A young boy outside Lucknow's Charbagh Railway Station can be seen flinching and hiding his face, as a municipal worker in protective gear sprayed him with a bleach-and-water disinfectant.
In the six-second video circulated on social media on Wednesday, a woman sitting close to him, presumably a member of his family, said "He will get wet."
The rest of the family, all migrant workers, can be seen squatting on the roadside with their things. The incident has drawn outrage all over social media and is reminiscent of a similar incident that took place in March amid the lockdown.
When a group of migrant workers reached Uttar Pradesh's Bareilly district via special buses arranged by the state, they were sprayed upon with the same kind of solution to "disinfect" them.
It must be noted that a bleach-and-water solution is meant only for surface disinfection and is not to be used on human beings.
However, a top Lucknow Municipal Corporation, who is the in-charge of disinfecting the buses bringing back migrant workers, has responded saying that the spraying was unintentional.
"The process of sanitisation of buses was on. The hosepipe was full and when our workers were moving from one bus to the other, some labourers came in the way. It was unintentional," Indramani Tripathi, the Lucknow Municipal Commissioner, explained, according to a report by NDTV.
He added that the two workers involved have been removed, adding that they "made a mistake."
The boy was sprayed upon with the disinfectant has not been identified yet. However, NDTV stated that sources said his family and he arrived on a train that brought the migrants stranded across country to Lucknow.
(With inputs from NDTV)
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