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The Karnataka government has withdrawn its request to the railways to run special trains to ferry migrant labourers to their home states, hours after builders met Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa to apprise him of the problems the construction sector will face in case they left.
“This is worse than treating them as bonded labour. Does the Indian constitution exist? Are there any laws in the country? This BJP state government is throwing us back to medieval barbarism. This will be stoutly resisted, Yechury said in a tweet.
The railways is running Shramik Special trains to ferry to their home towns migrants who were stranded at their places of work during the lockdown.
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The Principal Secretary in the Revenue Department N Manjunatha Prasad, who is the nodal officer for migrants, had requested the South Western Railways on Tuesday to run two train services a day for five days except Wednesday, while the state government wanted services thrice a day to Danapur in Bihar.
However, later, Prasad wrote another letter within a few hours that the special trains were not required.
Several migrants in the city were desperate to return home as they were out of jobs and money.
Yechury also lashed out at the central government over reports that it owed states and industry Rs 3 trillion and accused the centre of shifting the burden of fighting the pandemic to the state governments.
While shifting the entire burden of fighting the pandemic on to the State governments, Modi government is not even paying their legitimate dues. After November 2019, Centre has not paid the GST compensation dues for the rest of the financial year, i.e., March 2020.
Modi government has the right to loot while crores of people & States are left with nothing but the right to starve?, he tweeted.