A man can be seen climbing on the truck with an infant.
Highlights
- Migrants have been leaving bigger cities to go back to their villages
- Many of them have walked hundreds of kilometres
- Last week, 16 migrants in a group of 20 were run over by a cargo train
As men, women and children climb onto an already-crowded truck, a man hauls up a baby by an arm, handed to him by a mother. The visuals from Chhattisgarh once again highlighted the tragedy of migrants and their families, desperate to return home after being left without jobs, a home or food by the prolonged coronavirus lockdown.
Visuals showed a large group of migrants scrambling to get on a truck with their children. The man holding the baby uses his other hand to hold on to a rope attached to the truck. In the nearly 20-second clip, the man hands over the child to a labourer on the truck.
A woman in a sari struggles to climb. Another man reaches out to take another infant from a labourer standing on the road.
Speaking to NDTV, some labourers who began their journey from Telangana said that they could not find any other way to reach home. "What do we do... we are helpless. We have to go to Jharkhand. We hitched a ride on a truck because there is no other way," said an old man.
On being asked about special trains launched by the central government earlier this month for the labourers, he said: "We could not find any information that could help us take the journey."
An official from the state transport department who was standing close to the truck, watching the chaos, said: "There are no other means of transport. Administration has to facilitate special buses for them. I am from transport department but I can't arrange for buses at my level."
Since the lockdown in late March, migrants have been leaving bigger cities to go back to their villages. Many of them have walked hundreds of kilometres, some of them have died before they could complete their journey.
Last week, 16 migrants in a group of 20 were run over by a cargo train in Maharashtra while they were sleeping on tracks. They started walking from Jalna to reach Madhya Pradesh and slept on rail tracks, assuming trains were not running, said police.
On Sunday, five migrants in another group of 20 were killed in Madhya Pradesh when a truck they were travelling in overturned.