Skip to main content

Modi apologises to Indians for 21-day lockdown hardships

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi apologised to the public on Sunday for imposing a three-week national lockdown, calling it harsh but “needed to win” the battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

“I apologise for taking these harsh steps that have caused difficulties in your lives, especially the poor people,” Modi said in his monthly address, broadcast by state radio. “I know some of you will be angry with me. But these tough measures were needed to win this battle.”

The unprecedented lockdown order, which came into effect on Wednesday to keep India’s 1.3 billion people at home for all but essential trips to places like markets or pharmacies, is meant to prevent the spread of the virus from surging and overwhelming India’s already strained health care system.

A view shows empty roads in India's Ahmedabad area during an earlier 14-hour curfew. — Reuters/File
A view shows empty roads in India's Ahmedabad area during an earlier 14-hour curfew. — Reuters/File

Indian health officials have confirmed 867 cases of the coronavirus, including 25 deaths. Experts have said local spreading is inevitable in a country where tens of millions of people live in dense urban areas in cramped conditions with irregular access to clean water.

The lockdown has caused tens of thousands of people, mostly young male day labourers but also families, to flee their New Delhi homes, and has effectively put millions of Indians who live off daily earnings out of work.

Read: Poor Indians flee to villages as coronavirus measures take heavy toll

Modi said on Sunday that he had “no choice but to make these decisions to fight the coronavirus”.

The lockdown — the world’s largest — risks heaping further hardship on the quarter of the population who live below the poverty line.

Millions of migrant workers have been left jobless and penniless in India after a shutdown that has sparked an exodus from major cities. — AFP
Millions of migrant workers have been left jobless and penniless in India after a shutdown that has sparked an exodus from major cities. — AFP

Rickshaw drivers, itinerant produce peddlers, maids, day labourers and other informal workers form the backbone of the Indian economy, comprising around 85 per cent of all employment, according to official data. Many buy food with the money they make each day and have no savings to fall back on.

Untold numbers are now out of work, and many families have been left struggling to eat.

Read: Stranded by virus lockdown, India migrant workers walk home

The governments of New Delhi and the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh have arranged buses to bring the migrant workers back to their home villages.

At Anand Vihar bus terminal, on New Delhi’s eastern side bordering Uttar Pradesh, a long stream of people waited Sunday to pass through a metal detector and cross the bridge to Uttar Pradesh. Many men were making the journey in flip flops. A young man was on crutches.

Workers from Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a Hindu nationalist group, passed out surgical masks and stacks of roti wrapped in newspaper. With millions of followers, RSS eventually gave rise to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Many people carried belongings in plastic bags normally used for cement, while women in saris carried infants on their hips. The orderly line of people suddenly devolved into a crush when authorities signalled that more people could cross the bridge.

A group of friends from New Delhi distributed plates of hot food from a giant pot in the back of their truck to migrants in buses.

“There’s no government help present here. We’re distributing food free of cost,” said Rajesh Singh, one of the volunteers.

Local police officer Rahul Katara said the passengers were facing difficulties getting to their destinations.

“There are not enough buses, and those that make it across the border to Uttar Pradesh are often being turned away by local district officials, so bus drivers are dropping passengers off as near as they can to their destinations,” Katara said.

RK Sharma, 53, a carpenter going to his native home in eastern Jharkhand state, carried water, cooking vessels, a blanket and a mat. Even if he is not able to board a bus, he said he would make it on foot in two or three days, highlighting the determination of the workers to overcome the difficulties they are facing.

“Its not so long a distance,” Sharma said. “I’ll reach in two or three days.”



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/2w1EpBq
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more