21 buses will today drive the workers to the border.
The temperature in Rajasthan worked its way up to 37 degrees celsius today, infiltrating the already arduous journey of migrant workers who are walking home to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
To help, buses began pulling up alongside the workers on the highway that links the state capital of Jaipur to Agra in Uttar Pradesh. It is this four-lane road that is being used by migrants who are leaving Rajasthan.
Twenty-one buses will today drive the workers to the border. By 2 pm, 625 workers had been collected in the "No To Foot Movement" drive.
The workers who were walking on the 200-kilometer highway were asked to stop.
Before boarding, they were screened with thermal scanners for temperature, and sanitisers were handed out to them. The migrants were also given food packets, water and masks.
The buses are being kept half-empty to comply with social distancing. Similar bus rides were organized in states like Uttar Pradesh over the weekend.
At the border, if their home states refuse to let them through, the workers will be kept in camps at Bharatpur, a town famous for its bird sanctuaries.
The Rajasthan government says its new initiative provides workers with a much-needed ride but is not a substitute for or part of the buses or trains that are transporting migrant workers who have registered to go back to their villages.
Yesterday, a protest by nearly two hundred workers in Jaipur triggered a lathi-charge to break up the gathering. The migrants who were demonstrating were largely those who were living in rented neighbourhoods like Shahstri Nagar and Jhotwara. They demanded assistance in being transported home and better ration or dry good supplies.
The Prime Minister, in a televised address to the country tonight, is expected to share plans for whether and how the national lockdown, first declared on March 23rd, will be lifted.
Through the curfew and other restrictions, the images of migrant workers hitching rides, cycling for hundreds of kilometres, or walking on highways carrying babies in their arms, have been a constant reminder of the hardship created as the country lives with the world's most restrictive lockdown.
The move, medical and other experts agree, has been vastly successful in containing the spread of the pandemic in a country with a shambolic public health set-up.
But the steady chains of workers walking down roads and over train tracks, trying to make their way back to their families has incited criticism of how they were left to fend for themselves after the abrupt lockdown left them jobless and often forced them to vacate their accommodation in cities.