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Mangled remains of a truck, carrying nearly 65 migrant laborers, after it collided with an empty bus, on Guna …Read More
NEW DELHI: Seventeen migrant laborers 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 laborers 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 traveling to Bihar in a truck after they lost their jobs at a factory in Haryana’s 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 laborers 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 Bihar’s 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 Shramik Special train, but was unable to do so, after which they decided to walk home.
Meanwhile, early on Thursday, eight migrant workers were killed and 50 others injured when a truck in which they were traveling from Maharashtra to UP collided with a bus near MP’s Guna. The dead were residents of UP’s Unnao and Raebareli districts who had paid up to Rs 4,000 per head for the truck ride.
In Bihar as well, a bus carrying migrants collided with a truck on Thursday morning, killing two and injuring over 24, five of them critically. The accident took place near Shankar Chowk in Samastipur district.
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