Day 151
Toll 399
#FarmersProtest
Opening Roads
Every protest site now has one side of the road open. This is to allow any medical emergency vehicle – oxygen trucks, ambulances, any other – to pass through. While Tikri and Ghaziabad already had roads open, last night one road at Singhu was also opened.
Yet, the police has not removed barricades. Even from the roads the farmers have vacated. Concrete slabs stolen from road dividers are hard to move. Concertina wire does not yield easy. Still the COVID-19 farmer volunteers are facilitating incoming vehicles around the police barricades.
The farmers march to Parliament, scheduled for May, has been postponed for now. Though thousands of farmers have reached the protest sites – but for standing tall at sites of protests – the farmers do not want to hamper the nation fighting COVID-19 or distract the police from its job is helping with COVID-19 relief.
These are farmers we accuse of stubble burning, smoke pollution without considering that along with our food, they also grow oxygen for months twice or thrice every year in their fields. The same oxygen that in concentrated form the government has failed to provide to critical patients at this time.
It is beyond sad that the government remains unmoved. Even stones have been known to melt.