Mangal Gope had been hoping the lockdown would end on April 14. When the young migrant worker’s hopes were dashed, he made up his mind. He would hit the road to his native Jharkhand.

The 23-year-old and some of his friends — all employed as labourers in Odisha — managed to cover only 12km of the 400km distance from Bhubaneswar to Jagannathpur when a police jeep caught up with them.

They are now under police custody in Bhubaneswar.

“We had a lot of hope that the lockdown would end on April 14. But after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Tuesday the lockdown would continue, we decided to leave the place at once,” Gope told The Telegraph on Thursday from his current location, an under-construction building in an area that falls under Model police station, Nandan Kanan.

He gets rations the police provide and can use his mobile too but that’s where freedom ends — another locked-down tale of migrant woes, stranded in a nowhere place away from where they work and far away from home.

Sisir Kumar Mishra, public relations officer, police commissionerate, said the migrant labourers had been intercepted in Cuttack and “dissuaded” from continuing with their journey.

“During the extended lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, 10 migrant labourers from Jharkhand and 21 from Bengal were dissuaded while passing through Cuttack. They were accommodated under Nandan Kanan, Chauliaganja and Malgodwon police stations with dry rations and provision for cooked food,” Mishra said.

According to official records, more than 77,000 migrant labourers are stranded in different parts of Odisha. While a number of them have been accommodated in government-run shelters, those like Gope have been put in under-construction buildings.

“We have instructed all labour contractors to look after the food requirements of labourers. If anyone lodges a complaint, serious steps will be taken against the contractor. Besides, on the instruction of the police commissioner, we are also providing rations to the stranded labourers. All of us have been asked to be humane in our approach” said Gayadhar Behera, a policeman with Nandan Kanan police station.

Gope and his friends Mithun Munda, Kaira Kerai and Sanjay Kerkare had decided to hit the road the same day Modi announced the lockdown would be extended till May 3. “Our home is no more than 400km from here (Bhubaneswar). We would have covered the distance in three to four days,” he said.

The migrant worker said he was his family’s only earning member. “My father recently met with an accident in Secunderabad. The family has no money at this point. My mother was crying and in a video call begged me to return home.”

The young man made up his mind then and there. “We decided to leave the city around 3am on April 15. But by the time we organised ourselves, it was late by nearly four hours. We started our journey at 8am after taking curd rice. We had covered around 12km and crossed the city’s jurisdiction and entered the Cuttack district limits when police got to know about our movement. Our images had been recorded on a CCTV near a railway crossing and transmitted to police,” Gope said.

“Suddenly a police jeep came. Asked where we were headed to, my friends told the truth out of fear.”

Did they regret their decision to leave Bhubaneswar?

“The thought of our family members haunts us,” said Gope’s friend Kerkare.

“We have been told our family members in Jharkhand are getting rice. But we would request the government to give money to our families. There is no money in any labourer’s family. Even we have no money to buy emergency medicines. I hope my appeal for my parents would reach our chief minister and he will take steps to evacuate us from here.”

Had any of them been ill-treated? “We have no grudge against the police,” said another labourer. “But how many days shall we remain in confinement without work and money?”

The contractor had cleared their dues, yes, but it wasn’t enough. “We had worked for only 10 days before the lockdown started,” he said.

Bankim Biswas, 49, who is from the Dhantala police station area of Nadia, Bengal, said: “We have been here for the last 25 days. We could not muster the courage to make a trip on foot to our state. We are just counting the days when the lockdown period will end and trains and buses will start running again.”

The government, Biswas added, should come up with a scheme to provide money to families of migrant labourers.

Former Union minister Srikant Jena on Thursday wrote to Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik urging him to give Rs 5,000 to the family of each labourer.