India Police Fire Tear Gas on Workers Defying Lockdown

Police in Western India fired tear gas to clear a stone-pelting crowd of migrant workers defying a three-week coronavirus lockout that left hundreds of thousands of poor people without employment and starving, officials said Monday (March 30).

Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed the 1,3 billion people in the world to stay indoors until April 15, the only way to save the infectious pandemic was to announce this self-isolation.

But the massive closure has caused a humanitarian crisis with hundreds of thousands of impoverished migrant workers living in big cities including Delhi and Mumbai struggling to move to their country homes after losing their jobs.

Many have been walking for days on abandoned highways with no exposure to food or water, often with families with young children.

On Sunday, in the western city of Surat, about 500 employees clashed with police asking that they are permitted to go home to other parts of India because they had no employment left behind.

“The police tried to convince them that it is not possible since buses or trains are not available...However, the workers refused to budge, and started pelting stones at police,” Surat deputy commissioner of police Vidhi Chaudhari said.

She said the men, most of whom were working in Surat's shuttered textile industry, were forced indoors by tear gas volleys and were detained for violating lockdown orders on Monday 93.

TIP OF ICEBERG

India has reported 1,071 cases of coronavirus, 29 of which died, the ministry of health said on Monday. Compared to the United States, Italy and China, the number of reported cases is low, but health officials warn India is weeks away from a gigantic increase that could overpower its fragile public health network.

A health official said that the large-scale migration of population through the countryside threatened widespread spread of coronavirus, compounding the difficulty of suppressing the epidemic in the second-most populated nation in the world.

"It's an evolving situation with daily new challenges coming up, like having migratory populations moving from one place to another. Like non-affected states adjoining affected states," said SK Singh, director of the National Centre for Disease Control, which investigates and recommends control measures for outbreaks of illness.

Health staff clad in protective suits sprayed disinfectant on a community of migrant workers in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, who were all attempting to make the trip home to their villages, local television reported. They were forced to pose on a street corner in the district of Bareilly, doused with hose sticks, stirring up outrage on social media.

Nitish Kumar, the district's top government official, later claimed that the local authorities had directed health workers to clean buses, but in their anger, they had turned their hoses on migrant workers too.

"I have asked for action to be taken against those responsible for this," he said in a tweet.

The federal government said on Monday that it had no plans to extend the shutdown beyond the three-week period.

But from Tuesday, neighboring Nepal declared that it will prolong its shutdown for another week. The landlocked country has registered just five virus cases and no deaths but contagion will spread as more people fly.