not leave you space to connect deeply with characters you encounter on the road.

I say characters because the story was written and executed by those in power. These migrant workers were left to fend for themselves. And in that given space and time, those few seconds or minutes on the street, only a slice of that person's life can be captured and absorbed.

Those moments of distress, one they would remember for the rest of their lives. On March 29, migrant workers returning from Delhi and other cities of UP continued to arrive in Lucknow. However, for many, the journey became even more stressful due to last-minute change in boarding stations, mismanagement, and miscommunication between arms of the State.

They had to scamper from one bus station to another in search of transportation. At the Qaiserbagh bus station, desperate migrant workers were being chased away by police who cruelly asked them to walk to the outskirts of the city or even to their destination, hundreds of kms away, in Purvanchal. Virender Kumar, a wallpaper-maker, arrived in Lucknow along with 11 associates after a tedious journey from the Anand Vihar terminus in Delhi.

After boarding a UP Roadways bus in Delhi, Virendra was dropped near Hathras from where he boarded a truck. The bus conductor charged them Rs 300 per head instead of the Rs 155 negotiated and also made them sit on the roof of the vehicle. After walking for another 15-20 minutes, Virendra and his associates found a truck which dropped them at a non-descript location.

From there, they had to hike 35-40 kms in the night to reach a highway. They boarded another truck towards the outskirts of Lucknow. "We were packed in the truck like cattle fodder," he told me.

They had to pay another Rs 3,000 to an SUV-driver to drop them at Qaiserbagh.

Photo: Omar Rashid

Ankita Singh and her family members were sitting on a pavement outside the Qaiserbagh police station. With no means of transportation, they had to wait for several hours as all the buses had already left in the morning. Police chased them away from the bus station.

"Now, where do I take these two little children and sit in the sun," asked Ankita, a baby tightly latched on to her. Her husband worked in a plywood factory in Kanpur and they were on their way to Hardoi, their home. The family spent several hours on the pavement before deciding to walk around 10 kms to the Dubagga market where police helped them board a supply truck later in the day.

After arriving in their native places, migrants were kept inside quarantine centres in rural areas as per preventive protocol. But authorities were struggling to contain these people inside these centres, mostly primary schools or other utility buildings. In Sultanpur, 26 persons out of 115 kept in a quarantine centre in Faridipur village in Gosaiganj escaped from the second floor after getting down with the help of a cloth rope at night on March 31.

All 26 were soon traced and arrested. There were several such incidents across the state in the month of April.

May 5

I was back in Charbagh but this time at the railway station. It was 6:10 pm.

Around 1,200 passengers had just deboarded from a special Shramik Express arriving from Vadodara in Gujarat. Manfur Nishad and his two sons were among those who made the 1,126 km journey. There was relief on their faces.

They were finally back in their home state. But actual home, Kalpi town, was still far away. After scanning through a labyrinth of parked state-run buses parked outside the railway station, Manfur was disappointed to know that there was no direct bus to take him to his village.

The bus would drop him in Jalaun, 45 west of his destination. "If they drop me in Jalaun, I will be stranded. I don't have a single penny in my pocket to pay for any fare," said Nishad, desperately calling his relatives on phone for guidance.

At Charbagh, the migrants were immediately made to queue up at the screening booths for inspection. They were then sorted for boarding state buses to their native districts. The entire time they were asked to maintain physical distance.

Kallu Nishad of Kanpur faced a peculiar situation. He lost his Aadhaar card during the journey and was frantically approaching officials for help. He heaved a sigh of relief when he was told that the 'medical certificate' issued to him during quarantine in Narmada would serve as his identification proof.

May 7

Seven hundred kms is the distance Lalaram and his family attempted to cover as they set out on bicycles towards home in Mungeli in Chhattisgarh from Lucknow.

He took along his wife, four-year-old daughter, his father, and other relatives. The stranded migrant workers from Chhattisgarh had run out of patience and just wanted to go home. A construction worker living in a slum, Lalaram had been out of work since the lockdown began.

The occasional ration kits and food packets he received from NGOs were not enough for his family. "We get puris. How long will we survive on puris?

We also need money for our expenses," he told me. The journey was precarious but they reached home safe, I later found out. Just a day earlier, a migrant couple from Behmetara district, also in Chhattisgarh, living in a slum in Jankipuram area of Lucknow, Krishna and Pramila, who had set out on foot towards home, were crushed to death by a vehicle on a road on the outskirts.

Their two little children survived but were seriously injured. Not only were residents of UP stuck outside, migrants of other states like Chhattisgarh were also waiting to get back home. A migrant worker who was cycling back home to his village in Bihar from Delhi died after being hit by a speeding car in Lucknow.

Sagheer Ansari, 26, was cycling to his home in East Champaran along with seven colleagues when the accident took place. Sagheer, who worked as a tailor in Delhi, started cycling back home along with his colleagues on May 5. The group sat on a divider on the Shaheed Path, a major road on the outskirts of Lucknow, to eat as they were hungry.

They were eating chura --flattened rice-- when a car rammed into Sagheer. He had a wife and three little kids.

May 11

Satish Kumar stood within the walls of the Chadra government primary school in Pisawan in Sitapur district. The school had been converted into a temporary quarantine centre for migrants before they were allowed to enter their homes.

Satish was working as a farm labourer in Haryana when he was forced to head home. He reached Sitapur on May 11, after much struggle. Like many others at the quarantine centre, he was sceptical of the government's announcement that employment opportunities would be provided to migrant workers who returned.

Photo: Omar Rashid

In Haryana, Satish earned Rs 360-500 daily.

In his village, if he worked under the rural employment guarantee scheme, he was likely to earn relatively less. At the quarantine centre, a large notebook detailed names, addresses, phone numbers, and date of arrival of the migrants. However, the columns under educational qualification, skills, and experience in the diary had not been filled for days.

Most under quarantine there were labourers. In another corner of Sitapur district, Mukesh Kumar of Jamuniya village, was digging a pond under the rural employment guarantee scheme. A remarkable shift from his job in Rudrapur in Uttarakhand where he packed bags in a company.

Now he, like thousands of others, found himself with a shovel. The intermediate-pass migrant worker was not used to such gruelling labour. "But there is no other option right now," he reasoned. In Uttarakhand, Mukesh took home a fixed monthly salary of Rs 9,000 but the lockdown forced the unit to shut.

His employer stopped paying him but offered to provide him ration. It was proving too cumbersome amid restrictions so he decided to head back home. While the journey back home from the big cities was arduous enough, what bothered migrants more was the uncertain financial future.

When would the lockdown end? When would they get back to work? Would things be the same again?

Photo: Omar Rashid

"Chhaya wala admi dhoop mein ajaye, toh dikkat toh hoti hai (A man used to working in the shade will feel uncomfortable under the sun)," Nizamuddin, a tailor who was compelled to do MNREGA work, told me about the difficulties faced by him.

Three years later, most of these migrant workers are back trying to make a living in the cities which left them to fend for themselves during the lockdown. The undignified treatment, apathy, and callousness towards their lives, all was forgiven as the 2022 UP Assembly election results demonstrated. But forgotten?

Maybe not yet.