One possibly cannot fathom how to react when one sees the visuals of a baby playing with the shroud that covers his dead mother’s body.
An extremely heart wrenching visual surfaced in the media, wherein a little baby is seen playing with the shroud covering his dead mother at Bihar’s Muzaffarpur station.
This is among the many visuals that have emerged in the recent past which show the plight of the migrant workers amid the lockdown.
The clip has been widely shared on social media.
The clip shows the toddler tugging at the cloth covering his mother’s body, as he tries to pull the cloth away he realises that his mother doesn’t move. She died just moments ago from fatigue and tiredness. According to her family, the woman died because of extreme heat and dehydration.
The clip was shot at a station in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur, where the 23 year old woman had arrived via a special train for migrants on Monday. It was at the same station that a two year old child also died due to heat and inadequate food. The child’s family had come via a special train meant for migrant workers from Delhi on Sunday.
The woman who died in the train shortly before it could reach Muzaffarpur was unwell from the beginning of the journey itself and her family feels that she died due to starvation and thirst.
She had boarded the train from Ahmedabad on Sunday and died just a short distance before the train reached Muzaffarpur.
Her body was then laid out at the station and her little son kept trying to wake her up, until an older sibling dragged him away. The woman wanted to go to Katihar with her sister, brother in law and two children.
In the last couple of weeks many disturbing visuals portraying the pathological state of migrant workers has come to us from different corners of the country.
In the lockdown, the migrant workers have been rendered jobless and their meagre savings have already been exhausted. Without jobs or money, many migrant workers have also been undertaking arduous journeys back home on foot or have been traveling on cycles, autos or trucks. Many have died before they could reach home, either in road accidents or due to exhaustion.
It was earlier in the m0nth that the Centre had decided on starting special trains to take migrants home, but due to a large number of migrants and a limited number of trains, many have made desperate arrangements to return back home.
They have been forced to wait in long queues despite the scorching heat with little food and water. A recent home ministry order suggested that there is no permission required from the destination states to run the trains and this seems to only have enhanced the levels of chaos. The lack of coordination between the Centre and the states is evident in this regard.
