Haryana: Jobless since lockdown, Rohingya refugees are awaiting jabs too in Nuh

GURUGRAM: Ansarul Haq raises his head every time his siesta is disturbed by the cacophony of children playing on a mound of sand. A few metres away, a group of men are engaged in random discussions to while away the long afternoon. The women are all inside houses, engaged in domestic chores.
Time seems to have come to a standstill at this camp for Rohingya refugees in Nuh’s Chandeni. The subsequent lockdowns have robbed the men here of jobs. And since most of them are yet to be vaccinated, finding a job is all the more difficult now.
Chandeni is among five camps for Rohingya refugees in Nuh where a majority of the people are yet to be jabbed even once. Over 1,000 families live here.
In the absence of jobs and with exhausted savings, these people are finding it difficult to make ends meet.
With the children playing nearby, Ansarul is unable to complete his sleep. He wakes up with an irritated face. The 27-year-old stubby man tells TOI he would transport vegetables from the mandi to the main market until the lockdown hit last year.
“I would earn around Rs 5,000 a month. But now, it’s becoming tough to arrange for meals every day. I don’t know how long we can continue like this,” says Ansarul, who now picks up rags and sells them to scrap dealers for a meagre sum.
Nearly 1,000 refugees stay in the Chandeni camp, 46km away from the city on the Gurgaon-Alwar road. Job and income alone is not their problem. Unlike in other rural areas of the district, vaccine drives have eluded these sites, they allege.
A couple of months ago, says Ansarul, a group of healthcare officials had visited the camp. But since most men were away looking for a job, only 30 refugees could be vaccinated. No health department team has visited the camp since.
“They could have at least announced it a day before. We would have stayed back in the village. But instead, they came at a time when all of us were away,” says Ansarul, whose wife and four children managed to take the jabs.
According to a rough estimate, around 70% of Rohingya refugees staying in these five camps are yet to be vaccinated. Around 20km away in Nangli village, not even a single person has received the shot. Here too, a health department team had come with vaccine doses. But only a few women and children were present at the camp then.
For them, getting vaccinated is one of the prerequisites for finding a job. Before the pandemic struck, most of these refugees would work as daily-wage labourers at construction sites. Now, they do odd jobs like ferrying water jars or working at small hotels.
The lack of sustenance has had a cascading effect on those running businesses near the camps. Sultan Amin (42), who owns a small shack selling groceries in Ningla, is yet to get Rs 15,000 from his customers who are finding it difficult to pay it off because of lack of jobs at hand.
“My monthly earnings are spent in buying groceries from the wholesaler. At this rate, I will have to shut shop very soon,” Amin says.
According to Nuh deputy commissioner Shakti Singh, there is hesitancy among the refugees to take the vaccine. “We have come to know that many of the refugees are hesitant to take the vaccine. We ran a few campaigns at the camps earlier, but there is no special drive now. If they want to get vaccinated, they should visit the nearest government centre,” he says.
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