Workers in a large Emergency India rolls out emergency aid program for migrant workers, five kilograms of grain, a kilogram of chickpeas: The government in Delhi want to preserve 80 million stranded people from death. Critics ask: Why only now?Arne Perras from Singapur0 comment caravan of the poor: Because no more trains need to run millions of migrant workers back to their villages.Photo: Yawar Nazir ()
The Bus from Pune to Bhopal needs according to the timetable, 16 hours and 40 minutes. If it were not for him because. In times of Corona, the regular is set to long-distance transport in India, there are some special trains for workers to travel only. Far too few to bring all the Stranded home. So the people, mostly single men, sometimes whole families. Some of them are already broken up weeks ago, also on the road from Pune to Bhopal. The are 800 kilometers, at 40 degrees in the shade.
The “Times of India” revealed in mid-may, pictures of the “caravan of the poor”. It creates the Plight of the Poorest on the page 1 an Indian newspaper, is rather rare, but here they were now: for example, a 26-year-old mother who had brought under a tree near the village of Balabheat your child to the world. You have to cover a distance of 500 kilometres of running, if you want to do it ever with your newborn to home. Hungry and crying children; people who fall exhausted by the wayside together. It was as if the newspaper wanted to print a reminder of the Suffering of the Indians at the very bottom.
But who will fill the huge vacuum, in order to secure the Survival of the Stranded? India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to roll out an emergency programme to bring about 80 million migrant workers over the next two months, the state provides for the equivalent of 477 million Swiss francs for you.
Hard and unforgiving
that means: five kilograms of grain and a kilogram of chickpeas for each needy stranded family per month, to relieve the worst Plight of the Stranded until July.
poverty and misery were overlooked in everyday life in South Asia, also in front of the Corona can hardly be. But the pictures from the trek of Indian migrant workers make to a Dimension of the virus crisis, which is expected to meet no other country in the world as hard and relentlessly as India. The number of Infected in the country is now higher than in China, and the epidemiologists are worried.
But at the same time, there is a need to fight a different, perhaps even much larger Killer on the subcontinent: The collapsed economy has forced millions of people to the abyss, a network of social security systems, such as in the welfare States of the West there are. The people have to fight every day to get to the bare minimum. And no one knows how long they’ll hold out.
in times before the Corona of millions of migrant workers from Hand-to-mouth living, only if they were lucky, they had some money left, you could send them home in the villages, to their poor families. However, the meager wage of the equivalent of two, three or also five euros on the day you previously, the Drudge on construction sites, markets and in backyard workshops brought – him there for weeks. Now you just need to get the in the Hand, something you other people with happiness on the way.
Plight of the Stranded until July, India’s Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman relieve:.Photo: Keystone
Also Narendra modi had urged in one of his TV speeches on it: take Care of the poor, as well as it goes, was his appeal to all the citizens of India. So a call didn’t cost him much, but maybe it helped in fact, the word of the Prime Minister, it is heard in the Land. Some liked however, this sentence also as an admission that the state is unable to cope with the crisis and not all will be able to save.
It died 24 migrant workers
How many Indians has been exhausted, and without help, died, under the conditions of the Lockdown is hardly overlook. It is not even reliable estimates. In the headlines it will create, at best, the terrible accidents on Highways or railway lines. For example, in Uttar Pradesh: There was racing last week, a lorry into a parked Truck, died 24 migrant workers.
Earlier, it was killed by a train in Western India on a railway line, 16 people had stored there after a long March, exhausted and fell asleep. With regular trains during the Lockdown, no one had expected until then, but a freight train the road came. As it was for many too late.
There are incidents like this, the dieting, in India, the Worry, the Hunger and the misery could soon kill more people than Covid-19. The recent government support for migrant workers belong to a rescue package, which was announced by India’s Prime Minister Narendra modi in mid-may, on TV. The head of the government called the sum of 266 billion dollars, wants to invest in the state, to support the Economy and to India, as the Premier said, to do more “to help self-employment”. After the Details are known.
The sheet “Indian Express” comes to the conclusion that Delhi has underestimated the impending Plight of the migrant workers from the beginning.
While the urgency of the AIDS for the migrant workers, no one is questioning the power, but also skepticism wide. It is still not clear, how the needy are to quickly and efficiently get to the the help. Critics complain also that the support of the round will be too low and late to come.
The Economist Jayati Ghosh of the Jawaharlal Nehru University on threw, therefore, in the newspaper “the Hindu” the question to the government: “now, If food is spent for nothing on migrant workers, what stopped you to do this six weeks ago, when the Lockdown was announced?” The sheet “Indian Express” comes to the conclusion that Delhi has underestimated the impending Plight of the migrant workers from the beginning.
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