With businesses shut down, tens of thousands of people flooded train stations across India to return to their villages. Some set off on foot to face journeys of hundreds of kilometres. In the battle against the pandemic, even railway carriages are being converted into isolation wards.
From 25 March, India too entered lockdown, with over a billion people confined to their homes and all activities halted for twenty-one days in order to contain the spread of the new coronavirus. It was a difficult decision, taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and one that Congress president Rahul Gandhi partially challenged, describing the shutdown as "potentially devastating" because "the number of poor people in India who survive on daily earnings is too large to justify unilaterally halting every kind of economic activity".
"The sudden and complete shutdown has caused panic and confusion, prompting a very high number of migrant workers to move in order to return to their homes. This phenomenon will considerably amplify the harmful consequences of the virus's spread," Gandhi warned.
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At the end of March, the Indian Council of Medical Research (Indian Council of Medical Research, Icmr) declared that there was no cause for alarm because India had not yet entered the community transmission phase of the virus. On 6 April, confirmed cases of Covid-19 stood at 3,370, while the total death toll had risen to 77. The government flatly denied rumours that had been circulating about a possible extension of the shutdown beyond the three weeks originally planned.
Two days after the lockdown was announced, with the Anand Vihar railway terminal in New Delhi completely packed, the government of the Uttar Pradesh region announced the arrival of a further thousand buses to transport workers, while the Delhi administration promised another hundred for the mass of poor people who had set off along roadsides carrying children in their arms, their few personal belongings balanced on their heads, and hundreds of kilometres ahead of them, because the price of private bus tickets had nearly doubled.
The confusion is such that deeply troubling incidents are coming to light, such as the one that occurred in the city of Bareilly, in Uttar Pradesh: a group of migrants, who had been told to sit down with the promise that a bus was on its way, were sprayed with chemical disinfectant using a pump.
Among those leaving the cities are tea sellers, fruit and vegetable vendors, men who cook sabji and chapati from a wooden cart or on the ground — as if even in total destitution, there is always a tomorrow. They are above all the people who inhabit the pavements of chaotic streets, filling them with vivid colours, intense aromas and gazes that beg for attention, but also the casual workers of small and large businesses that have pulled down their shutters and evicted them from the rooms they had made available to them.
A 39-year-old man died of exhaustion after walking two hundred kilometres from Delhi, where he had been making restaurant deliveries, to the city of Agra. The authorities subsequently called in army vehicles to try to bring as many people as possible to safety. Bihar, the country's poorest eastern state, recorded the entry of around 10,000 migrants at its border; they were directed to reception camps set up in various public buildings — such as schools and colleges — to provide accommodation, food and medical assistance.
In the south, in Tamil Nadu, the Greater Chennai Corporation managed to prevent an exodus of the enormous number of workers in the orbit of India's Silicon Valley by proactively setting up 51 reception camps — eight of them reserved for women — who immediately got to work, sewing three thousand masks in just a few days to distribute to the residents of the centres.
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The central government was engulfed by widespread outrage following numerous accounts — corroborated by photographs and videos — of humiliating and violent conduct carried out in some cities by police officers.
The Times of India reported the death, in the city of Pune, of an ambulance driver as a result of a severe beating; the suspicion had been that he was illegally transporting additional passengers in the vehicle. The same newspaper published the testimony of the family of a 32-year-old man from West Bengal who was beaten to death for going out to buy milk. Several opposition members appealed to Modi, calling on him to put an immediate stop to such actions. The Prime Minister's response was one of apology, but without any retraction: "I am sorry for these harsh measures that have caused hardship," the premier said. "I know that some people will now be angry with me, but they are necessary to win this battle."
In recent days the Delhi government has set up new reception centres for homeless people and migrant workers stranded in the city and left without accommodation following factory closures. In the Gujarat region, seventy railway carriages have been converted into isolation wards for those who test positive for Covid-19. They will be equipped with basic medical devices and will house patients with milder symptoms. Other regional networks are also working in this direction.