By Matters India Reporter
Kolkata, May 4, 2020: The West Bengal unit of the Right to Food and Work Network, along with 42 trade unions, peoples’ organizations and NGOs has written to the West Bengal Chief Minister and the Indian Prime Minister to ensure safe return of migrant workers.
The campaign demands that the transportation arrangements for the migrants need to be increased manifold immediately to bring workers back.
The letter addressed to West Bengal chief secretary Rajiva Sinha drew attention of a recent federal Home Ministry’s order on the movement of the migrant laborers stranded in various parts of the country to their home states.
The letter states, about 1.2 million workers from West Bengal are working in other states. Kerala in southern India alone is reported to have half of them. Yet the West Bengal government has arranged for two trains only (of which only one is from Kerala) and a few hundred buses.
“The Central government has completely washed its hands off the matter. It has already been 40 days since the nationwide lockdown has been announced, with the woes of the stranded migrant laborers increasing with each passing day,” the campaign points out.
Jesuit Father Irudaya Jothi, one of the conveners of the Right To Food and Work West Bengal, says they want the West Bengal government to make an immediate policy to facilitate the return of the stranded migrant laborers to their home state.
For this, he suggests that the West Bengal government meet the expenses for the return journey of the migrant laborers from other states by special trains.
Father Jothi wants the government to immediately devise and publish a simple process to help workers register for transportation.
The Jesuit priest also wants the West Bengal government to ensure mandatory health check-up of the returnees.
“Adequate facilities to quarantine the returnees should be made prior to the commencement of their journey and all unused government buildings and educational institutions should be made available for such a purpose,” the letter pleads.
The campaign also wants the government to ensure food and sanitation facilities during and after the travel.
The letter demands arrangement of transportation facilities from major railway stations to provide last mile connectivity to the returnee’s respective hometowns or villages.
The campaign is a platform for NGOs, non-political party unions, and dedicated individuals working in West Bengal’s 18 districts.
It is headed by a steering committee comprising members of the partner agencies.
Social activists Anuradha Talwar, Jesuit Father Irudhaya Jothi, Pawan Baxla, and Tapojay Mukherjee lead the state team.
Earlier, the campaign urged the federal Home Ministry to ensure “humane” transportation of migrant laborers to return to their home states.
The campaign says separate isolation facilities should be extended to suspected or symptomatic individuals and medical facilities should be extended to them on de-boarding from the special trains. Isolation facilities should not be set in villages with the resource constraints, it asserts.