JOIN USHit by lockdown, labourers traverse snow-packed mountains to reach home
Taking a cue from labourers from other states, a group of workers walked over a hundred kilometers in snow-packed mountains to reach hilly Poonch district in Jammu from Kashmir where they had remained stuck due to lockdown and restrictions over COVID-19 pandemic.
Reports said over two dozen labourers reached Chandimarh village of Surankote in Poonch on Saturday evening, following which locals informed authorities, who took them to a quarantine facility. “The labourers belong to different villages of Rajouri district and were working in the Valley where they got stuck.
“Preliminary reports suggest that they started their journey by foot from Shopian in south Kashmir on Friday morning and spent the night somewhere in the snow-packed mountains of Pir Ki Gali before reaching Surankote on Saturday evening,” sources said.
District Magistrate Poonch, Rahul Yadav said that all the laborers are presently in medical aid center where designated teams are carrying out necessary screening. “We are not going to allow anyone to move from here and all these laborers have been kept in the quarantine facility in Surankote,” he said.
Hit by a sudden 21-day lockdown and no transport, thousands of migrant labourers from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and other states are walking for days to reach their homes from the Delhi-NCR region and Gujarat, about 200 to 300 km away. And some elsewhere try to make the desperate journey crammed inside container trucks.