17 migrant labourers killed, 93 injured in accidents in 24 hours

Mangled remains of a truck, carrying nearly 65 migrant labourers, after it collided with an empty bus, on Guna…Read More

NEW DELHI: Seventeen migrant labourers died even as 93 others were injured in separate road accidents in just 24 hours while they were on their way home — in buses, trucks and on foot — to towns in Madhya Pradesh, UP and Bihar.
In the first incident late on Wednesday, six migrant labourers walking from Haryana to Bihar in a group of 16 were mowed down by a speeding bus on the Muzaffarnagar-Saharanpur state highway in UP.
The survivors said they were travelling to Bihar in a truck after they lost their jobs at a factory in Haryanas Yamunanagar when UP police stopped the vehicle and asked them to “go back where they came from”. After taking shelter at an ashram in Saharanpur for a day, they decided to walk all the way to their native place Gopalganj when the speeding bus ran over six of them and injured five.
DIG (Saharanpur range) Upender Agarwal told TOI, “We have come across several cases where factory owners from bordering states are dropping retrenched labourers near the UP borders, telling them that the state government would make arrangements for their travel back home.”
A government official in Lucknow said chief minister Yogi Adityanath had announced an ex gratia of Rs 2 lakh each to the families of the deceased and Rs 50,000 to the injured.
In another accident on Wednesday night, a 36-year-old migrant worker who set out on foot from Gurgaon to Bihars Samastipur — about 1,200 km away — with his family was run over by a truck near Jharsa on the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway.
The man, who lost his job at a manufacturing unit after the lockdown, had made several attempts to secure tickets for his family on a Read More – Source

times of india