25 migrants die in UP lorry smash
Lockdown related deaths continue; Opposition terms it ‘murder’, not accident
Auraiya (UP), May 16: At least 25 migrant workers were killed and 40 others injured when a trailer they had hitched a ride on slammed into a stationary truck on a highway near here in the early hours of Saturday, the latest in a string of accidents involving migrants returning to their states amid the Coronavirus lockdown.
Most of the victims were sitting on sacks of wheat flour loaded on the trailer, and were crushed when the vehicles overturned and fell into a ditch following the crash that occurred near an eatery between 3 am and 3.30 am on the Auraiya-Kanpur Dehat stretch of National Highway 19, police said.
While many of the workers were from Jharkhand and West Bengal, some were from Kushinagar in eastern Uttar Pradesh, they said. District magistrate Abhishek Singh said that all the deceased were men.
The truck, which was going from Delhi to Madhya Pradesh, had stopped at the eatery as some workers wanted to have tea. It was carrying around 22 people, including five women and seven children, officials said.
The trailer with 43 migrants was coming from Rajasthan, they said. Both were ferrying people who found themselves without jobs, money or food during the lockdown and were desperate to return to their homes.
Fifteen persons who were seriously injured have been admitted to a hospital in Saifai in Etawah district. The rest were hospitalised in Auraiya, about 400 km from New Delhi and 200 km from the state capital.
The Congress and the Samajwadi Party hit out at the BJP government, saying it was not an accident but a “murder”, and asked why it was not making adequate arrangements for the migrant labourers.
The state government announced an ex gratia of `2 lakh to the kin of each deceased, and `50,000 to the seriously injured. It directed district magistrates in the border districts to strictly comply with the order on providing buses to migrants.
Thirty-five migrants have died in four major accidents this week, apart from several other mishaps where individual workers or their family members have died.