Amid reports of so many migrant workers dying in their quest to reach their home towns  as they are left stranded without work or money during the coronavirus lockdown, a migrant worker, who was cycling to reach his home in Bihar’s East Champaran, was hit by a car and died on Saturday in Lucknow.

26-year-old Sagheer Ansari is survived by his wife and three children. His village is 1000 km away from the national capital.

Ansari had started his journey on May 5 with a group of 7 people, all without work due to the lockdown to curb the spread of Coronavirus. They reached Lucknow in five days cycling throughout the journey.

Seven of them were having breakfast at around 10 am sitting on the divider of a road on Saturday, when a car lost control and hit Ansari after hitting the divider, according to the FIR. While the rest six of them were saved due to a tree there, reported NDTV.

Ansari’s friends who were cycling with him and mostly from around his native place say that the car driver came out from the car and offered them some money as compensation but later on he refused.  Ansari was taken to a hospital and while undergoing treatment he passed away.

An NGO and some political workers made arrangements for an ambulance to send his body home.

While the car driver has been arrested, police booked him for causing death due to negligence and will be sent to jail.

This comes just close on the heels of yet another similar incident where at least five migrant labourers were killed and 13 others injured in Madhya Pradesh’s Narsinghpur when a truck they were travelling in overturned in a village late night on Saturday.

These migrant labourers, a group of around 20 of them, were travelling from Hyderabad and going to Jhansi in Madhya Pradesh and Etah in Uttar Pradesh,  in a truck carrying mangoes.

Earlier, in yet another heart-wrenching Aurangabad incident where at least 16 migrants, who were sleeping on the railway tracks while returning to their native places amid the Coronavirus -inducted lockdown, were crushed to death after they were run over by a good train on Friday leading nationwide condolences. Around 20 of them were walking from Jalna in Maharashtra to reach around 150 km apart Bhusaval in Madhya Pradesh.

According to the police, the labourers were walking on the railway tracks so that they might escape the highways where police could have stopped them and they thought that trains were not running due to the coronavirus lockdown so they can use the tracks. Because they were tired from walking a long distance, they did not realise and dozed off at the tracks.

Amid the nationwide lockdown, thousands of daily wagers and other migrants undertook epic journeys to reach home — walking, cycling and hitching rides when they could — in the absence of any public transport, the outskirts of many cities like Delhi and Mumbai teemed with people.

The nationwide lockdown, which began on March 25, was first extended till April 14, then till May 3 and finally till May 17 with a few relaxations built in. The unprecedented move to stem the spread of COVID-19 triggered possibly the biggest movement of people since Partition.

Some made it, some are still on their way while some others just gave up on the way. There have been several reports of workers desperate to be with their families in the uncertain days of a pandemic but dying before they reached their destination.

The first reported casualty of this exodus was 39-year-old Ranveer Singh, who worked as a delivery boy for a restaurant in Delhi and died in Agra after walking for over 200 km to Morena in Madhya Pradesh.

According to a report by SaveLIFE Foundation, at least 42 migrants died in road accidents while attempting to return home during the Coronavirus lockdown.

The report details that about 140 lives were lost in over 600 road accidents over the course of the two phases of the nationwide lockdown between March 24 and May 3.

Of this count, 30 per cent of the victims were migrant workers returning to their homes, said the report by the non-profit organisation which underlined over-speeding on empty roads as one of the most common reasons for deaths across states.

Apart from 42 migrants, 17 essential workers also died in road accidents.