JOIN USPeople returning home shunned in Bihar
Shortly after the nationwide lockdown was announced last week, two brothers Rahul and Anil Singh, working in Punjab’s Ludhiana district, decided to return to their home state Bihar lock, stock and ‘apparel’.
One of their friends, Sujit, too joined them. After travelling more than a thousand kilometres, the three men reached their home Aurangabad in western Bihar this week.
These three private sector workers were among the 180,652 migrants who reached Bihar after setting out from Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and other states besides Nepal, before the state borders were eventually sealed on April 1.
However, much to their dismay, the young men found that unlike previous occasions, their neighbours in the village were in no mood to welcome them. Rather, they felt ‘socially ostracised’ when they were asked to visit the local primary health centre (PHC) and get themselves medically examined.
The trio underwent a medical examination, spent a night at the PHC and were allowed to enter their village only after the reports showed they had no symptoms of COVID-19.
Other migrants, who showed symptoms of COVID-19, were asked to quarantine themselves in the hundreds of makeshift isolation wards set in the government schools along the borders.
Porous border
Bihar shares a porous border with West Bengal in the east, Uttar Pradesh in the west, Jharkhand in the south and Nepal in the north. Many of its residents from across the country, as well as Nepal, are returning home.
These migrant workers are now stopped at the Bihar border, asked to undergo a medical test and are confined to isolation wards. However, several migrants have now started protesting.
“We have faced numerous hardships in reaching Bihar. We remained without food and water while travelling to our home State. Now, you are stopping us at the border. Kindly allow us to go to our villages. We would prefer to live or die at our home. But don’t ask us to quarantine ourselves,” say hundreds of workers quarantined near the Bihar-UP border.
There are several reports of disturbances, with the migrant workers abusing guards and officials and even scaling walls of the quarantine camp (near Buxar) before fleeing to their native place.
At least 41 such workers fled from a quarantine centre near Supaul (in eastern Bihar) while five people fled from an isolation ward in Purnia. A common complaint was lack of basic amenities: no proper food, beds or toilets. The district administration has pressed in officials to look for those who escaped quarantine, as they could potentially be carrying the virus and infect hundreds of other people.
“We had not expected such heavy influx of migrants. But once they were sent by other state governments, our officials have somehow managed well,” said Bihar’s Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi. “Those who are coming here will have to quarantine themselves for 14 days before being allowed to enter their village or town,” he reiterated.
But for migrants like Sajjan Thakur in Madhubani (in north Bihar), who travelled hundreds of kilometers, the announcement feels like a double blow. “We came here after much hardship. Now our entry to the village has been banned. Where should we go now?” Thakur laments, ruing the stigma attached to being quarantined.