Two major road accident involving migrant workers were reported on Thursday morning in which 14 were killed.
Six migrant workers were killed and five seriously injured after they were run over by a Uttar Pradesh state transport bus in Muzaffarnagar, police said.
Eight migrant workers were killed and nearly 50 others injured when a bus in which they were travelling collided with a truck near Guna town in Madhya Pradesh.
The accident in MP took place between 3 am and 4 am when the victims were on their way to Uttar Pradesh border from Maharashtra, Cantt police station in-charge Madan Mohan Malviya said. The injured persons were rushed to a nearby district hospital.
Policemen involved in the rescue work were later quarantined in the wake of the COVID-19 scare, another police official said.
In Uttar Pradesh, NDTV says the workers had been walking to their hometown Gopalganj in Bihar from Punjab when they were run over by state transport bus.
The accused driver, who was suspected to be under the influence of alcohol, was arrested, SSP Abhishek Yadav told PTI.
A police official said the bus was empty when the accident took place.
“We received information around 11 pm that a group of persons walking on the NH-9 highway had been hit by a bus. On reaching the spot, we were told by locals that the people were migrants, which we are in the process of verifying. Six people were declared dead on arrival at the hospital while two have been referred to Meerut. A case of negligence will be filed against the driver,” said Anil Kaparvan, SHO Kotwali police station, told the Indian Express.
He said the bus was possibly one of those being used to evacuate migrant workers and those stranded during lockdown.
There has been a spate of accidents across the country, involving migrant workers walking long distances to go back to their homes as public transport remained suspended during lockdown.
Two road accidents had been reported in UP on Wednesday alone.
A truck carrying a group of 54 migrant labourers and their families from Ahmedabad in Gujarat to Balrampur in Uttar Pradesh rammed into a stationary truck near Lalpur police post on Kanpur-Jhansi highway, killing three people and injuring 43 others.
In Chitrakoot, a migrant labourer returning home in Uttar Pradesh from Chhattisgarh on a bicycle was killed after being hit by a truck, the police said.
Last week, in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad, 16 migrant workers were killed after a train ran over them while they were sleeping on the tracks.