The Virus Trains : How Lockdown Chaos Spread Covid-19 Across India - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/world/asia/india-coronavirus-shramik-specials.html
India has now reported more coronavirus cases than any country besides the United States. And it has become clear that the special trains operated by the government to ease suffering — and to counteract a disastrous lack of lockdown planning — instead played a significant role in spreading the coronavirus into almost every corner of the country.The trains became contagion zones: Every passenger was supposed to be screened for Covid-19 before boarding but few if any were tested. Social distancing, if promised, was nonexistent, as men pressed into passenger cars for journeys that could last days. Then the trains disgorged passengers into distant villages, in regions that before had few if any coronavirus cases.
One of those places was Ganjam, a lush, rural district on the Bay of Bengal, where the Behera brothers disembarked after their crowded trip from Surat. Untouched by the virus, Ganjam soon became one of India’s most heavily infected rural districts after the migrants started returning.
ImageFarmers in Ganjam, a rural district that was untouched by the virus until workers began to return.Many people in Ganjam’s villages had no idea what coronavirus symptoms were — until people around them started dying.
“There was a very direct correlation between the active Covid cases and the trains,” said Keerthi Vasan V., a district-level civil servant in Ganjam. “It was obvious that the returnees brought the virus.”
The tragic irony is that Mr. Modi’s lockdown inadvertently unlocked an exodus of tens of millions. His government and especially his Covid-19 task force, dominated by upper-caste Hindus, never adequately contemplated how shutting down the economy and quarantining 1.3 billion people would introduce desperation, then panic and then chaos for millions of migrant workers at the heart of Indian industry.A top economic adviser to Mr. Modi, Sanjeev Sanyal, confirmed that the administration had been aware of the risks posed by moving people from urban hot spots to rural areas but said that the situation had been managed “quite well.”Railroad officials also insist that the trains were the safest way to get migrant workers home.
“India has done extraordinarily well in managing the spread of disease compared to some of the materially most advanced countries of the world,” said D.J. Narain, a Ministry of Railways spokesman. In all, the government organized 4,621 Shramik Specials, moving more than 6 million people. As they poured out of India’s cities, which were becoming hot spots, many returnees dragged the virus with them, yet they kept coming. Surat, an industrial hub, saw more than half a million workers leave on the trains.
“It felt like doomsday,” said Ram Singhasan, a ticket collector. “When you saw how many people were thronged outside, it looked like the end of the world was coming.”
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