I am Pavitra Uikey, a 35-year-old migrant worker working in Bangalore, India's financial hub. When the coronavirus scare engulfed our country in the middle of March, we had a foreboding that people like us, who work in the informal sector, would be worst hit.
I'm a carpenter in a furniture workshop. In early March, my employer said that the government might announce a lockdown soon. A stone's throw from the workshop is the giant Mysore factory that employs hundreds of migrants. Every day, I watched dozens of them leaving to go home to their villages.
That was the wise thing to do. A lockdown would deprive us of our wages, and with little or no savings, we would be stranded without food or the means to get home. Our landlord might forcibly evict us if we failed to pay the rent.
I decided that my wife, Pushplata, who is expecting our first baby, and I should return to our village, Silgi, in Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh province.
I booked train tickets for 29 March. The plan was to travel by train to Nagpur in Maharashtra province, then by bus to Silgi. Even in normal times, the journey is arduous. There are no direct buses. From Nagpur, you travel four hours to Seoni district and then change buses to reach Mandla, a bumpy ride of another four hours. Little did I know that the journey back to our village would be a grievous test of our endurance.
The government sealed the country at midnight on 24 March and suspended public transport, and our fears started to come true!
As the weeks passed, our savings dried up. I fretted as my wife's delivery date inched nearer. How could I pay the hospital costs in an expensive city like Bangalore?
Our plight was the same as that of 100 million other migrants in urban hubs left without work in the lockdown. By mid-April, many were starving and they set out for their homes on foot. These journeys were often more than 1,000 kilometres long.
This sorry spectacle flooded television screens as people perished on their way home. By 18 May, over 130 migrants had died on the road. Many had fallen asleep on road dividers or train tracks, exhausted, and were run over by vehicles or trains.
When the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, announced that he would transfer 1,000 rupees (about £10.45) to every migrant worker's bank account, I kept checking my bank balance repeatedly. That gives you an idea of our circumstances.
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