By Alok Pandey

Lucknow, May 11, 2020: Om Prakash was on a 1,000-km journey to his home in Bihar’s Saran.

The 20-year-old construction worker in Uttar Pradesh’s Greater Noida walked 200 km to reach Agra where he found a truck driver willing to take him to Lucknow, 350 km ahead, for a fee.

The journey is hard, and problems kept piling up for him.

“I have only 10 rupees in my pocket,” Prakash told NDTV, tears welling up in his eyes. He paid the truck driver 400 rupees. “But from here, I do not know what will I do,” he said at Lucknow.

He could get the vehicle because a group of policemen had stopped an empty truck. “Drop them near the railway station. There are buses there and things will be arranged. Don’t take them anywhere else,” a constable yelled at the driver. Several migrants, including Prakash, climb on the truck’s back.

Prakash was among thousands of migrants who turned up at a toll plaza near Lucknow, walking hundreds of kilometers in the hope of getting back to their native states. Some like Prakash have reached there paying hefty sums to truck drivers. Most have no money left, and are still far away from home.

Some distance away, another truck driver named Mahender Kumar is cooking a dal-baati meal underneath his truck. He has to feed his himself, his helper and the 30 accompanying migrant workers who travelled from Agra to Lucknow on his truck. “He did not charge a single rupee,” shouts a traveller.

Asked why he has not charged any money when others are charging exorbitantly, he says: “That would not be acceptable to my conscience.”

“Anyone will empathize with them. There is no end to the number of people walking on the roads; must be thousands,” he adds.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants have been stranded across the country without job and money because of the coronavirus lockdown. The federal government has arranged special trains to ferry migrants on a payment basis. Some states have arranged buses on pro-bono basis, others are charging fares.

Without essentials and hope, thousands across the country have chosen to walk or cycle back home.

Last week, sixteen migrant workers in a group of 20 were killed after a cargo train ran over them while they were sleeping on the tracks in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad.

Source: ndtv.com