India’s lockdown is set

India is all set to go into lockdown on Sunday with a one-day nationwide curfew coupled with a week-long ban on all incoming international flights as Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday sought his countrymen's cooperation to battle the coronavirus.

Mr Modi, in his first address to the nation since India registered its first coronavirus case on Jan 30, announced the one-day curfew stretching from 7am to 9pm in a televised speech yesterday.

The announcement was preceded by a government advisory banning all international flights to India for a week starting on Sunday.

The effects of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's restrictions on movement, affecting some 1.3 billion people in India, are coming into view, as the country’s most vulnerable populations struggle to eat or to find shelter, and get punished for it.

Hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers have begun long journeys on foot to get home, having been rendered homeless and jobless by the lockdown measures. More than a dozen have died in the process.

With businesses shut down, many of the millions of migrants who had moved to cities to find work, and often lived in their workplaces, were trying to return home. They planned, in some cases, to walk hundreds of miles — until they were beaten back by the police. There are no clear plans by the government to bring migrants home.

And the country’s homeless population — one of the largest in the world — is deeply struggling, with many people not knowing about the coronavirus until they are ordered off the streets by the police; some said they had been beaten by officers for being out in public during the nationwide lockdown.

Shelters and soup kitchens are overwhelmed; religious institutions that normally feed the homeless are closed; and aid workers warn that the situation may deteriorate into violence if people continue to go without food.