People Rush Back To The Sundarbans, Untested

By Jayanta Basu/thethirdpole.net

Climate change forced them out, COVID-19 has brought them back. Since mid-March, as the pandemic started to assume dangerous proportions in India, thousands of migrant workers have rushed back to their homes in the Sundarbans – the world’s largest mangrove forest that straddles the Bay of Bengal coast of Bangladesh and India.

Largely unchecked for the Coronavirus as they returned, this panic movement has placed nearly five million residents in the Indian part of the Sundarbans at risk of infection, not to talk about the areas around, including megapolis Kolkata.

Bureaucrats and NGOs working in the Sundarbans estimate that 250,000-300,000 people with homes there work elsewhere in India, with a large proportion working in Kerala and Maharashtra, the two states showing the highest number of COVID-19 infections in India now. Their families stayed back, mostly dependent on remittances.

With India under lockdown, all means of earning closed and fearful of catching the infection, between a third and a half of these migrant workers have rushed home, the bureaucrats and NGOs estimate.

Some of those still stuck at their erstwhile places of work due to the nationwide passenger transport shutdown are holding demonstrations to be allowed to go home – photographs from such a demonstration at a railway station in Kerala show the rule to maintain physical distance to avoid infection is being ignored.

Those who have reached their homes in the Sundarbans consider themselves lucky, and just shrug when asked if they are quarantining themselves at home. “How will it help?” asks Hossain Sarkar, a resident of Mousuni island at the southern edge of the Sundarbans, facing the Bay of Bengal. “We live in a one-room hut. There’s no water at home, nor a toilet. Even if I stay at home, my wife and children can get infected, in case I’m carrying the virus. They have to go out to fetch water from the neighbourhood tubewell. All of us have to go out for the toilet. I’m wearing a mask when I go out, there’s nothing more we can do. Anyway, I’m feeling quite well. I don’t have a cold or anything like that.” Sarkar used to be a waiter in a Mumbai restaurant. He left as soon as he could and reached home just a day before the lockdown.

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