At least 12 migrant workers who were walking to their home towns were killed in accidents in three separate incidents in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Bihar since the last Saturday.

Since the lockdown began, several migrant daily wage workers were forced to either stay at their workplace surviving on NGOs and state government’s help or walk to their native places hundreds of kilometres away. Many migrants have lost their lives in accidents as they walk along the roadsides.

A young migrant worker was killed and his companion was injured after they were run over by a Toyota Innova on a highway in Haryana’s Ambala district.

The two migrants hailed from Bihar and were walking back to their native state on Tuesday morning. The police stated that the car allegedly swerved at a high speed and became uncontrollable. While the vehicle has been seized, the driver fled the scene.

In a separate incident, four migrant labourers who were on the move, taking on the journey of thousands of kilometres to reach their native states, were reportedly killed in separate road accidents since on Monday evening.

According to reports, a migrant mother and her six-year-old lost their lives when the auto-rickshaw they were travelling in was hit by a truck just a few kilometres from their destination in Uttar Pradesh’s Fatehpur.

The mother was part of a group travelling between Maharashtra and Jaunpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh and had already covered a distance of 1,300 km in the rickshaw.

On Saturday, in a separate incident, at least six migrant workers were killed and 14 others were reportedly injured after the truck in which they hitched a ride overturned in Madhya Pradesh’s Narsinghpur.

The labourers were going in the truck laden with mangoes to Jhansi, Etah and Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh from Hyderabad, police said.

Several videos have surfaced on the internet which points towards the plight of the migrant workers forced to take thousand kilometres journey on foot without access to food and water.

The government’s Shramik special trains to ferry the migrants back to their home states entails a long list of challenges for such workers who are accompanied by their families and cannot afford to wait for days.

Men, women carrying children say that if they don’t keep moving they would die of hunger before coronavirus.

Also Read: Vadodara: Police Helps Uttar Pradesh Family With Money, Ration Amid Lockdown