A baby plays with a shroud covering its dead mother at a station in Bihar, in one of the most tragic visuals to emerge from the countless stories of migrants stranded by the coronavirus lockdown, desperate for jobs, food or shelter.
In the clip widely shared on social media, the toddler tugs at the cloth partly covering his mother, lying motionless. The cloth comes off but the woman doesn't move; she died of extreme heat, hunger and dehydration moments ago.
The clip is from a station in Muzaffarpur in Bihar, where the woman had arrived in a special train for migrants.
The woman, according to her family, had been unwell on the train because of the lack of food and water. She had boarded the train from Gujarat on Saturday. On Monday, shortly before the train rolled into Muzaffarnagar, the woman collapsed.
After her body was laid out on the station platform, her little son kept trying to wake her until an older child dragged him away.
Lakhs of migrant workers and their families were left to fend for themselves after India went into shutdown in late March. Without jobs or money, the migrants set out for their homes thousands of kilometres away, walking or on cycles, autos or trucks.
Many died before they could reach home, either in road accidents or from hunger and exhaustion.
Earlier this month, the government started special trains to take migrants home, but the process has been vexed by paperwork and glitches, which led to many making their own arrangements to go home.
In the soaring heat, migrant families have been forced to wait in queues, either for tickets or at centres where they are screened and declared virus-free to travel on trains.
Temperatures have touched 50 degrees in parts of India, adding to the suffering of labourers and families on the move.
