The Missing Migrants and Bus Politics

Dilip Banerjee

Google maps show the distance to be close to 987.7 plus kms that would take 19 hours 15 minutes to cover by road by a car and 200 hours on step. Ram Singh, a daily wage earlier in Ludhiana Punjab for 15 years, has sold off all he had to buy this second hand dilapidated moped to cart his family and save them from starvation. His wife, Rajni, clasps on to one-year old twins, one of them feeding even on move, while the 5-year-old daughter Meetu stands ahead of her father on the moped. Another daughter has been sent along with some other acquaintances as the moped could not accommodate any more.

The family, I accidentally, found in my daily travails to cover these untold stories begun their journey two days ago and will take another week to reach their destination, if they make it.

Night halts depends on whether they find a place to rest provided weather gods are kind and there is no rainfall.

All this on the expressway in UP (on the Delhi-UP border) where political parties like Congress and BJP are busy in political slug-fest over providing buses for migrants and fitness certificates of the vehicles.

Dilip Banerjee is a veteran Photo Journalist. He worked in a number of mainstream Newspapers & Magazines.

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Frontier
May 24, 2020