The nationwide lockdown to battle COVID-19 has resulted in the urban poor and migrant workers across the country experiencing disproportionate suffering. Scenes of thousands of workers stranded at Delhi, waiting for buses or trains to take them back to their hometowns are now all across the media.
The inter-state borders in Kurnool, Krishna and Guntur districts too are witness to a similar humanitarian crisis, exposing the lack of coordination between the two state governments headed by K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) and Jagan Reddy. While the two Chief Ministers, of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh respectively, were eerily similar in their initial dismissal of COVID-19 fears, prescribing ‘paracetamol’ as the solution, the heads of the sister states were hardly in sync when it came to the crisis.
The Telangana government announced a lockdown immediately after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for “Janata curfew” on Sunday, without giving sufficient time for workers from Andhra Pradesh and the other states to return to their native places. And while the Hyderabad police issued NOCs (no objection certificates) to those who wanted to go back to their native places, these slips of paper did not help as the Andhra police at the state borders did not receive required orders from their government. At the inter-state toll plaza near Jaggayyapeta in Krishna district, the AP police dishonoured the NOCs and stopped people from crossing over.
Similarly, labourers and workers in Hyderabad began to trek, with children and luggage in their arms, to reach their homes in Uttarandhra region in Andhra Pradesh, over 600 km away. A rickshaw puller began travelling with his wife and children in his cycle rickshaw, from Hyderabad to his native place in Telangana’s Jangaon district, 135 km away.
Paying guest (PG) accommodations in the city, housing hundreds of students, closed down due to the lockdown. This forced several students, who suddenly found themselves without food and accommodation, to return to their homes. Telangana Municipal Administration minister KT Rama Rao appealed to the hostels to remain open. But this came too late, as by then, the students left Hyderabad and were stranded at the border points.
The returning workers, students, and professionals spent nearly two days at the state border until the Andhra Pradesh High Court came to their rescue. The court directed the AP government to honour the NOCs issued by Telangana, and allow the workers to enter the state. The court ruled that the AP government must place these returning workers in quarantine or home isolation and to treat women and children in a humane manner.
Poor hit hard
T Lakshminarayana, an analyst, says that the two governments should have anticipated the after-effects of the lockdown, and initiated timely measures such as deployment of special buses to ferry the people to and from Telangana. “Health check-up centres should have been set up at the inter-state border points, and the people in good health condition should have been allowed to go to their destinations,” he said.
In AP’s Vijayawada, hundreds of workers from Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand, and Chattisgarh, engaged as workers in gold shops, hotels, construction and footwear companies, were stranded for want of transport arrangements from the government side, CPI (M) spokesperson Babu Rao told TNM.
Telangana reported 65 COVID-19 positive cases, of which one has recovered. AP had a total of 14 cases, of which 13 are active and under medical care. Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Friday said about 20,000 people are currently in home quarantine or in government facilities under surveillance and all these people are taken care of well. The state is setting up a 10,000 bed speciality hospital in Hyderabad’s Gachibowli sports complex and has declared that government hospitals will be designated centres for treating COVID-19 patients.
Gali Nagaraja is a freelance journalist who writes on the two Telugu states.
Views expressed are the author’s own.