Migrants duped by travel agents in Delhi, woman walks with kid on her back 28 kms in NCR

New Delhi: A small group of migrant labourers from Bihar duped by a travel agent in Delhi, a young woman from Chhattisgarh walking to the New Delhi Railway station to go back to her native place from Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh and another group of migrants from UP working in Haryana trying to cross the Yamuna are just some of the stories which have come in as India entered Lockdown 4 on May 18 (Monday). 

Three workers in Delhi booked online bus tickets worth Rs 8,000 to go to their native places in Bihar. The travel agent assured them that they will get their buses from Anand Vihar but didn't pick the calls when they reached the Inter-State Bus Terminal.

A photo of a woman with a child on her back in Greater Noida who was seen walking towards the New Delhi Railway Station to look for a train to her home in Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh). She said she couldn't get any help from either state or central government and decided to walk around 28 km to reach the NDLS railway station.

Another photo of a group of migrant labourers seen crossing the Yamuna river in Haryana to reach their homes also went viral on social media. 

Similarly, several large groups of migrant labourers were seen walking bare-foot on roads, crying on the phone because they couldn't attend the funerals of their closed ones and were also seen sleeping on highways/railway tracks.

There are an estimated more than 4 crore migrant labourers across the country, mostly working in Maharashtra (close to 80 lakh), Andhra Pradesh (over 37.3 lakh), Tamil Nadu (around 34.8 lakh), and Uttar Pradesh (31.5lakh).

The central and state governments are trying their best to provide these labourers with food and shelter, and have also started transporting them through special trains and buses, but the numbers are so high, that there are thousands out there who are not able to avail these services.

The COVID-19 crisis in the country has led to various problems for these daily-wage labourers, from not getting any work amid the lockdown to not being able to reach to their homes and families.

Earlier, there was a train mishap in Aurangabad, where 16 migrant workers were killed because of sleeping on railway tracks, and 24 migrant labourers were killed in Auraiya (Uttar Pradesh) in a road accident.