Migrant worker wheels son sleeping on suitcase in heart-wrenching video
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The woman was among a group of labourers who had been returning from Punjab on foot in the absence of any means of transport. Photo: Twitter/Arvind Chauhan

Migrant worker wheels son sleeping on suitcase in heart-wrenching video


An exhausted woman drags her suitcase on a highway in Uttar Pradesh’s Agra. Her son, around four to five years, worn out by an arduous journey, sleeps on the suitcase. They had completed two-third of their 800 km-long journey from Punjab. The incident wrenched the hearts of many as the country entered the fiftieth day of the COVID-19 lockdown.

The 38-second video of the woman — a migrant labourer — and her son has gone viral. The mother says, in the clip, she has been heading towards her hometown Jhansi that is around 230 km away from Agra. She is among a group of labourers who have been returning from Punjab on foot in the absence of any means of transport.

A similar incident happened a couple of days ago, when a migrant worker was pulling a makeshift cart carrying his pregnant wife and daughter. He was returning to his village in Balaghat district of Madhya Pradesh from Telangana’s Hyderabad, reported NDTV. Initially, the couple had walked and the man had carried the child. However, she couldn’t walk beyond the point and so, he made a wooden cart on the way.

Since the nationwide lockdown was announced on March 24, migrant labourers have been taking long and gruelling journeys with their children. Even after 50 days, many workers have not found a way to make their travel simple. Though the Railways has started running special trains for migrants, lakhs of workers and their families could not be accommodated in a few trains.

Even worse, many migrants have been killed in accidents on the course of their journeys. At least 16 migrant labourers who had been walking from Jalna district in Maharashtra to Bhusawal in the same state to board a special train to Madhya Pradesh were run down by a freight train in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad district in the wee hours of May 8.

Related News: Desperate to go home, man joins ox in pulling cart

In the last two days alone, at least 18 people have been killed and over 100 injured in four different accidents in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. While six people who had been walking from Haryana to Bihar were mowed down by a bus on the Delhi-Saharanpur Highway in UP on May 13, eight others were killed after a speeding bus rammed their truck in the Guna district of MP. The had been retuning to Uttar Pradesh from Maharashtra.

On May 12, a truck carrying 54 migrant workers and their family members from Gujarat’s Ahmedabad to Balrampur in Uttar Pradesh rammed a stationary truck on the Kanpur-Jhansi highway, killing three and injuring 43. In another mishap, a migrant worker returning home in Uttar Pradesh from Chhattisgarh on a bicycle was hit by a truck in Chitrakoot in MP. While he died, three other workers were injured in the accident.

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