Amid the nationwide lockdown owing to the fast-spreading coronavirus pandemic, homeless people and daily wage workers, who migrate to big cities from their home towns in search of jobs, are combating hunger for survival as the fast-spreading disease has now created a panic situation across India.
The situation had gone from bad to worse and during this crisis, celebrities, entrepreneurs, businessmen rose to the occasion by doing their best to help the country combat the pandemic.
There have been more than one lakh confirmed coronavirus cases in India on Monday, including 3,000 + deaths. So far 36,824 people have recovered from the coronavirus epidemic.
One must imagine how difficult it is from being thousands of km away from home during this coronavirus crisis. With lack of income, several migrants workers are facing tough times while staying in different cities.
In the need of the hour, actor Sonu Sood has once again come to help the migrant workers. After sending over 350 migrant workers back home to Karnataka from Mumbai, Sonu Sood has once again arranged buses and also sought permission to send 500 migrant workers go home in Uttar Pradesh.
It should be noted that the Uttar Pradesh government has sealed the borders in an attempt to prevent the entry of coronavirus carriers. However, Sonu Sood sought permission from District Magistrates of Lucknow and Siddharthnagar and eventually made this possible.
“I am grateful to my friend and Additional Director General (ADG), Lucknow Zone – Satya Narain Sabat – for getting me required permissions. Another friend Neeti Goel also helped me and we are providing people with food, rations, medicines and PPE kits as well,” he told The Times Of India.
Sonu has now sent 500 migrant workers home to Uttar Pradesh and is planning to send 3000 more soon.
Meanwhile, Additional Director General (ADG) Lucknow Zone, Uttar Pradesh Police, Satya Narain Sabat told the publication, “Sonu already had permissions from Mumbai and wanted an official go-ahead from the administration here in UP for which we helped him. I have also connected him with officials at Hardoi, Pratapgarh and Siddharthnagar to let the buses through in these cities. He also got in touch with me to help the families of the migrants who lost their lives in accidents in Muzaffarnagar and Auraiya. The migrants were mostly from Bihar, so we are getting the details of the families and will provide those to him as soon as possible.”
“I feel it is my duty to help the migrants, the heartbeats of our country. We have seen migrants walking on the highways with their families and kids. We just can’t sit in the AC and tweet and show our concern till we don’t go on the roads, till we don’t become one of them. Otherwise they will not have the trust that there is someone standing there for them. SHe had been working from morning until the evening to send these people “have worked hard to build our houses” back to their homes.
“Now I get so many messages and hundreds of emails everyday saying that they want to travel and I have been coordinating non-stop from the morning till the evening. This has become my only job during this lockdown. It gives me so much satisfaction that I can’t express in words.” o I have been coordinating for their travels, for permissions from different states,” Sonu had told news agency IANS earlier.
He also stressed on the fact that he cannot sleep at night seeing their condition and hence he wants to help them in this ongoing crisis.
“When I see these migrants and all those who are suffering, I feel that we have lost the respect of being a human. I can’t sleep properly in the night because the thoughts keep coming in my mind. The entire day I am reading emails, noting down their phone numbers, trying to call them. There are hundreds of them. I wish I could drive them personally to their villages day and night and reunite them with their families.”
“One thing I feel very sad about is that we just say that eight migrants died or 10 migrants died or 16 migrants were killed under a train. Why can’t we put their names in the newspapers or social media? We have to consider migrants as humans, as equally important as those people killed in a plane crash whose names are mentioned in the news. We need to know who these people are, who lost their lives. We should know their names and respect them,” he said.