After Centre reopened inter-state travel, coronavirus cases surge across rural India

India’s coronavirus lockdown was set up to be the harshest in the world. It was, for example, the only country that sought to restrict movement and prevent all travel.

This sort of draconian lockdown could only have worked if extensive welfare provisions had been made, which would have allowed migrant workers to stay back in big cities even without employment. This did not happen. The situation became so dire that many migrants began to walk, cycle or hitchhike back home, sometimes travelling more than 1,000 km to get home from the cities in which they had been working.

On April 29, just over a month into the lockdown, the Union government decided to start running special “Shramik” trains for stranded workers. This meant that workers who had been trapped since March 25 in urban centres, mostly in West and South India, would be able to travel back to their homes, mostly in the East and the North.

Through May, Shramik trains transported as many as 50 lakh workers. But – in a sign of how complex the battle against the pandemic is – it has also led to a spike in Covid-19 cases. This isn’t surprising given that workers who had been stuck for more than a month...

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