New Delhi: Eight migrants including four women were killed in three separate road accidents in Madhya Pradesh on Saturday, police said.
At least 29 others were injured in these accidents which took place in Sagar, Guna and Barwani districts, police said.
Six persons – four women and two men – were killed in an accident near Sagar, said Superintendent of Police (SP) Amit Sanghi.
They were heading for Uttar Pradesh from Maharashtra when the truck carrying them overturned on Sagar-Kanpur Road, 70 km from Sagar district headquarters, at around 10 am, Additional SP Praveen Bhuria had informed earlier.
Five of them were killed on the spot and 19 others injured. They were rushed to a government hospital at Banda, where one victim died later.
The truck was carrying bundles of clothes on top of which migrant travellers were sitting, police said.
A woman who was among survivors said they were three families returning from Nalasopara near Mumbai to UP.
In another tragedy in Guna district, a person was killed when the tempo in which he was travelling overturned near Bhadora.
Sub-divisional magistrate Shivani Garg said that a family from Dharavi in Mumbai was returning from Pratapgarh in UP, where they had been stuck due to lockdown, when the tempo overturned while trying to avoid hitting a bike.
Sharafat Ali (45), a Mumbai resident, died while 11 others were injured, two of them seriously, she said.
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In Barwani district, Aniket Thakur (22), resident of Azamgarh (UP), was killed when another vehicle rammed into the truck in which he was travelling from behind near Gavghati on Agra-Mumbai Road in the afternoon.
Nagalwadi Police Station in-charge Majhar Khan said the truck was carrying 45 migrant labourers from Mumbai to Azamgarh.
In another incident, at least 24 migrant labourers lost their lives and 36 people sustained injuries when a trailer truck carrying them collided with another truck in the early hours of Saturday in Uttar Pradesh’s Auraiya district. Both the trucks were carrying migrant workers.
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath expressed his condolences to the families of the deceased and directed the divisional commissioner and IG Kanpur to visit the site and give a report on the cause of the accident.
The deaths of the migrant labourers are the latest in a string of accidents that have killed over 400 people as workers across the country scramble to reach their homes amid the stringent coronavirus-induced lockdown imposed nearly two months.
On Friday, six migrant workers had been killed in different accidents across UP as they tried to make their way home.
On Wednesday night, six migrant workers, who were walking to their homes in Bihar from Punjab, were killed and another five others seriously injured when a speeding bus ran over them on the Delhi-Saharanpur highway in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar district.
In two separate accidents between Tuesday and Wednesday, four migrant labourers and members of their families – all on their way home in the course of the lockdown – died in Uttar Pradesh.
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At least five migrant labourers were killed and 13 others injured when a truck in which they were travelling overturned in Madhya Pradesh’s Narsinghpur district last Saturday.
As many as 16 migrant workers were run over by a goods train while they slept on tracks at Aurangabad in Maharashtra, last week.
(With inputs from PTI)