india

Updated: Mar 29, 2020 10:29 IST

A 38-year-old man who had walked 200 km from the national capital to reach home died on the Delhi-Agra highway on Saturday morning. Ranveer Singh’s destination, his family in a remote village in Madhya Pradesh’s Morena district, was still 100 km away.

The two men, who were accompanying Ranveer Singh, told the police that Ranveer Singh complained of chest pain sometime before he collapsed a short distance.

The death is the first recorded fatality among the tens of thousands – some estimates put the numbers into six digits – of migrant workers walking back to their villages for food and shelter after losing work in metropolitan cities during the three-week lockdown put in place to stem the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19).

Ranveer Singh had decided to walk home after the government suddenly imposed a national lockdown, ordering shops and offices to close. Eating joints were allowed to stay open provided they don’t serve but deliver the food to customers. But in the initial days of the lockdown, the police wouldn’t let them operate.

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Agra district police chief Babloo Kumar said the restaurant in south Delhi’s Tughlakabad locality where Ranveer Singh worked had shut down.

Like the thousands of migrant workers in and around Delhi who have been struggling to go home, Ranveer Singh also decided to go home. Since the government had stopped public transport services - buses and trains - his only option appeared to be to travel the 300 km by foot.

“Ranveer was accompanied by two others from Delhi and was walking towards his village in Morena district of Madhya Pradesh. On reaching Agra on Saturday morning, he complained of chest pain. So all three stopped on the outskirts of Agra but Ranveer collapsed,” the senior police officer said.

Also read: Amid lockdown, a sea of migrants in Delhi try to find their way back home

A local shopkeeper came to help the three. They asked Ranveer to lie down for a bit and gave the hungry man tea and biscuits.

“Police rushed to the spot but the man had died by then. So his body was sent for post mortem examination to ascertain the exact reason for his death,” the SSP said.

An autopsy later identified the cause of death as myocardial infarction – the medical term for a heart attack.

“The heart attack was probably caused because of exertion in walking to Agra from Delhi. The post-mortem was conducted on Saturday and body was handed over to family members who turned up from the village,” said Arvind Kumar, the Station House Officer of Sikandra police station.

Police has informed the dead man’s family after getting their contact details from his phone. He was a resident of Bad Ka Pura in Ambah area of Morena and had to walk 100 more km to reach his village, a police officer said.