No money, no food and 2,000km from home: a journey facing millions in India’s migrant worker humanitarian crisis
- Across India, millions of migrant workers, scarred by a lockdown that has left them jobless, hungry and penniless, are struggling to return home
- Many face journeys 2,000km long, with as little as US$6 in their pockets and sometimes with babies in tow
Yadav, a labourer in a gas utility company, is looking for ways to return to his hometown, 2,000km east in the state of Bihar.
He has been waiting to do so for two months. At first, he was waiting for India’s lockdown, implemented in mid-March and now scheduled to last until May 31, to be lifted. Things had looked up, briefly, when the Mumbai police asked migrant workers like him to fill in forms to be repatriated, but then he heard nothing more.
In the three days before This Week in Asia spoke to him, Yadav was waiting for food. Out of money after his employers stopped paying him due to the lockdown, he lived on khichdi, a porridge made of rice and lentils, handed out by a community kitchen. When the kitchen closed, Yadav asked neighbours if he could borrow money to buy fuel to cook the rice grains he had left. They turned him down.
“After three nights of sleeping on an empty stomach, I could not take it any more,” he says, the whites of his eyes yellow.
On Thursday morning, he began walking to the highway, taking only a half-filled small gunny sack. After walking more than 25km in eight hours, he stopped.
