Amid second wave, NHAI, contractors kept workers back with vaccines, food

Vaccines, isolation wards, medical insurance, oxygen-fitted ambulances and food — these are some of the ways the country’s national highway builders checked an exodus of labourers from work sites, even as the second wave of the pandemic unfolded over the past two months.

Learning from the experience of the first lockdown in 2020 — when scores of migrant labourers left their places of work, including highway construction sites, and walked back hundreds of kilometers to their villages — contractors working on projects of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) worked overtime to ensure that workers had a strong reason to stay back.