Indian migrant workers at risk of falling out of Chinese control Coronavirus pandemic News

New Delhi, India – In the last year, Jagdev Pandey has lived three lives.

Last summer, a 37-year-old migrant worker lived in a rented single-room home in a working-class neighborhood in the eastern working capital of New Delhi, India. He had a stable marketing job with a company that manufactured aluminum foil.

In July, in the monsoons, the company closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a nationwide shutdown that was established to verify the virus.

Pandey was forced to return to his hometown 700 kilometers away in Uttar Pradesh Siddharth Nagar district, India’s most populous state.

After months of unemployment, he returned to Delhi in the winter to find himself in a homeless shelter, living off the money he could make by painting the walls. He now shares a common bedroom and bathroom with 12 strangers.

“My life changed like the seasons,” said a disguised Pandey, sitting outside the shelter, far away from the rental room he called home last year. The closeness is a reminder of everything he dreamed of when he migrated to the city six years ago.

Before this year’s Delhi shutdown, he was painting the walls for about 10 days a month, earning 500 Indian salaries a day (less than $ 7).

Pandey feels that migrant workers like him, who travel back and forth – with his wife and two children living in the village – and that the life suffered by the blockades must be prioritized in order to be vaccinated. But there is a big problem.

“I don’t know where and how to insert it,” he told Al Jazeera.

Experts say there is a risk that 140 million migrant workers in India will be excluded from the ongoing promotion of COVID-19 vaccine due to lack of awareness, a targeted strategy or a severe dose shortage.

The trend is sharper for adults under the age of 45, the age group with the highest number of migrant workers. Vaccination against this group began on May 1st.

S Irudaya Rajan, president of the International Institute for Migration and Development (IIMAD) in Trivandrum, Kerala, said migrant workers are stigmatized carriers of the disease and their vaccine should be prioritized.

“Migration-prone age groups, especially migrant workers, are mostly under 30 years old. They should be given priority for vaccination because they are the ones who move, so their risk factor is much higher compared to the others, ”he told Al Jazeera.

Rajan’s observation came behind crossing two rugged landmarks in India. Last week, it became the second country after the United States to register more than 25 million coronavirus cases. Monday became The third country after the US and Brazil has reported more than 300,000 virus-related deaths.

Weak and mobile population

On March 24 last year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide shutdown with a four-hour forecast. A few days later, more than 11.4 million migrant workers, who lost their jobs overnight, tried to go home, many walking hundreds of miles.

As the second deadly wave of the virus escalated last month, many workers left large cities again when states that boarded trains and buses announced closures. Thousands of workers went home, stressing the need to vaccinate in the cities where they work so that COVID would not return to their hometown with them.

But the power of vaccines has slowed lately, and many states have experienced severe shortages. India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, has fully vaccinated more than 41.6 million people with two doses, which is almost 1.35% of the population’s 3.35 billion.

Dr. Shri Prakash Kalantri, a medical professor at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in Sevagram state of Maharmatra, said migrant workers should be vaccinated as a priority as the risk of infection is “quite high” but acknowledged that this would be. “Challenge” due to limited supplies.

“It is our moral responsibility and ethical duty to protect them, but how to do it when the supply of vaccines is short. I can’t answer that question,” Kalantrik said.

The need to prioritize gunfire on this transient population is all the more urgent because a dozen states are constantly blocked.

A recent study (PDF) showed that the prohibitions imposed by governments in developing countries to control the spread of viruses can be detrimental, especially in the medium term, as they limit the number of migrant workers to the area where the cases are increasing, thus increasing the risk of infection.

Several other studies have highlighted how year-round pandemics and repeated blockades have affected the lives and lifestyles of migrant workers.

Predicting the long-term impact on India’s migration patterns, a report by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in December 2020 found that the pandemic could increase from rural to rural migration.

Ilaran

While Pandey’s struggles emphasize India’s digital divide and lack of awareness that it is almost impossible for migrant workers to get vaccinated, there are others, like Sukanta Mandal, who have managed to register but still can’t get a crack.

Mandal, a worker in the western state of Surat in Gujarat, comes from Gopinathpur village in Ganjam district of Odisha. Surat and Ganjam are on opposite coasts, 1,600km (995 miles) apart.

He registered with CoWIN, a federal government website that tracks all vaccines. He has been searching the website for the vaccine slot for more than three weeks.

“But in each case, I only see red. It’s never been yellow for me. ”Red indicates cracks filled and yellow indicates limited usability.

The set of inquiries sent by Al Jazeera to the federal health ministry to comment on the vaccination of migrant workers went unanswered.

Anhad Imaan of the Aajeevika Bureau, which works for migrant workers, said his organization had seen the virus spread in recent weeks to “homes in very remote areas” of a northwestern state of Rajasthan.

“There are so many barriers to getting vaccinated. It’s hard to register them, as most don’t have smartphones. Even so, they are expected to help others, but it is not a viable way to do that, ”Imaan said.

Mandal says he has encouraged and helped Surat’s friends over the age of 45 to get vaccinated, but as cases escalate, he is concerned about his safety before taking others to vaccination centers.

Dissemination control

To put millions in a dire situation like Mandal and himself, they are part of the migration corridor between Ganjam and Surat.

According to research, Surat employs between 600,000 and 900,000 migrant workers from Odisha, more than 80% of whom are from Ganjam.

In highly mobile migration corridors, and when infections in rural areas increase in the second wave, there are concerns about the lack of vaccination among migrant workers in urban areas like Surat directly in rural source districts like Ganjam.

There are other such corridors, which have been identified by the Ministry of Finance of India, which analyzed the routes of the railway entries that mapped the routes in the 2016-2017 economic survey. Among them, they traveled to Gorakhpur Uttar Pradesh from Mumbai and Delhi and Kutch Gujarat Chennaira to Tamil Nadu, among others.

Dr. DCS Reddy, a former community medicine chief at the Institute of Medical Sciences at Banaras Hindu University in Uttar Pradesh, said migrant workers in Delhi and Mumbai decided to go home early in the second wave after experiencing it last year.

“They have traveled to areas with a low prevalence of the disease, which means a higher sensitivity of the local population. Some are more likely to be infected and spread the disease if they do not have proper COVID-19 behavior and access to health care,” Reddy told Al Jazeera.

Sanjeev Kumar Thakur, the youngest in the shelter, is waiting for work and vaccination [Anuja/Al Jazeera]

At a homeless shelter in Delhi where Pandey lives, staff said they will try to get vaccinated before going home again.

The youngest of them, also the most enthusiastic about getting the vaccine, is Sanjeev Kumar Thakur, a 27-year-old worker from Muzaffarpur in the eastern state of Bihar.

Mixed with hope and confusion, Thakur reported that the only one who could soon visit the house is 53-year-old Surendra Kumar Prasad, who received her first vaccine on April 2.

“He’s got it, I’d like it too, but I think it’s going to take some time,” Thakur said.

For the young person, however, waiting for the vaccine could be linked to waiting for a new job. Last year, he risked his life to deliver food demands at the height of the pandemic, as most of India’s middle class were locked up at home.

He has been unemployed for months and takes day jobs to support himself. “I don’t know what I want anymore, work or vaccination,” he said.