NEW DELHI : On 20 March, the last “normal" weekday before life in many Indian cities came to a grinding halt, roughly 1.5 million people shuttled between Delhi and one of its four satellite cities—Gurugram, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Noida.
Those figures, based on the digital trails left behind by Facebook users, plummeted to a mere 100,000 a day by 30 March—some accounted for by migrants—as one of the world’s strictest nationwide lockdowns went into effect.
This week, when the lockdown has supposedly begun to ease, about 300,000 people travelled between Delhi and its satellite cities in a day, 20% of the usual flow. “Some of it could just be goods traffic," said Olivier Telle, an urban health geographer at the Centre for Social Sciences and