A collision on an Uttar Pradesh highway between two trucks carrying migrant workers home killed 25 labourers on Saturday, including at least five from Bengal.

At least 15 of the 35 injured are critical, according to district medical authorities in Auraiya, where the tragedy occurred.

Sources at the police headquarters in Lucknow said dozens of smaller road accidents had killed more than 300 returning migrant labourers in the state since the lockdown began on March 25. The figure is more than three times the state’s official Covid-19 death toll of 95.

A mini-truck carrying 22 migrant workers from Ghaziabad in the state’s west to Gorakhpur in the east had stopped at a roadside dhaba in village Chiruhuli for tea around 5am. While some of the passengers got off for tea, most continued sleeping in the mini-truck.

A large Calcutta-bound truck from Udaipur in Rajasthan, carrying bags of lime on top of which 40-odd migrants sat, hit the stationary mini-truck from behind, the survivors said.

The impact threw the labourers sitting on top of the larger truck into a ditch, before both trucks too rolled into the ditch. Twenty labourers who got buried under the bags of lime died on the spot. Five died on the way to hospital.

Vinay Kumar, 25, a labourer from Bihar who was on the mini-truck and escaped unhurt as he had got off for tea, told local reporters the travellers had met at the Ghaziabad bus stand.

“A driver approached us and said he was going to Gorakhpur and would drop us there for Rs 3,000 each,” Kumar, a motor mechanic, said.

The usual fare for the journey in normal times would have been between Rs 400 and Rs 500, he said.

While chief minister Yogi Adityanath claims his government has arranged thousands of buses for the returning migrants, Kumar said he hadn’t seen any.

“We kept waiting for buses at Ghaziabad bus stand for four days before hiring the mini-truck,” he said.

Archana Srivastava, chief medical officer of Auraiya, said: “Twenty-four people were brought dead to the district hospital. Of the 35 injured, 15 are critically wounded and have been sent to Saifai’s University of Medical Sciences.”

The dead include seven from Bokaro in Jharkhand, five from various districts of Uttar Pradesh, five from Bengal and two from Gaya in Bihar. Six of the dead are yet to be identified.

‘Exploited’

Over 300 migrant workers walking or buying rides home in the absence of government transport have been killed as trucks, tractors and private buses crashed, skidded into ditches or mowed down pedestrians, state police sources said.

“Almost every day accidents kill around five returning workers,” an officer said.

He added that another two dozen-odd migrant labourers had died of dehydration, fatigue or hunger on the roads.

Kumar, the motor mechanic, said everyone was exploiting the stranded and homesick migrant labourers, the group hit the worst by the lockdown.

“We cannot trust anybody, individuals or governments. Everybody is trying to exploit us,” he said.

“The motor workshop owner refused to pay our wages for March and April; the landlord wanted to raise my room rent; the grocer charged double for everything; the police demanded bribes to let us travel on the roads; the truck driver charged us what rich people pay for a flight; and the government announced it had arranged buses for us but we didn’t see any.”

Adityanath tweeted that the deaths in Saturday’s road accident were “unfortunate and painful”.

He announced a compensation of Rs 2 lakh for the family of each of the dead and Rs 50,000 for each injured.

Couple killed on way home

Unnao: Ashok Chaudhuri, 35, an auto-rickshaw driver in Haryana, and his wife Chhoti, 33, returning home to Bihar with their six-year-old son in the auto, were killed on Saturday when a loader hit them on the Lucknow-Agra Expressway where they had stopped to fill petrol. The child was unhurt. PTI