Thirty-six days after announcing at four hours’ notice a total lockdown of the country that left millions of migrant workers stranded without money or food in cities far from their homes, the Centre on Wednesday decided to let them return but shifted the responsibility of organising the travel to the states.

“In case a group of stranded persons wish to move between one state/UT and another state/UT, the sending and receiving states may consult each other and mutually agree to the movement by road. The moving persons would be screened and those found asymptomatic would be allowed to proceed,” the order issued by the Union home ministry said.

The order will also cover tourists, students and pilgrims.

Sent to all states and Union Territories, the order asks them to designate nodal authorities and develop a standard protocol to send and receive people. It says the nodal authorities should register people stranded within their state or Union Territory and that buses should transport them in groups.

The buses should be sanitised and social-distancing norms followed in seating.

On arrival at the destination, the travellers should be assessed by “local health authorities” and told to stay in home quarantine unless they required “institutional quarantine”. Periodic health check-ups should be done and the traveller “may be encouraged to use Aarogya Setu app”, the order said.

(The Union home ministry, in a separate announcement, said the new guidelines to fight Covid-19, effective from May 4, would grant considerable relaxations to many districts and would be communicated in the days to come.)

CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury responded on Twitter to the order on the migrants. “Finally Centre has condescended to permit migrant labour to go home, after subjecting them to untold hardships, misery, hunger and exposure to Covid. But how? It’s now the responsibility of the concerned states to organise buses, fund the costs and take all health precautions!” he wrote. “Centre will not spend a paisa….”

Since the evening of March 24, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the country would go into lockdown at midnight, lakhs of workers have made desperate attempts to get home — walking hundreds of miles, carrying little children and elderly parents, cycling, taking a boat, trying to hide in trucks of vegetables — in the largest movement of people in India since the Partition.

Many have died on the way; many more have been caught and quarantined or sent back to where they came from.

Workers who earned an honest living and sent money home have had to join unending lines of the destitute waiting for free meals, often donated by volunteers.

As early as March 28, visuals of thousands of workers crowding the Anand Vihar bus terminal in the national capital — exposing themselves and others to the risk of coronavirus — in the desperate hope of getting a ride home had offered a view of the humanitarian crisis staring at the country.

The Opposition has since repeatedly urged the Centre to provide them relief, through cash transfer, and work out a way for them to go home. The workers have got restive — there have been several violent protests in Surat, besides a large demonstration in Mumbai.

On Wednesday, a group of labourers from 10 states working for a contractor hired by IIT Hyderabad attacked officials of the firm and threw stones at police, demanding payment of their wage dues and a return home.

After the three-week lockdown was extended by another three weeks with no plan announced by the Centre for those stranded, some states had on their own started sending buses to bring their students and labourers back.

But others have appeared reluctant to do so immediately, worried that the entry of large numbers of people would increase the risk of spreading the coronavirus infection. The states, on whom has fallen the burden of feeding the millions who have suddenly become jobless, also find their resources stretched.

“Centre will not spend a paisa, or give them their dues, while Modi writes off loans of thousands of crores looted by cronies like ‘Mehul bhai’. Rs 68,000 crore of loans taken by cronies have been written off by this govt but no money to pay states?” Yechury said on Wednesday.

A senior Bengal government officer said the state had set up a nodal authority but a proper plan would be needed to bring back so many people. A rough estimate by the state government suggests that more than 1.5 lakh people from Bengal are stuck in other states.

“We have to decide who would be brought back first and how. Then there are steps that need to be taken once they are brought back. We have to develop a protocol on who would be sent to home quarantine and who would be taken to government quarantine centres. Once we work out these issues, we would talk to the states where they are stuck,” the officer added.

Several chief ministers, including Rajasthan’s Ashok Gehlot, Maharashtra’s Uddhav Thackeray and Jharkhand’s Hemant Soren, have asked the Centre to run special trains for the migrants.

Soren tweeted on Wednesday night that he had spoken to railway minister Piyush Goyal and urged him to resume train services to bring back the state’s stranded students and more than 5 lakh migrant workers.