Baby plays with dead mom; video goes viral

Patna: A baby plays with a shroud covering its dead mother at a station in Bihar, in one of the most tragic visuals to emerge from the daily reports of migrants stranded by the coronavirus lockdown.

In a clip widely shared on social media, the toddler tugs at the cloth placed over his mother's body. The cloth comes off but his mother doesn't move; she had died moments before. According to her family, she died of extreme heat, hunger and dehydration.

The clip is from a station in Muzaffarpur in Bihar, where the 23-year-old woman had arrived in a special train for migrants on Monday. At the same station, a two-year-old child also died, reportedly from heat on top of inadequate food. The child's family had boarded a different train from Delhi on Sunday.

The woman, according to her family, had been unwell on the train because of the lack of food and water. She had taken a train from Ahmedabad, Gujarat on Saturday. On Monday, shortly before the train rolled into Muzaffarpur, she collapsed.After her body was laid out on the station platform, her little son kept playing and trying to wake her until an older child dragged him away.

The Railways Ministry says the woman had been unwell when she got on the train and the family got off at Muzaffarpur station when she died. The woman was heading to Katihar with her sister, sister's husband and two children, said the ministry.

"The woman's family members have said she was already unwell. Request all not to spread fake news," the railways tweeted.

Amid heart-breaking stories of jobless and penniless migrant workers being forced to walk or cycle hundreds of kilometres in searing heat in a desperate bid to return home, a kernel of good news and hope has emerged from a Delhi village. Pappan Singh, a mushroom farmer from Tigipur village in Dehi, has paid Rs 70,000 for air tickets to send 10 of his labourers - migrants from Bihar - back home.

Madhya Pradesh farmers may be celebrating a good harvest, but large crowds at procurement centres across the state have led to long queues, chaos and mismanagement.A farmer from the Agar Malwa district, who spent six days in scorching summer heat waiting for his wheat crop to be weighed, collapsed and died of a heart attack just as his produce was being put on the scales.