Amidst strict lockdown measures imposed all across India, a 12-year-old girl died while making a 150-kilometre trip on foot from a village in Telangana to her native Bijapur district in Chhattisgarh, officials said on Monday.

Jamlo Makdam was among a group of 11 people who started out on foot from Telangana to return to their native place in Bijapur on April 15 since there was no mode of transportation because of the lockdown. The minor died on April 18, when she some 50 kilometres away from her village.

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The group consisted of labourers who work in chilli fields in Kannaiguda village in Telangana.

“The distance between the place in Telangana where she worked and Bijapur is 150 kilometres and she died some 50 kilometres away from her native village here. She had a meal on Saturday morning but then complained of stomach ache and uneasiness and died around 10am,” said Bijapur Chief Medical and Health Officer BR Pujari.

Meanwhile, the child’s samples have tested negative for Coronavirus and she is believed to have died either due to exhaustion, electrolyte imbalance or dehydration, he said.

Further course of action will be decided after the post-mortem of the body, he added.

He said those who were walking along have informed that the girl did not eat well which may have caused muscle fatigue, adding that the viscera had been preserved for further medical investigation.

The state government later in the evening announced a compensation of Rs 1 lakh for the kin of the girl.

The girl’s father, Andoram Madkam, according to a report in NDTV, said she had been working in Telangana for two months. “She had walked for three days. She suffered from vomiting and stomach ache,” he said.

Hundreds of migrant labourers are stranded in various parts of the country and are unable to move to their natives as the lockdown has shut down transportation facilities and sealed state boundaries.

A sea of such labourers was seen on Anand Vihar and Kaushambi bus terminals in Delhi and Ghaziabad on March 29 to catch buses provided by the state governments. This was followed by many videos surfacing on social media where those labourers, after reaching at certain places, were treated inhumanely by the local administrations and others.

Also, there have been reports of migrants workers collapsing and dying on way to their native places.

In one of the few cases, a 38-year-old man, who had walked over 200 km from Delhi to reach his home in Madhya Pradesh’s Morena, collapsed and died at Delhi-Agra highway on March 29.