At present around 30,000 students including approximately 7,500 from UP are stuck in Rajasthan’s Kota, which is the major coaching hub for various competitive exams in India.
On Friday, the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath escorted the state government to send buses from Agra and Jhansi to Kota.
A campaign called #SendUsBackHome was started on Tuesday on social media by the students stuck in Kota in amidst of the coronavirus outbreak, preceding that UP government has decided to get back approximately 7,500 students who were in Kota to hail back to their families by sending 250-300 buses, officials said.
Prabha Kant Awasthi, the Additional District Magistrate (City) of Agra has said that although there is no specific information about the number of students of U.P. stranded in Kota but each bus would carry 25 students. He said that food, water bottles, sanitisers and masks along with the buses, had been dispatched by the administration. He further added that the buses were being sent to Kota “on the demand” of the Rajasthan government to bring back the students.
According to the Kota officials, buses from UP reached the coaching hub on Friday evening and initiated the process to bring back students to their hometowns in UP after the thermal screening was done on Friday night. Only 30 students were allowed in a Bus on board to secure social distancing and prevention from the spread of the virus.
Rajasthan Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot asked other states to follow the same move as U.P.
Mr Gehlot wrote on his twitter, “Students in Kota can be sent to their home states on the consent of the concerned state government so that these young boys & girls do not panic or feel depressed,”
Mr Akhilesh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party chief embraced the action of bringing back the students who were stranded in Kota but pondered over the government if they have any plan to get back the helpless migrant workers and the poor who are “falling prey to starvation”
Even the BSP leader Mayawati has praised the Uttar Pradesh government for this initiative on Saturday for sending buses to bring back more than 7000 students from Rajasthan’s Kota, on her Twitter handle and also urged the government to show equivalent empathy for families of poor migrant labourers.
Whereas, the chief minister of Bihar, Mr Nitish Kumar criticised the U.P. government’s actions and called it an injustice as well as against the lockdown protocol.
A viral hashtag on Twitter made the government bring back students home. Is government waiting for a similar hashtag to get viral for the migrants too? Will the government start working on it only after the citizens flood their social media with the same thing? Oh, wait! That’s already been done, and not just social media virals but media coverage is also there. Then why there is no action? What exactly the Government of India is waiting for?
It is an act of discrimination among poor and rich and is a matter of great condemnation on humanitarian grounds, when you show concern towards one class of people and the other is walking helplessly on roads in search of food and shelter. Why we are not being able to help them. Don’t they have families? As of now, looking forward to an equivalent action by the government for all the needy.
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