GUWAHATI
A public sector refinery in eastern Assam’s Golaghat district fears the “rumours” surrounding the exodus of labourers from the region could affect its expansion work.
A few instances of migrant workers, especially Bengali Muslims, leaving Sivasagar, Charaideo, and other urban centres of eastern Assam were reported following outrage over the alleged gang rape of a 14-year-old Assamese girl in Nagaon district’s Dhing on August 22. One of the three people, a Bengali Muslim, suspected to have committed the crime died in police custody.
The 3 million metric tonnes per annum (MMTPA) Numaligarh Refinery Limited (NRL), about 260 km east of Guwahati, is undergoing expansion to increase its capacity to 9 MMTPA. The project is expected to be completed by 2025.
The refinery is also racing against time to complete a bamboo-fed second-generation bioethanol plant with an installed capacity of 186 kilolitres per day. The targeted completion of this project is September.
“We have about 11,000 labourers engaged in the two projects. They are a mix of local and migrant labourers and some 150-200 of the latter category left following rumours about the exodus of people belonging to a minority community leaving the place,” a senior NRL officer said, declining to be quoted.
He said members of some 30 organisations representing indigenous communities have recently requested NRL to give preference to locals for menial jobs. “They, however, did not demand that the non-local or migrant labourers should be removed from the projects or told to go,” he added.
Another officer said the absence of a few labourers has not affected work much but the bioethanol project may get delayed “if more of them succumb to rumours and leave”.
He urged the local administration and the Assam government to crack down on rumour-mongers, especially on social media platforms, who were creating a fear psychosis in the minds of migrant workers mostly from the western and central parts of the State.
The NRL refinery is in Golaghat, one of seven districts of eastern Assam where sentiments against the bohiragata (outsiders) have been building up since the second week of August following the alleged assault of a 17-year-old arm-wrestling girl by two Marwari men in Sivasagar town.
The incident sparked a hate campaign against Marwari, Bihari, Bengali and other non-Assamese communities, which subsided after elders of the Marwari community offered a public apology by going down on their knees. The anti-Miya (a pejorative term for Bengali Muslims) protests followed after the Dhing incident.
