Hundreds of migrant workers on Thursday staged a protest in Sendhwa town on the Madhya Pradesh-Maharashtra border, demanding food and transport arrangements to go back home, PTI reported. The town is an important stopping point for migrant labourers going to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh from Maharashtra.

Eyewitnesses told the news agency that the migrant workers threw stones at the police personnel deployed at the spot. A labourer said that the group of migrants, which included pregnant women, children and old people, was not even provided food and water. He said that they kept waiting for transport at the border for hours.

“People here are travelling with month-old babies,” Sailesh Tripathi, a resident of Madhya Pradesh, who works in Pune told NDTV. “The Maharashtra government sent us till here, but the Madhya Pradesh government is extending no help to us. We have been here since last night, hungry and thirsty.”

District Collector Amit Tomar said the migrant workers resorted to stone-pelting because they believed that there would be no more buses to take them home. He added that the officials pacified them and arranged 135 buses to send them to transit points in different districts of the state.

He added that the government was providing food, water and shelter to labourers coming in their own vehicles or through other modes of transport and providing facility of buses to those who came walking from Maharashtra, according NDTV.

The Madhya Pradesh government said that about 15,000 migrant labourers had been taken from the Sendhwa border to other places in the past three days, according to PTI.

The government added that it had to deal with a huge influx of labourers from Maharashtra. “The maximum pressure of migrants is being faced at Bijasan Ghat on the border of Sendhwa,” the state government said, according to PTI. “Between 5,000 to 6,000 migrant workers are reaching there every day.”

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had appealed to the labourers to be patient and had assured them that they would be transported free of cost after medical checkups and a meal.

Left without jobs and food since the lockdown, migrant workers have been forced to return home with their families. Many undertook long journeys on foot, bicycles or holed up in trucks, with little children and elderly parents in tow. Several migrant workers died on the way.

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