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'Ensure no migrant worker has to walk on road or railway track': Home ministry to states

The Union Home Ministry has directed all the states to cooperate in order to mitigate the distress of migrant workers, who are walking towards their native places on foot from various parts of the country.

In his letter to the chief secretaries, Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla asked the states to coordinate with the railways ministry for running more special trains to ferry the migrants.

Bhalla also asked the state administration to make designated rest places on routes taken by the migrants to reach their homes. These places can be identified with the help of district administration, and NGOs can help in building them, he further said in the letter.

The home secretary also asked the states to take into account the requirement of sanitation, food and health at these rest places and alleviate the notion of long quarantine at these places.

Also read:  Stopped from cycling home, migrants wait for hours in buses

He also said that district administration and states should make sure that no migrant worker has to resort to walking on roads or railway track.

The letter, sent on Monday, was posted on Twitter by the home ministry spokesperson today when three different accidents claimed the lives of more than a dozen migrant workers.

Nine labourers were killed in Bihar's Naugachia in early hours of Tuesday in a head-on collision between a bus carrying migrants and a truck. Five others were injured.

The truck fell into a ditch after hitting the bus.

In another accident, four migrant workers were killed and 15 others injured after a bus they were travelling in crashed into a truck in Maharashtra's Yavatmal early on Tuesday. The bus was travelling from Solapur to Jharkhand.

Three migrant labourers were killed and more than 12 injured after a vehicle carrying them overturned on a highway late on Monday in Uttar Pradesh's Mahoba district. About 17 people were travelling in the vehicle when the accident took place on the Jhansi-Mirzapur highway.

Earlier on Monday, at least six migrant workers were killed and several others were injured in separate road accidents in Bihar when they were returning home during the ongoing lockdown to combat the coronavirus outbreak. The accidents took at Gopalganj, Bhagalpur, Patna, Bhojpur and Begusarai districts.

(Input from agencies)

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