The virus trains: how lockdown chaos spread COVID-19 across 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 am Surat was beastly hot, 106 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius). 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, an Indian flatbread. 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 “labourer” in Hindi.

But they became the virus trains.

India has now reported more coronavirus cases than any country beside 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.

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 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.

In all, the government organised 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 pm, 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% 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.

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 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.

On May 1, India’s Labor Day, the railways ministry made a grand announcement: Shramik Specials. Routes were drawn up from Surat, Mumbai, Chennai, New Delhi, Ahmadabad and other cities deep into rural areas.

A Rural District Explodes

The Behera brothers rode for 27 hours across the width of India, about 1,000 miles, in a second-class, non-air-conditioned train packed to capacity. The heat seemed to be getting to Prafulla. During the journey, he complained of having a fever.

They stepped off in Ganjam on May 6, around 1 pm, exhausted and dehydrated, among the first wave of migrants to return.

The Beheras were told they would quarantine for 21 days at a centre and each was given a toothbrush, a slice of soap, a bucket to wash with and a thin sheet to sleep on.

But the next morning, Prafulla awoke with a splitting headache. A doctor didn’t think he had coronavirus but suggested, as a precaution, that he be moved into the courtyard, away from the other men. The following morning, Prafulla could barely breathe and called his wife on his cellphone.

“Come and bring the girls,” he whispered. “I need to see you.”

An hour later, he was dead. A subsequent test revealed that Prafulla Behera was Ganjam’s first coronavirus death.

Testing was still relatively low but when authorities zeroed in on suspected carriers they found high positivity rates. After Prafulla’s death, Rabindra and six other men who had travelled with him were tested. Six out of seven tested positive.

But the Shramik Specials kept coming — four, five, six, sometimes 16 a day, each carrying as many as 2,000 migrants, many from Surat.

Across India, state leaders were under pressure from voters urging them to rescue stranded family members. Yet some recognised that the trains could mean trouble.

“It will lead to a spike in COVID-19 cases,” predicted Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal’s chief minister, in late May. “Who will take the responsibility then?”

Aftermath

Most cases in Ganjam caused only mild symptoms and did not require hospitalisation. But no one is certain of the district’s real death toll, just as that figure remains a mystery across the country. India has reported far fewer virus deaths per capita than many Western nations, but experts caution that 80% of all deaths in the country are not medically certified.

Opposition politicians have pushed for a parliamentary inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic but members of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party have blocked them. In October, India’s Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit calling for an independent investigation.

In Ganjam, the scars are still fresh.

Rabindra Behera eventually returned to Surat, by train. His brother had been right: There was no work in Ganjam. And now Prafulla Behera’s widow and four daughters have no one to support them.

The plastic suitcase that Prafulla brought home, packed with gifts, was destroyed at the quarantine centre. His daughters never got their 13 dresses.

© 2020 The New York Times Company