Ramadan Ali earned 500 rupees (less than six euros) a day as a laborer, but has been unemployed for two weeks, he told the Associated Press (AP).
“What do I do now?” He asked.
Ali, 47, arrived at the Kurla train station this morning to join a long line to buy a ticket to Balrampur, a village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where he was born.
The 47-year-old worker hoped to find work to feed his wife and four children, he told AP.
Maharashtra has been the epicenter of the second wave of epidemic in the country, which has reached the peak many times before.
In the last 24 hours, India recorded a new record of daily cases with 217,353 new infections, more than 200 thousand cases for the second consecutive day.
The Indian Health Ministry also announced 1,185 deaths in the last 24 hours, taking the total deaths to 174,308.
On Wednesday, the Maharashtra state government imposed 15 days of imprisonment for trying to stop the spread of the virus. Most industries, businesses and public spaces have closed.
There was no mass migration, migrant workers transported backpacks in crowded trains, tried to leave Mumbai and return to their native states, which could have spread the infection to rural areas.
This situation is not as desperate as last year, when the Indian Railways stopped operating passenger trains across the country in a sudden halt, forcing thousands of migrant laborers to travel thousands of kilometers on foot.
Furthermore, states located in the north of the country, such as Punjab, Haryana and the western state of Rajasthan, have not yet seen large-scale movements of migrant workers, as it is harvest time.
24-year-old Mohammad Aslam is a tailor in Mumbai, but he is idle for 18 days and has decided to try to work for harvesting the crop in the state of Bihar.
AP said, “My family has a farm and I can earn some money by working there,” he told AP, waiting in line to board a train to Muzaffarpur city in that eastern state .
Since the onset of the epidemic, India has accounted for more than 14.2 million cases of Kovid-19 (14,291,917), with the second infection in the world, being the second country in the world with more infections, overtaking Brazil. in the second place.
According to independent calculations by Johns Hopkins University (USA), India is the fourth country in the world after the United States, Brazil and Mexico.
With a population of 1.3 billion, the country began a vaccination campaign on 16 January, with more than 117 million doses (117,223,509) so far, according to data updated daily by the Ministry of Health.
According to a report by the French agency AFP, the Kovid-19 epidemic caused at least 2,974,651 deaths worldwide, amounting to more than 138.2 million cases of infection.
The disease has been detected by a new coronavirus in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
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