THE VIRUS TRAINS: HOW LOCKDOWN CHAOS SPREAD COVID-19 ACROSS INDIA

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s coronavirus restrictions sent migrant workers fleeing. To get them home, the government offered special trains. But the trains would spread the virus across the country.

Migrant workers in Mumbai waiting to board a train home to rural Bihar in May. Tens of millions poured out of India’s cities.

By Jeffrey Gettleman, Suhasini Raj, Sameer Yasir and Karan Deep Singh-Photographs by Atul Loke

SURAT, India — The crowds surged through the gates, fought their way up the stairs of the 160-year-old station, poured across the platforms and engulfed the trains.

It was May 5, around 10 a.m. Surat was beastly hot, 106 degrees. Thousands of migrant laborers were frantic to leave — loom operators, diamond polishers, mechanics, truck drivers, cooks, cleaners, the backbone of Surat’s economy. Two of them were Rabindra and Prafulla Behera, brothers and textile workers, who had arrived in Surat a decade ago in search of opportunity and were now fleeing disease and death.

Rabindra stepped aboard carrying a bag stuffed with chapatis. His older brother, Prafulla, clattered in behind, dragging a plastic suitcase packed with pencils, toys, lipstick for his wife and 13 dresses for his girls.

“You really think we should be doing this?” Prafulla asked.

“What else are we going to do?” Rabindra said. “We have nothing to eat and our money’s out.”

They were among tens of millions of migrant workers stranded without work or food after Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a national coronavirus lockdown in March. By spring and summer, these workers were so desperate that the government provided emergency trains to carry them back to their home villages. The trains were called Shramik Specials, because shramik means “laborer” in Hindi.

But they became the virus trains.

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.

Farmers in Ganjam, a rural district that was untouched by the virus until workers began to return.

Screening in Ganjam last month. It became one of India’s most heavily infected rural districts.

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.”

A Lockdown Unlocks an Exodus

On March 24, at 8 p.m., Mr. Modi hit the lockdown switch. In a televised address, he ordered the entire nation to stay inside their homes for three weeks — starting in four hours.

The decision was pure Modi: sudden, dramatic and firm, like when he abruptly wiped out nearly 90 percent of India’s currency bills in 2016, a bolt-from-the-blue measure that he said was necessary to fight corruption but proved economically devastating.

Prafulla and Rabindra Behera had just finished a dinner of rice, lentils and potatoes, their usual fare. They lived in squalid, bare rooms in Surat’s industrial zone, sleeping wall to wall on the floor with a half dozen other laborers. Within minutes of Mr. Modi’s address, they started getting calls.

“Everyone was thinking the same: This will be over soon and somehow we’ll pass the days,” Rabindra said.

The eastern expressway in Mumbai on the first day of lockdown in March. A stringent three-week closure was announced with four hours’ notice.

The building where Prafulla Behera used to live in Surat’s industrial zone.

At the time, India had fewer than 600 known virus cases.

Many experts have criticized Mr. Modi’s government for overlooking the plight of migrant laborers, who suddenly had no work, no income and no support network in the cities. The government’s Covid-19 task force lacked migrant specialists and was hardly representative of India. Of its 21 members, only two were women and the rest were largely upper-caste men. Many of the migrant laborers came from lower castes and economically underprivileged backgrounds.

Harsh Vardhan, India’s health minister, responded by saying that “not even in our wildest imaginations do we think about the caste” and that the task force’s members had been chosen for their “competence, capabilities and intellectual abilities.”

Mr. Modi’s lockdown closed all public transport, and immediately, some migrants began walking hundreds of miles, desperate to return to their home villages, where living was cheaper and they could find family support. After Mr. Modi declared a second lockdown in mid-April, the stream of migrants turned into a humanitarian disaster.

Tens of millions poured out of the cities, and India’s airwaves were dominated by horrific scenes of migrants and their families dying along the roads, from thirst, heat, hunger and exhaustion.

In New Delhi, railroad officials concluded there was no way to stop the migrants, said Arun Kumar, the head of the railroad police.

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