In a shocking incident, 18 migrant workers who were desperate to return home to Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh were found stuffed inside a concrete mixer on a highway in Madhya Pradesh on Saturday morning.
These migrant workers were stuffed in a massive drum of the concrete mixer truck and were aiming to reach Lucknow due to the lockdown.
Cops who were stationed on the border between Indore and Ujjain districts stopped the truck to check the illegal movement of people during the nationwide lockdown.
On questioning, the truck driver looked nervous which raised an alarm for the cops. They checked the massive drum. Usually, the drum comes for the use of mixing a large quantity of cement and other materials to produce concrete for the construction activities, but to their shock, 18 labourers were found hidden in it.
A video has been shot which shows the distressing scene.
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In the video, a concrete mixer can be seen parked along the side of a road while migrant labourers are seen coming out of the massive drum, one by one. The entrance of the drum was small to barely fit a human being in it.
Few of them were seen with their belongings in tattered cloth bags.
“How many more people? How many people are there inside?” a man could be heard asking in the video.
Another man, who presumably was a police officer, was heard ordering the migrants to stand by the side of the road and maintain a gap between each other to ensure social distancing.
An FIR has been registered by the Madhya Pradesh police and the truck was sent to a police station. The police have taken the migrants to a quarantine centre where they were screened for infection.
According to the reports, the state government is arranging for their transport to Lucknow via bus.
The incident came a day after the government has extended the lockdown for another two weeks till May 17.
However, this time, the lockdown comes with certain relaxations in the red, orange and green zones.
The cases of coronavirus have crossed the 36,000 mark with 1,218 deaths due to the deadly virus.