16 migrants sleeping on a railway track were mowed down by a goods train in Maharashtra on Friday morning More than any other incident in over 40 days of a lockdown that is reputedly the world’s most stringent, it was the mowing down of 16 migrants sleeping on a rail track in Aurangabad, Maharashtra, on Friday that encapsulated the human tragedy unleashed by the covid-19 pandemic.
The migrants, who had walked 36km on the first stretch of what would have been their journey home to Madhya Pradesh, had fallen asleep on the rail track, tired.
A goods train ploughed through them at daybreak. The covid-19 pandemic has hit the poor the hardest in India, with locked factories and other workplaces triggering the biggest internal migration since