Bengaluru: Migrant workers at new township site keen to return home

Bengaluru: Hundreds of migrant labourers at a construction worksite in the city have claimed that they are being kept confined at the place and appealed to the government to send them back to their native places.

The workers also alleged the living conditions were difficult at the site in Anchepalya on Tumakuru Road where a huge township is coming up and flagged health concerns besides lamenting that they have not been paid wages since coronavirus lockdown began.

“We are 1,800 workers here. We are living in extremely difficult conditions. We have to stay inside rooms,” said Kumar Mandal from Bokaro in Jharkhand, appealing for arrangements to send them back.

Karnataka government has initiated the process for operating special trains from Friday to ferry the migrant workers stranded due to lockdown and written to several states, including Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal, seeking their consent.

The news did bring respite to thousands of migrants in the city and elsewhere in the state as the government had earlier cancelled its request for special trains, but the labourers put up in tin sheds on Tumakuru Road are unsure of returning home despite no work in progress at the site.

The workers said most of them had registered on the websites of their respective states to return but so far they have not got any communication either from the Railways or the government on when they would be sent back.

“We have been locked down here in this campus. There are policemen standing outside preventing us from going out. There is no information that we will be able to go back home,” Habibullah, a labourer from Araria in Bihar, said.

The migrant labourers later made a video on their plight showing the deployment of police and them being ‘confined’ at the construction site.

Mandal made an appeal to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa to let them go home.

“I urge Modiji and the Chief Minister here to let us go home at the earliest,” he said.

The Jharkhand worker said no health check-up was being conducted for those at the site.

Another labourer, who wished anonymity, maintained none of the workers have been given any cash ever since the lockdown was enforced in March.

“We don’t have cash. The builder has confined us here and is not letting anyone go out. Thankfully he is giving us food but that alone is not sufficient. We want to go back home,” the labourer said.