![]() “Please, please, I just want to go home,” he said, looking downtrodden and dishevelled outside the shelter.Īccording to experts, the lockdown will need to last for much longer than the proposed 21 days if it is to prove effective. Now he is living in a shelter in West Delhi, which provides him with simple meals of dal, rice and tea. After Modi’s announcement, he was evicted and then attempted to walk the 600 miles back to Bihar – but the border was shut so he had to turn back. The authorities swiftly put a stop to that by closing all state borders, leaving thousands stranded.Īmong them was Lal Sahab Kumar, 20, from a small village in Bihar, who had come to Delhi to earn 300 rupees (£3.20) a day as a mason. This prompted a wave of mass migration across India unlike anything seen since partition, as people began walking for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles. Most critics say Modi’s 21-day lockdown was too sudden – people were only given four hours’ notice and millions had no time to get back to their villages before transport and work shut down. Suddenly I have turned homeless and been made a beggar.” Then I sold my mobile phone to a vegetable seller to be able to sustain myself for a few more days. He made a temporary home in a small space on the floor of the railway station and still dresses as smartly as he can every morning, but said things were getting harder: “I bought food and used up all my savings in the first two or three days of the lockdown. Manoranjan Ghosh, who worked – and slept – in a roadside tea shop in Kolkata, is another of the new homeless. “I need to work daily to support my family of four people, so for the first time in my life I have taken to begging. “No trains are running and so I am completely jobless,” he said. Her son, Raja Khan, also now lives on the streets with his three children after his work as a railway porter dried up.Įvery day since the lockdown was declared, Khan has been pushing his mother as much as 25 miles a day in her wheelchair in an attempt to find food for her and his children. ![]() The consequences for India, where tens of millions live in poverty, work thousands of miles from home, often living where they work, have been cataclysmic.įor those like Jan, who do not have a home, the edict to stay indoors and maintain social distance for 21 days has been particularly cruel. When prime minister Narendra Modi announced almost two weeks ago that India’s entire population of 1.3bn people would be under lockdown for at least three weeks to prevent the spread of coronavirus, it was the largest restriction of movement the world had ever seen. ![]() “They are all at home because of the lockdown they don’t have any job and so they cannot help me any more.” “For the past week, none of these people who usually help me have come in sight,” she said, her voice cracking with sadness. ![]()
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