Lockdown deaths: Of those who never reached home

Although the lockdown has been an important tool in breaking the chain of transmission and saving lives, it has also resulted in the loss of life at the same time. Migrant workers stranded in different parts of the country, away from home started their journeys back home, on foot or by some other means, but not all of them reached home.

New Delhi: As the government readied trains to transport migrant workers to their homes in distant corners, Dharamveer and Tabarat Mansoor gave up on the battle of life, one collapsing while cycling from Delhi to Bihar and the other as he headed from Maharashtra to Uttar Pradesh.

Sheer fatigue felled them both, as it did so many other stranded migrants who set off for home, hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometres away, desperate to be with their families in the prolonged lockdown that left them with no money, no jobs and no roof over their heads.

Home beckoned. But they never did get there.

Some bought cycles with their little savings and others just set off on the long walk, in shoes with paper-thin soles or flip flops, their few belongings packed into backpacks or unwieldy bundles.

On Friday night, the first special train ferrying over 1,200 stranded migrants from Telangana reached Hatia in Jharkhand from where the state government took them to their respective districts in sanitised buses in accordance with COVID-19 protocols.

Sometime around then, 32-year-old Dharamveer was declared brought dead at a hospital in Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh. He began cycling, along with other labourers like him, from Delhi to Khagaria in Bihar, about 1,200 km away, on April 28, police said.

"On Friday night, they halted at the Delhi-Lucknow highway in Shahjahanpur. When Dharamveer's condition deteriorated, the labourers took him to the medical college where he was declared brought dead," Circle Officer (City) Praveen Kumar said.

The day before, 50-year-old Tabarat died in Sendhwa in Madhya Pradesh after cycling over 390 kilometres to get home from Bhiwandi in Maharashtra to Maharajganj in Uttar Pradesh, about 1,600 km away.

"He died on Thursday near Sendhwa in Barwani possibly due to fatigue and heart attack," said Ramesh Pawar who was with him.

Recapping the arduous journey, he said the group of 11 had left on their cycles on April 25 to get to Maharajganj.

Those accompanying him wanted to take his body to Maharajganj but police did not give permission given the ongoing lockdown restrictions and he was buried in Sendhwa, his desire to go home unfulfilled.

As lakhs of daily wagers and other migrants undertook epic journeys to reach home - walking, cycling and hitching rides when they could - in the absence of any public transport, the outskirts of many cities like Delhi and Mumbai teemed with people.

The nationwide lockdown, which began on March 25, was first extended till May 3 and then on Friday till May 17 with a few relaxations built-in. The unprecedented move to stem the spread of COVID-19 triggered possibly the biggest movement of people since Partition.

Some made it, some are still on their way and some just gave up somewhere in between, their stamina unable to keep pace with their will to get to their families. Their tragedies found wide echo across India.

Twelve-year-old Jamlo Kadam, who was making a 150-km trip on foot from Telangana where she worked in a chilli farm to Bijapur in Chhattisgarh, was one of the youngest victims.

She started walking on April 15 and died tantalisingly close to her village on the morning of April 18, an official told reporters.

"The distance between the place in Telangana where she worked and Bijapur is 150 kilometres and she died some 50 kilometres away from her village.

"Her samples tested negative for coronavirus and she may have died due to electrolyte imbalance," a health official added.

Insaf Ali, 35, was even closer. He reached his village in Uttar Pradesh's Shravasti district but did not make it home.

Ali walked or hitched 1,500 km from Mumbai to Shravast, the Indian Express reported. He worked as a helper to a mason in Mumbai before the lockdown and reached Mathkanwa village where he was quarantined early on Monday morning this week. By noon, he was dead.

The media recorded several such stories, of workers desperate to be with their families in the uncertain days of a pandemic but dying before they reached their destination.

The first reported casualty of this exodus was 39-year-old Ranveer Singh, who worked as a delivery boy for a restaurant in Delhi and died in Agra after walking for over 200 km to Morena in Madhya Pradesh

The autopsy revealed a heart attack, triggered by exhaustion due to the arduous long walk, as the cause of death, the Times of India reported.

Then there was 62-year-old Gangaram Yelenge who died in Surat after walking from a hospital to his house for around eight kilometres as no vehicle was available.

Logesh Balasubramani, 23, trekked from Nagpur on his way home to Namakkal in Tamil Nadu but breathed his last while resting at a shelter home in Secunderabad, NDTV reported.

Satya, who was part of the group of 26 that set off on the march from Nagpur, said they had walked for three days with random strangers giving them food and sometimes a ride.

Hundreds of miles from southern Secunderabad, three people succumbed to extreme cold in Jammu and Kashmir. Indian Express reported that they were attempting to reach their home in Jammu through a perilous hilly route after being denied passage from the Jawahar Tunnel.

Some working migrants lost their lives in accidents.

In Madhya Pradesh, three labourers sleeping on the roadside after residents of their village refused them entry due to fears of the spread of the coronavirus, were mowed down by a truck. In Hyderabad, seven migrant workers and an 18-month old baby were killed when their vehicle was hit by a truck.

In another incident, four migrant workers from Rajasthan were crushed to death and three seriously injured when a tempo ran over them as they were walking along a highway in Maharashtra's Palghar district.

Researchers Thejesh GN, Kanika Sharma and Aman estimate that there have been over 300 non-virus deaths, including from suicides, denial of medicare, hunger and financial distress since the lockdown began.

"We have been tracking newspapers, online news portals, and social media to compile such deaths due to the lockdown across India, in a handful of languages - primarily English, Hindi and few vernaculars (Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Odiya, and Malayalam)," Aman, assistant professor at the Jindal Global School of Law, told reporters.

"It must be understood these deaths are likely an underestimate: only a fraction of deaths as per reported by the media and we may have missed some deaths reported in local media as well," he said.

PTI