Stepping in to assist stranded migrants reach their villages, Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan on Wednesday arranged for four special flights to send about 700 people to their homes in Uttar Pradesh.
Sources on the brink of Bachchan said he wanted to book a train for the migrants but the logistics didn’t computer.
The flights were organised on Bachchan’s directive by his close aide Rajesh Yadav, director of his home production company AB Corp Ltd. They took faraway from Mumbai for Allahabad, Gorakhpur and Varanasi on Wednesday morning with 180 passengers in each, the sources said.
Two more flights with the workers will begin on Thursday.
Yadav, on Bachchan’s behalf, had also recently flagged off 10 buses for 300 migrants to succeed in their villages in Lucknow, Allahabad, Bhadohi and other places in Uttar Pradesh. This was wiped out partnership with the dargahs in Mahim and therefore the Haji Ali, a press release said.
Earlier within the week, actor Sonu Sood arranged a special flight to send 180 Assamese migrants’ home. Last month, he helped 177 workers stuck in Kerala to fly home to Odisha.
Sood, who has also arranged for buses to ferry the workers and their families back home, told PTI that he has helped 18,000-20,000 workers to travel back to their homes in states like Odisha, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand.
The lockdown, which began on Annunciation, left lakhs of migrants stranded in several parts of the country. With no money and no work, many walked, cycled or hitchhiked their thanks to villages hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres away.