Migrants forced Uttar Pradesh to delay lockdown

LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh announced a complete lockdown on account of the Covid-19 outbreak on Tuesday, delaying the measure to give time to millions of migrant workers from the country’s most populous state to return to their homes.

The state health minister Jai Pratap Singh told ET that people from UP who had been working in Maharashtra and other parts of the country were still trickling in and that it was important to ensure everybody who was on the way back to UP had come and was inside their houses or otherwise they would be stranded with nowhere to go.

People coming in have been thermally scanned at railway stations and their names and details have been shared right down to the gram pradhan level for monitoring for symptoms, said Singh.


With Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s announcement, UP became one of the last few states to announce a complete lockdown. The CM said the lockdown will remain in place till March 27.

Till Monday, only 17 out of 75 districts in the state were under lockdown. These were the districts where positive cases of the coronavirus had been reported. All interstate borders as well as the Indo-Nepal border have been sealed while bus services have been stopped between states and within UP, along with metro services. All essential products and services will, however, continue to be available.