New Delhi- As the government readied trains to transport migrant workers to their homes in distant corners, Dharamveer and Tabarat Mansoor gave up on the battle of life, one collapsing while cycling from Delhi to Bihar and the other as he headed from Maharashtra to Uttar Pradesh
Sheer fatigue felled them both, as it did so many other stranded migrants who set off for home, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres away, desperate to be with their families in the prolonged lockdown that left them with no money, no jobs and no roof over their heads.
Home beckoned. But they never did get there.
Some bought cycles with their little savings and others just set off on the long walk, in shoes with paper thin soles or flip flops, their few belongings packed into backpacks or unwieldy bundles.
On Friday night, the first special train ferrying over 1,200 stranded migrants from Telangana reached Hatia in Jharkhand from where the state government took them to their respective districts in sanitised buses in accordance with Covid-19 protocols. Sometime around then, 32-year-old Dharamveer was declared brought dead at a hospital in Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh. He began cycling, along with other labourers like him, from Delhi to Khagaria in Bihar, about 1,200 km away, on April 28, police said.
“When Dharamveer’s condition deteriorated, the labourers took him to the medical college where he was declared brought dead,” Circle Officer (city) Praveen Kumar said. The day before, 50-year-old Tabarat died in Sendhwa in Madhya Pradesh after cycling over 390 kilometres to get home from Bhiwandi in Maharashtra to Maharajganj in Uttar Pradesh, about 1,600 km away. “He died on Thursday near Sendhwa in Barwani possibly due to fatigue and heart attack,” said Ramesh Pawar who was with him.
The unprecedented move to stem Covid spread triggered possibly the biggest movement of people since Partition.
Insaf Ali, 35, was even closer. He reached his village in Uttar Pradesh’s Shravasti district but did not make it home. Ali walked or hitched 1,500 km from Mumbai to Shravast. He worked as a helper to a mason in Mumbai before the lockdown and reached Mathkanwa village where he was quarantined early on Monday morning this week. By noon, he was dead. The media recorded several such stories, of workers desperate to be with their families in the uncertain days of a pandemic but dying before they reached their destination.
The first reported casualty of this exodus was 39-year-old Ranveer Singh, who worked as a delivery boy for a restaurant in Delhi and died in Agra after walking for over 200 km to Morena in MP.
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