Barely 20 metres from the Delhi-Noida border in Mayur Vihar Extension, three groups of migrants sat in despair as the Uttar Pradesh Police denied them entry to Noida.
Not all of them had started together: one group of 11 people, including two children and four women, had come from Bawana Industrial Area and were headed to Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh on foot. They hoped to catch a bus from Noida to the nearest point to Gwalior, perhaps Etawah in U.P., and then arrange for transport to their hometown.
A second group had come from Pratap Nagar in a private vehicle and had paid ₹1,000 each to the driver to help them cross into Noida, their escape route to Betiah, Kishanganj and Gopalganj in Bihar. Their plan failed when the police stopped their vehicle and asked them to go back.
“Returning to Pratap Nagar is not an option for me now. My landlord asked me to vacate the room as I hadn’t paid the rent for two months,” said Rahman, a resident of Betiah, who worked as a tailor.
The third group wanted to go to Kanpur and Agra in U.P. and home seemed so close across the barricades on the border.
They had all been waiting since Monday afternoon for some vehicle willing to take them to the other side of the inter-State demarcation, which suddenly seemed like the “line of control” in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic.
Their hopes dashed as darkness enveloped the service lane, adjacent to an apartment complex, that they had been occupying for hours.
Family effort
Sneha, a 20-year-old DU student, first spotted the migrants outside the apartment complex and alerted her family, which came forward to help them with water, bed sheets, mosquito nets and cell phone chargers.
There were at least 31 men in the other two groups.
Their situation seemed desperate and help unlikely in those hours of the night. But then a few phone calls and a Facebook post by a journalist worked like magic and help arrived for the stranded workers at 2 a.m.
Mohit Raj, co-founder, TYCIA (Turn Your Concern Into Action) Foundation, an NGO working for vulnerable communities under the initiative ‘India Against Corona’, in Delhi, and another volunteer, Jatin Babbar, made at least three rounds of the road where the migrants were stranded to enable each group to find a bus to home. By 3 a.m., all three groups were seen packing their bags and moving to the main road in anticipation of their bus.
Ms. Sneha, who had been running back and forth, filling the water bottles of the migrants, was the happiest to see them leaving.
“I have the best Instagram story to tell my friends,” she said, happily capturing the smiling faces of the migrants on her camera phone.
