Arid Anantapur district is known for its migrant labour force, who mainly go to Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, but return to their native villages in Kadiri, Puttaparthi and Kalyandurg Assembly constituency areas a week ahead of Ugadi to return within 15 days. But this year, COVID-19 changed their fate and 1,326 of them have been forced to stay back without any source of income.
District officials identified such persons in several mandals with the help of village volunteers and their list has been prepared with house addresses. Each of them has been mapped to a healthcare professional for regular monitoring, said District Collector Gandham Chandrudu. As of now, they are being given welfare benefits as per the State government’s norms. They are also being sensitised on how to fend off COVID-19 with change in personal hygiene and social behaviour.
While 474 persons had come from Karnataka, 27 from Maharashtra, 68 Telangana, 37 Kerala, 10 Tamil Nadu, 3 Delhi and one each had come from Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. Place of migration of 700 more is yet to be ascertained. Stay-at-home orders have been issued to all those family members.
Meanwhile, 445 beggars and street urchins in Anantapur town have found a temporary shelter, where they would be fed and health taken care of by the district administration in association with different NGOs.
Four shelters at Kamalanagar, Social Welfare Hostel near Guild of Service, Kazanagar, and Maruthi Nagar were started on Saturday where they had started arriving one by one. While 134 of them preferred to stay put at the place of their begging, but the administration with the help of police is contemplating shifting them to these shelters. “None of them was getting any alms as people had stopped coming out,” Mr. Chandrudu observed. In all municipalities, such shelters have been started and 17 of them are functional from Saturday.
