At a railway station in Bihar's Muzaffarpur, a child tries to wake his mother up. He tugs at the cloth covering her until it comes off. But his mother lies there motionless: she has died of starvation, dehydration and extreme heat.
The video of the child and his dead mother has been widely shared on social media and it is one of the most tragic visual evidence of what the migrants are undergoing amid the lockdown imposed due to the Coronavirus spread.
According to a report in NDTV, the incident occurred at a station in Muzaffarpur in Bihar, where the woman had arrived in a special train for migrants.
Her family said that she had taken ill on the train due to the lack of food and water. The deceased woman had boarded the special train from Gujarat on Saturday. When the train reached Muzaffarnagar on Monday, she collapsed. Her body was laid out on the station platform where her child frantically tried to wake her up.
Dozens of migrant workers have lost their lives while on their way back to home. After the lockdown was imposed in late March, lakhs of migrant workers were left jobless and as a result, they began to march to their native villages. In the absence of transport, thousands of them travelled home afoot or cycles or were huddled in load carriers and trucks.
Many of them died due to hunger, smouldering heat and the road accidents.
