A group of labourers have been making trips from their construction site on KRS road in Mysuru to the offices of City Police Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner to know about the fate of their application on Seva Sindhu portal to return to their native places in North India since the last three days, but to no avail.
Though it has been five days since they have registered on the portal on May 4, they have not received any response. Desperate to return home, they have begun knocking on the doors of senior police and district administration officials.
“We have not had any work for the last one-and-a-half month now. Though we have been promised that work will resume soon, there is a lot of uncertainty and we do not wish to stay. We just want to return home and cultivate our land to earn a livelihood”, said Rajdev, a native of Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, who had turned up at the Deputy Commissioner’s office on Saturday along with a group of fellow workers.
“Our families are concerned for our safety and are bringing pressure on us to return. We have exhausted the groceries, which had been provided to us, and are barely subsisting. We are running out of our savings”, said Prashant, a painter at the construction site on KRS road, also a native of Gorakhpur.
The labourers are among the 1,700 migrants, who had registered on the Seva Sindhu portal from Mysuru, till three days ago when the authorities disabled the facility. Though the portal has been enabled now, the latest figures were not immediately available.
Assistant Labour Commissioner, Mysuru, Thammanna said any decision on arranging transport can be taken only after their native State gives consent to admit them. Their native State will communicate its consent to the State government after which the migrants will receive a text message on their mobile phone.
Sources in the Railways siad that there is no proposal to run a Shramik special train from Mysuru as the 1,700 migrants were from different parts of North India including Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Bihar. A train can be run only if there are about 1,200 people to a particular destination. In this case, the migrants are headed to multiple destinations in different parts of North India.
So, the best option is transport them to Bengaluru by road and put them on trains headed to different destinations in North India, a Railway official said.
Meanwhile, the authorities are trying to convince the migrant labourers to stay put. “Construction work, which had been stalled during the lockdown, has now been permitted. Construction material is also available now. So, we are convincing them to stay”, said Mr. Thammanna.
But, construction labourers like Rajdev did not appear inclined to change their mind. “We have to go. We don’t want to return. We will do agriculture and earn our livelihood in our native villages”, he said.
The departure of migrants, who are the backbone of the construction industry, is expected to seriously hit work in Mysuru. CREDAI’s Mysuru Secretary Muralidhar admitted that this is a serious setback to the industry. However, they are hopeful of the local labourers turning up once the lockdown ends.
Apart from migrants, labourers from neighbouring Chamarajanagar district also comprise the workforce for the construction industry in Mysuru. Hundreds of labourers from Chamarajanagar commute to Mysuru by train every day for work. “We are hopeful of the labourers returning to the construction sites once train service resumes”, Mr. Muralidhar added.
