Coronavirus lockdown: Make outgoing and incoming calls free, Priyanka Gandhi urges telcos
Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi on Sunday wrote to major Reliance Jio, Airtel, BSNL and Vodafone-Idea and urged them to make incoming and outcoming calls free for one month. This step, she said, was necessary as thousands of migrant workers are trying to reach their hometowns across the country.
"I am writing this on humanitarian grounds," she said in her letter written in Hindi
"Many of those who are trying to reach home have exhausted their mobile recharges as a result of which they are not able to contact their families," said Priyanka Gandhi in the letter. She has then requested the telecom companies to make all incoming and outgoing calls free for one month.
COVID-19 pandemic has created a new crisis in the country. Exodus of migrant labourers is generating fears of mass infection.
Worried about this large-scale movement of people triggering a risk of mass infection, the central government ordered sealing of all state and district borders and said violators face a 14-day mandatory quarantine.
State governments also appealed to the migrant workers to stay put and announced special measures for providing food and other facilities to them, while a few arranged special buses to ferry them to their native places.
In Kerala, hundreds hit the streets on Sunday demanding transportation to travel to their native places. The state government deployed police forces and sent administrative officers to pacify the agitating migrant workers, who are called guest labourers in the state, and managed to send them back back to their camps.
They were promised all facilities for a comfortable stay in the state during the lockdown period, but their demand for travel facilities was rejected.
The Haryana government, on its part, said it has provided over 800 sanitised state roadways buses to Uttar Pradesh to ferry migrant workers stranded on the Delhi-Ghaziabad border to their villages.
On Saturday evening, chaos, confusion and a stampede-like situation prevailed at the Delhi-Ghaziabad border as hundreds of migrant workers fought amongst themselves to get seats on the limited number of buses the Uttar Pradesh administration operated to ferry them to the hinterlands.
Hundreds of migrant workers from Delhi, Haryana and even Punjab reached Anand Vihar, Ghazipur and Ghaziabad's Lal Kuan area after taking arduous treks of many kilometers on foot to take buses to their respective native places
Delhi as well as industrial towns in the neighbouring states of Haryana and Punjab employ thousands of workers from states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.
