THE HARDSHIPS OF HOME

I am back here, at home, but I am still angry,” says Munna Mehta, 38, as he serves out his home quarantine in the village of Chausa, in Bihar’s Madhepura district. A carpenter in Bengaluru, he used to earn Rs 20,000 a month. A day before the Janata Curfew was announced on March 23, he and three others from his village—Santosh Kumar, 30; Pappu Thakur, 42; and Govind Sao, 25—had set off for home, nearly 2,350 kilometres away. They boarded the Hatia-Yashwantpur Express headed for Ranchi, from where they planned to catch another train to Bhagalpur. But they were stuck in Jharkhand for almost two months, staying in a government-run rain basera (night shelter), till they managed to reach Bihar a week back. Now that he is back, he does not know what to do next. “Years ago, it was hard to leave home for an unknown land and an uncertain future,” he says. “Coming back is even harder.”

Bihar is in the midst of a tidal wave of reverse migration, perhaps the biggest it has ever seen. From May 2, when the first Shramik Special carrying 1,200-odd migrants arrived in Patna, till May 31, as many as 2.03 million people will have reached Bihar. Add to this the nearly 200,000 people who returned in March after the