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The labouring population in general and the migrant workers / daily wage earners in particular are extremely vulnerable to the impact of the Coronavirus induced lockdown in the country. This section of the population has been rendered vulnerable due to their total dependence on daily wage earnings and meagre savings.

The lockdown means a loss of livelihood and therefore they are left with no source of income in order to be able to sustain themselves. Not only in India but if one were to look at their situation on a global level too, they are over represented among the homeless population all over the world.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had devastating consequences for the most vulnerable sections of the population and has indeed brought about a humanitarian crisis around the world. Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are desperately trying to return to their hometowns and are battling with hunger and scorching heat and somehow they wanted to get back to where they belong.

When the cities and urban centres have abandoned them and they are left to struggle for survival, even in their consciousness a place called home seems to be a refuge where they not only feel emotional security but even psychological comfort.

Many countries are doing their best to combat this virus but still, not everyone in the world is lucky enough to afford staying or working from home. Despite the health risks that haunt them, they are compelled to go out and work to sustain themselves and their families. These migrant workers toil day and night to keep our cities functioning and as the lockdown was announced, they were compelled to walk day and night with little food and no rest for hundreds of kilometres in sheer desperation.

While taking the intensive journeys home, migrant workers were sprayed with bleach in a bid by state authorities for disinfecting; them, they were kept in jail like isolation centres on state borders before they could be allowed to go home and even once they did reach their native villages, they received suspicion and resistance from other villagers as they feared that these outsiders could have brought the disease with them.

After arriving to their villages, some have been forced to sleep on trees because of overcrowded family homes and since many of them dont have personal rooms in their houses, they had no other ways to keep them isolated from rest of the family. The scenario was continuously worsening as the government had promised them two meals a day but the queues were tremendously long and food fell insufficient. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a financial package of 1.7 lakh crore aimed at helping the poor but given the widespread and extensive nature of the crisis, even this amount seemed insufficient.

The protocol of social distancing is not viable for migrant workers and daily wage earners because they do not have access to the basic necessities of life and cannot afford to sustain themselves even for a few days if they dont go to work in the outside world. Even though there may be risks to their lives, they are forced to venture outside.

They are not in a position to follow such advice and follow guidelines that speak of social distancing or avoiding crowded places. If they do not access basic necessities of life then how can they be expected to follow these guidelines and advices?

Measures like hand washing are important for protecting human and ensuring health during the coronavirus outbreak but migrant workers often do not have sanitation services and face a lack of basic hand washing facilities. These migrant workers and daily wage earners live in congested places where living conditions are no better.

In this situation maintaining physical distancing, avoiding crowded places or maintaining personal hygiene seem like impractical propositions that the section of the population is finding impossible to follow. The government should arrange transportation for all vulnerable, mobile medical facilities for the migrant workers hygiene, food and water. Whenever economic crises takes place in the country, it is the migrant worker who faces the biggest loss because of their vulnerable status. The concept of crisis as context becomes relevant in this scenario and is also connected toWalter Benjamins rejoinder to traditional Marxism in his essay The Concept of History.

Benjamins point is that the present of the oppressed is never an exception that is disconnected from his social past.

Analogously, the current state of exception facing the migrant workers in India is barely an exception. Rather, it is temporally connected to forming a tradition of multiple and ever deepening fractures of lived spaces, histories, and livelihoods in their everyday existence.

Many questions need to be answered and several more are incessantly arising .What about the migrants amid the Covid -19 outbreak? What are the steps and initiatives taken by the government to cover the threats brought forward by the novel coronavirus? What are the steps that have been initiated related to managing the health situation of migrant workers and daily wage earners? Everyday this vulnerable section of the population is facing poverty, hunger and deprivation but still continues to make efforts to live in this world with dignity. But will they be able to survive?

From giving birth while walking for hundreds of kilometres on alienating highways to succumbing to fatal road accidents that claimed the lives of several migrant workers, the apathy of the class is visible once again as the pandemic engulfs all of us.

The government should pay heed and attention to the migrant crisis and look for better ways to help the migrant workers to overcome their sufferings and hardships.

Nusrat Firdos is a Research Scholar at the Department of Sociology, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligrah.

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India's Migrant Crisis Highlights the Cleavages of Institutional Apathy and Policy Neglect in the Country - The New Leam

SANTIAGO Six months ago, Venezuelan emergency doctor Norelis Portal was laid off from Chile's public health service because she had not Received the green light from the country's stringent medical certification system.

Today, she is one of thousands of migrant health workers recruited to the frontlines of its fight against the new coronavirus.

Portal, 52, and her team visit COVID-19 sufferers at home and in state isolation units in some of Santiago's most crowded, poor and infected areas to conduct tests and assess symptoms, keeping the burden off near-saturated hospitals.

"The last 20 years in Venezuela taught my generation how to handle crises," Portal told Reuters.

Portal migrated to Chile in 2017 with experience in emergency and respiratory care. Her transformation from outsider to the frontlines of Chile's battle against coronavirus holds up a mirror to the country's uneasy response to wave of migration, largely from crisis-hit Venezuela, that has grown fivefold in 30 years.

Center-right President Sebastian Pinera made migration a key issue of his 2017 election campaign, pledging to tighten laws and crack down on foreigner-driven crime. Today, his government is appealing for migrant professionals' help.

Chile is nearing the peak of its coronavirus outbreak, with a caseload among the worst per capita in the world and deaths predicted to follow in the coming months.There are a total 284,541 cases and 5,920 fatalities.

Medical workers are exhausted and falling victim to the virus, and specialists are in short supply. So Chile has turned to retired doctors, student nurses and imported talent.

Unpublished figures obtained by Reuters show almost 3,000 public health service workers are off sick with coronavirus, but 13,849 more have been signed up, including more than 600 doctors, more than half of them foreign nationals.

Many countries have a large migrant health workforce, but in Chile many struggle to gain work certification because of rigorous and expensive local checks. Health workers from Venezuela,Colombia and Cuba often end up asUber drivers, petrol pump attendants or waiters.

GRATEFUL

Many migrant health workers are specialists in areas which Chile's public sector has historically lacked and now desperately needs to keep patients alive, the director of the country's civil service said in an interview.

Alejandro Weber said foreign doctors brought "knowledge, experience but also the desire to lend their skills to the state," pointing to a new "social pact" for the multicultural nation.

An emergency law last deployed by Chile's government after the 2010 earthquake allows it to recruit thousands more health workers.

Many have been drafted from the private sector but a large number are foreign medics for whom the usual stringent checks have been suspended.

Juan Carlos Riera, president of the Chilean Association of Foreign Medics, said the move came as a huge relief for medics to be able to use skills honed over years.

"Many doctors have told me they would prefer to expose themselves to the virus than to continue having no income or a minimal one that's impossible to live on," he said.

Dr. Jesus Valera Macho, 36, a Venezuelan trauma surgeon who was working as a cleaner before joining Portal's team in March, said taking on the coronavirus was the least he could do.

"We're not Chilean but this country gave us the chance to restart our lives," he said. "It's we who are grateful."

I SERVE MY COUNTRY

The campaign led by the civil service, I Serve My Country in an Emergency, drew 13,000 applicants, with 99% indicating immediate availability and 70% willing to be transferred anywhere in the country. They included 1,000 foreign medics, many of them experienced specialists.

Medical workers say the help cannot come soon enough. Carlos Romero, head of intensive care at the University of Chile's clinical hospital, said he sometimes debated if he had time to sleep or eat.

"There are six of us overseeing 100 critical care beds, that will soon rise to 140," he said.

Unions have cautioned against relying on unchecked resources. Dr. Patricio Meza, of Chile's College of Doctors, said not fully certified should not work unsupervised.

"The most important thing is to safeguard patients' safety," he said.

A nurse at a central Santiago hospital, who withheld her name because she was not authorized to speak to the media, said the gains outweighed the risks.

"It's better to have more people, someone who can alert you to a problem with a patient, than that they are left alone and something happens before you realize it," she said.

Portal said her generation was accustomed to facing crises head on. Her father locked her indoors during a violent uprising when she was 22, but she escaped through the window to help treat the injured in her local hospital.

"I feel trepidation but no fear anymore," she said. "As a doctor you can't do anything but act. This is a moment. It will be tough but it is temporary. It will end."

(Reporting by Aislinn Laing; Additional reporting Natalia Ramos; Editing by Richard Chang)

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Chile's Migrant Medics Move to Frontlines in Pandemic Battle - The New York Times

CALW, GERMANY As Germany emerged from its coronavirus lockdown in May, police commandos pulled up outside a rural property owned by a sergeant major in the special forces, the countrys most highly trained and secretive unit.

They brought a digger.

The sergeant majors nickname was Little Sheep. He was suspected of being a neo-Nazi. Buried in the garden, police found 4 pounds of PETN plastic explosives, a detonator, a fuse, an AK-47, a silencer, two knives, a crossbow and thousands of rounds of ammunition much of it believed to have been stolen from the German military.

They also found an SS songbook, 14 editions of a magazine for former members of the Waffen SS and a host of other Nazi memorabilia.

Germany has a problem. For years, politicians and security chiefs rejected the notion of any far-right infiltration of the security services, speaking only of individual cases. The idea of networks was dismissed. The superiors of those exposed as extremists were protected. Guns and ammunition disappeared from military stockpiles.

The government is now waking up. Cases of far-right extremists in the military and police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly. The nations top intelligence officials and senior military commanders are moving to confront a problem that has become too dangerous to ignore.

The problem has deepened with the emergence of the Alternative for Germany Party, or AfD, which legitimized a far-right ideology that used the arrival of more than 1 million migrants in 2015 and more recently the coronavirus pandemic to engender a sense of crisis.

Most concerning to authorities is that the extremists appear to be concentrated in the military unit that is supposed to be the most elite and dedicated to the German state, the special forces, known by their German acronym, the KSK.

This week, Germanys defense minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, took the drastic step of disbanding a fighting company in the KSK considered infested with extremists. Little Sheep, whom investigators have identified only as Philipp Sch., was a member.

Germanys military counterintelligence agency is now investigating more than 600 soldiers for far-right extremism, out of 184,000 in the military. Some 20 of them are in the KSK, a proportion that is five times higher than in other units.

But German authorities are concerned that the problem may be far larger and that other security institutions have been infiltrated as well. Over the past 13 months, far-right terrorists have assassinated a politician, attacked a synagogue and shot dead nine immigrants and German descendants of immigrants.

Thomas Haldenwang, president of Germanys domestic intelligence agency, has identified far-right extremism and terrorism as the biggest danger to German democracy today.

In interviews conducted over the course of the year with military and intelligence officials, as well as avowed far-right members themselves, they described nationwide networks of current and former soldiers and police officers with ties to the far right.

In many cases, soldiers have used the networks to prepare for when they predict Germanys democratic order will collapse. They call it Day X. Officials worry it is really a pretext for inciting terrorist acts, or worse, a putsch.

Ties, officials said, sometimes reach deep into old neo-Nazi networks and the more polished intellectual scene of the so-called New Right. Extremists are hoarding weapons, maintaining safe houses and in some cases keeping lists of political enemies.

But investigating the problem is itself fraught: Even the military counterintelligence agency, charged with monitoring extremism inside the armed forces, may be infiltrated.

A high-ranking investigator in the extremism unit was suspended in June after sharing confidential material from the May raid with a contact in the KSK, who in turn passed it on to at least eight other soldiers, tipping them off that the agency might turn its attention to them next.

If the very people who are meant to protect our democracy are plotting against it, we have a big problem, said Stephan Kramer, president of the domestic intelligence agency in the state of Thuringia. How do you find them? What we are dealing with is an enemy within.

The KSK are Germanys answer to the Navy SEALs. But these days their commander, Gen. Markus Kreitmayr, who has done tours in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, is a man divided between his loyalty to them and recognizing that he has a serious problem. I cant explain why there are allegedly so many cases of far-right extremism in the military, he said. The KSK is clearly more affected than others; that appears to be a fact.

For decades, Germany has tried to forge a force that represented a democratic society and its values. But in 2011 it abolished conscription and moved to a volunteer force. As a result, the military increasingly reflects not the broad society but a narrower slice of it.

Kreitmayr said that a big percentage of his soldiers are eastern Germans, a region where the AfD does disproportionately well. Roughly half the men on the list of KSK members suspected of being far-right extremists are also from the east, he added.

Officials talk of a perceptible shift in values among new recruits. In conversations, the soldiers themselves said that if there was a tipping point in the unit, it came with the migrant crisis of 2015.

As hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers from Syria and Afghanistan were making their way to Germany, the mood on the base was anxious, they recalled.

We are soldiers who are charged with defending this country, and then they just opened the borders no control, one officer recalled. We were at the limit.

It was in this atmosphere that a KSK soldier from eastern Germany, set up a Telegram chat network for soldiers, police officers and others united in their belief that the migrants would destroy the country.

His name was Andr Schmitt.

Schmitt left active service last September after stolen training grenades were found at a building belonging to his parents. But, he said, he still has his network: special forces, intelligence, business executives, Freemasons.

Several former members of his chats are now under investigation for plotting terrorism. Some were ordering body bags. One faces trial.

Schmitts situation is more complex. He acknowledged serving as an informer on the KSK for the military counterintelligence agency in mid-2017, when he met regularly with a liaison officer.

This week, the domestic intelligence agency announced that it was placing his current network, Uniter, under surveillance.

Authorities first stumbled onto his chats in 2017 while investigating a soldier in the network who was suspected of organizing a terror plot.

Investigators are now looking into whether the chats and Uniter were the early skeleton of a nationwide far-right network that has infiltrated state institutions.

Initially, Schmitt and other members said, the chats were about sharing information, much of it about the supposed threats posed by migrants.

Soon the chats morphed from sharing information to preparing for Day X. Chat members met in person, worked out what provisions and weapons to stockpile and where to keep safe houses. They practiced how to recognize each other, using military code, at pickup points where members could gather on Day X.

Schmitt, who denies planning for Day X, is still convinced that it will come. We know, thanks to our sources in the banks and in the intelligence services, that at the latest, by the end of September, the big economic crash will come, he said. People will take to the street.

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Germany faces the 'enemy within,' far-right extremists within the military - Minneapolis Star Tribune

With the UP Assembly elections less than two years away, the Congress, led by Priyanka Gandhi, is for the first time in many decades beginning to show a sense of political purpose and urgency.

After the Centre asked the UP Congress in charge to vacate her bungalow in Lutyens Delhi, news reports suggest she has decided to shift to Lucknow, perhaps to be in the thick of things. Even before this incident,Priyanka Gandhi has been a trending topic for months in the state.

She has had a spat with Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati on social media. In the context of the migrant crisis, Mayawati accused the Congress of doing little for the development of the weaker sections. In an obvious reference to Mayawati, Priyanka Gandhi hit back by saying some opposition leaders in UP are acting like spokespersons of the BJP.

Mass politics

Most importantly, what currently separates the Congress from other opposition parties is that the activists of the former have taken to the streets several times to agitate and confront the UP police.

Several of the Congresss local level activists, led by its state president Ajay Kumar Lallu, have been arrested. Lallu was arrested earlier when he was protesting against the UP polices decision to deny entry to buses provided by Priyanka Gandhi for migrant workers who were walking home. Earlier this week, he was arrested while protesting the arrest of Shanawaz Alam, head of the minority cell of the UP Congress.

All this is happening at a time when the lockdown is yet to be fully lifted and mandatory social distancing norms are still in place.

Can, therefore, the Congress revive its political fortunes in UP during the 2022 assembly elections? And what should be its strategy if it has to emerge as a serious electoral force in the state?

Ajay Kumar Lallu and Priyanka Gandhi. Photo: Facebook

Congress in UP: past and present

Before going further, it will be useful to briefly map the recent political trajectory of the Congress in UP and locate it in relation to other parties it will be up against.

The Congress was decimated after the Mandal and kamandal agitations in the late 1980s. Since then, the engine of UP politics has been driven by the identity politics of caste (OBCs-Dalits) and community (Hindu-Muslim). Until the 1980s, the Congresss electoral base comprised of a social coalition of Dalits-Muslims-Brahmins. This vote base shifted to the BSP and Samajwadi Party (SP), and since then the Congress has never been able to regain its political foothold in UP.

The BJP, riding on Narendra Modis popularity, Hindu-Muslim polarisation and aggressive nationalism, emerged as the top player post the 2014 Lok Sabha elections when it won 71 Lok Sabha seats. Three years later, in 2017 it won a landslide victory in the UP assembly elections. And it scored a knock-out victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Since then, CM Yogi Adityanath has run the state administration in a highly personalised manner, much like the government at the Centre.

The lockdown has created immense distress. Many have lost their jobs and also face mental and physical trauma. The poor, who are mostly Dalits, OBCs and Muslims, are hardest hit. Lakhs have left cities and have returned to their villages across the state.

In UP, the Congress is the only party that has been highlighting the misery of the migrants. Can it carry this momentum all the way to the 2022 assembly elections? The Congresss leadership must acknowledge that it is handicapped on two fronts that are essential for elez|What Is the Way Forward for Priyanka Gandhi and the Congress in Up?toral success in India. One, it lacks a social coalition of caste and communities that translate into votes and two, its party organisation is broken and non-existent in most districts of UP.

The way forward

Thus the Congress needs to make moves that will help it overcome the fundamental organisational and social coalition challenges that it faces.

First, Priyanka Gandhi must lead from the front and the Congress should declare her as the chief ministerial candidate sooner rather than later. In the last few months, the manner in which Yogi Adityanath has focussed his attack on Priyanka Gandhi, a perception has been created that the Congress is the main opposition party in the state.

Chief Minister Adityanath. Photo: Reuters/Jitendra Prakash

If Priyanka Gandhi does relocate to Lucknow, it will create further unease for the BJP. Besides, such a move will send a message to the electorate at large and also instil much-required energy and confidence in the moribund Congress cadre.

Second, the Congress must inspire its cadre to take to the streets, mobilise and campaign to the masses. It needs to expose the Yogi Adityanaths crumbling administration and his mishandling of the law and order and governance. It cannot simply depend on large sections of compliant vernacular media, social media and occasional press conferences. The Congress will never be able to match the resources of the BJP and its influence in the media. It must raise the pitch of agitational politics, initiated by local leaders like Lallu. But it will have to be Priyanka Gandhi who leads from the front.

Third, assembly polls are two years away. That is still a lot of time to identify and build local level party organisation of cadres and leaders who come from Dalit, backward and minority communities. Lakhs of labourers who have returned to the villages of UP come from this social background. Their distress is only going to get exaggerated in the coming months and years. They will get more restless and angry. Many of these people formed the political base of Akhilesh and Mayawati, the former is in a stupor and the later is clearly trying to patch up with the BJP. That has created a political vacuum, ideal for the Congress to capitalise upon.

Fourth, the Congresss strategy for the 2022 assembly polls should be realistic and it must work with a modest plan. It got just about 6.3% of the votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha and 2017 assembly elections. As the old clich goes, politics in India is full of surprises, but as things stand today, the Congress should not have ambitions of forming a government in the state on its own. It should try and set itself achievable targets of increasing its vote share to 20% and target a high two-digit tally of seats. That will allow it to regain its foothold in UP politics and also create much-needed momentum to have a decisive impact in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Finally, the BJPs most potent political asset is polarisation and nationalism. The BJP would like the Congress to bat on a pitch that suits the googlies of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), Ayodhya, Kashmir and Pakistan. The Congress must prepare its own track where it can challenge the BJP with bouncers of a crumbling economy, unemployment, lawlessness and the collapse of public infrastructure in UP. That is an uphill task, but entirely possible.

Jamal Kidwai is the founder of social enterprise Baragaon Weaves. He tweets @kidwaijamal.

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What's the Way Forward for Priyanka Gandhi and Congress in UP? - The Wire

Shramik trains saw migrant workers queue up at Chennai Central without proper information on schedule. Pic: Arokya Inian

As an extended lockdown was announced by the center and state to curtail the spread of COVID-19, little did I imagine that we would be witness to a humanitarian crisis of this scale, created by the Governments both state and centre. Agreed that this killer contagion was nasty but to use that as a cover to deny any assistance to the migrants is a sheer act of cruelty.

Having lost their livelihood and jobs, migrants, who power our cities, found themselves staring at an uncertain future, facing hunger, fearing disease and caught in an alien state with language issues. Under the circumstances, the least that the state could do was provide them reasonable assurance that they would be taken care of, or that safe passage to their homes would be ensured.

The first hurdle was that guest workers in Chennai were not eligible for cash or groceries provided by the state government as they did not possess valid ration cards. The Greater Chennai Corporation too made the decision to stop provision of cooked food by NGOs before going back on its decision after realizing the scale of the crisis.

Next came the travel crisis. With no support, no clear communication, no refuge, the migrants decided to go home. With all modes of transport banned and those available too expensive, they started walking in the searing heat of Chennai summer.

When the numbers swelled and accidents and deaths happened amongst those walking, hundreds of workers were stopped at the Andhra Pradesh state border by the police and sent back. The TN police too abandoned them by the side of highways, far away from any help. Much of this happened under the cover of dark.

Some workers tried hiring buses, with only 30 passengers allowed per bus. The charges, too, were exorbitant: a trip to Odisha cost Rs 5000 and one to UP was Rs 7500.Travel permits had to be obtained from both exit and destination states, making it an uphill task.

Even as they came close to home, a 14-day quarantine awaited before they could actually enter their village. Very soon, exit passes were reduced to 25 or even 20 passengers per bus, which made the already high cost unaffordable: Rs 7000 for Odisha and upwards of Rs 10000 for Uttar Pradesh.

As news of the issues faced by migrants blew up, the pressure from media, courts and civil society forced the government to run trains and to provide shelter to migrants stranded on roads. Under pressure, the Chennai Corporation started opening relief camps to accommodate the stranded, andensure food, water, sanitation and health.

But there was no proper communication on the camp locations and how to get in, leaving the workers in the dark once again. Accommodation in the camps was largely arbitrary.

Relying on NGOs

Rajesh Sharma, Pramod Kumar and their group of 40+ workers from villages near Nalanda, Bihar were living in Velachery. After they lost their jobs, they survived on meal handouts on the main road once a day. Desperate for help, they reached out to our volunteer group on May 19th. We were able to arrange groceries through NGO No Food Waste for a few days. They had sought help from local police and the Bihar association too, but to no avail. On May 23rd, about 30 people were lucky to get on a train and leave for Bihar, but 10 workers could not. Their wait continued until we were informed on June 26th that the group had finally managed to reach home three months after the lockdown began, after harrowing times in the city where they had hoped to secure their future.

The plight of those outside Greater Chennai Corporation limits was even more pathetic, with no relief centres in Chengalpet, Kancheepuram. For those who lost shelter provided by employers or their rented homes, there was nowhere to go. Thiruvallur was better off as there was plenty of outcry from NGOs and volunteers at the AP border.

Meanwhile special Shramik trains began to run, with uncertainty on who would bear the costs. Registrations (not reservations) were open, but there was no way to track when workers would get their chance, if at all they would.

There was no timetable or tickets. The lucky ones got a message and could board a train, most of the time it was those in relief camps who were rushed in buses and dropped off at railway stations. With all options closed, many workers started assembling at the station only to be driven away or bundled into the backroads, awaiting their destiny on footpaths for days at a stretch.

Even those who managed to get on a train could not breathe a sigh of relief, as many long-distance trains had no provision for food and drinking water. The delays meant two-day journeys were taking twice the amount of time, with plenty of diversions and redirections.

Slipping through the cracks

On May 17th two groups of about 30 migrant workers, mostly from Bihar and Jharkhand, were intercepted by the police from AP border late at night. Some of them were on GST Highway near Maraimalai Nagar while others were stranded on Bengaluru Highway near Sriperumbudur.

Two others, Arjun Kumar and Mohan Singh were stranded without help for three days, with only assistance from a passerby for food and stay at a roadside eatery. Arjun managed to walk from there, take trucks, cycle, and use other modes of transportto finally reach Bihar.Mohans whereabouts are still not known to those who tried to assist him.

The second group of 18 (including workers Deepak Chauhan, Anu Kumar, Jitender Kumar) from Jharkhand had no jobs anymore and had to vacate their rooms. On May 24th they managed to reach Central Station, upon hearing that there was a train for Jharkhand. But that was not to be and they ended up waiting in the streets. With the help of volunteers they were directed to a relief centre near Elephant gate police station

Similar issues were faced by the group stranded in Maraimalai Nagar. The current status of many of these workers is not known to the volunteer groups that aided them. The sheer number of workers in need of help has been overwhelming.

There were no stops along the way and the few shops where the migrants could look for food or water were all closed. There was no assistance from NGOs either during the journey. Most of the migrant workers we spoke to seemed to be overpowered by emotions triggered by hunger and the fear of death.

What was the crime committed by these migrant workers? That they were not a vote bank? That they moved in search of livelihoods? And why did their native states, and even the centre, display such careless, callous and often sadistic attitude towards these lives?

The truth remains that this nation, which prides itself on modernization and self sufficiency, failed to help its most-needy citizens making them feel unwelcome in their own country. If not for the many NGOs, civil society and volunteer groups and kind hearted donors, the situation would have been much worse.

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Comment: COVID-19 aside, migrant crisis in city has exposed the huge gaps in governance - Citizen Matters, Chennai