NEW DELHI: A freight train in western India on Friday struck and killed 16 people who had fallen asleep on a railway track, exhausted after walking 45 kilometers on their desperate journey home.
A group of 20 workers lost their jobs at an iron factory in Jalna, Maharashtra state, on Wednesday night and started to walk toward their hometown of Bhusawal in neighboring Madhya Pradesh, around 165 kilometers away.
But, with no public transport available due to the country’s coronavirus shutdown, they decided to follow the railway track.
“Me and my two other friends were walking a little distance away from the rest of the group,” Dhirendra Singh, who survived the accident, told reporters from a hospital in Aurangabad.
“When we saw the train coming, we frantically tried to wake my friends up but they could not react in time and the tragedy took place. We applied for government permission and asked them to send us back home but no response came so in desperation we started walking on the empty track.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his anguish over the accident, with the tragedy renewing focus on the aftermath of a lockdown imposed on March 24 to contain the outbreak.
Shutdowns of construction sites and industrial activity rendered millions of people jobless. With road, train and air travel suspended, thousands of daily wage workers took to the streets and, in the absence of any support, started to walk hundreds of miles to reach their hometowns.
Ramovtar Mandal and his four friends paddled 1,300 kilometers from Delhi to Bariarpur city, in eastern Bihar state, for 10 days because they could no longer survive without work.
“It was the toughest time of our life when every moment of our escape from Delhi we were reminded of hunger,” he told Arab News. “We survived on the bare minimum and managed to live in our village after lots of pain and trauma. For two weeks after the lockdown started, I tried to manage somehow but, when all the rations dried up, I along with my friends decided to paddle home in our cart. The government completely abdicated its responsibility toward the workers after announcing the lockdown. Many of us would die of hunger before the coronavirus would claim us.”
Critics of the lockdown say it should not be maintained if the government cannot take care of its own people.
The leader of the main opposition Congress Party Rahul Gandhi, responded to the train accident, saying: “We should be ashamed at the treatment meted out to the builders of our nation.”
Former finance minister Yashwant Sinha, who used to be a prominent member of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, said that migrant workers had been “left to die.”
“This is a complete abdication of responsibility by the government of India,” he told Arab News. “Never in our history has one seen such an insensitive government.”
Prominent civil and human rights activist Harsh Mander referred to the imposition of lockdown as “official cruelty” toward the poor.
“The government is stubborn in recognizing the mounting human tragedy that is playing out by extending no support to workers in the city and by trapping them in the city and by assisting them not to leave — all of these have compounded the tragedy,” he told Arab News.
“I see it as a complete absence of public compassion in the institutions of state and, sadly, the judiciary has also refused to intervene in this hour of crisis.”
