BENGALURU: Nearly 500 licenced porters across the Bengaluru Railway Division, who were desperately waiting for the national lockdown to be lifted from Wednesday, received a huge blow when they realized it had been extended and passenger trains will not run till May 3 now. A hurried meeting was convened on Platform 6 of the KSR Railway station on Wednesday to take stock of the precarious situation they find themselves in.
KSR station has the maximum number of porters, around 350, with the rest spread across Malleswaram, Bengaluru East, Bengaluru Cantonment and Yesvantpur.
C Uday Kumar, president of The South Western Railway Luggage Sahayaks Association, was making a fervent appeal at the meeting that took place with social distancing maintained on Platform Six on Wednesday morning. “There are around 25,000 porters attached to the Indian Railways across the country. All of us are facing immense hardship during the last three weeks as we depend on rail passengers for our daily bread. The Bengaluru Division staff have given us groceries but we are facing a tough cash crunch too,” he said. “Some kind of scheme needs to be worked out so that porters get some kind of financial support, he added.
The porters also released a video appealing to Railway Minister Piyush Goyal, the Centre and State to do something to alleviate their plight.
T Chandrashekhar, who has worked as a porter for nearly 11 years, “I struggled a lot these 20 days. I used to earn between Rs 500 and Rs 600 per day. My neighbours helped me financially and with groceries apart from railway officials in Bangalore helping us out. I have elderly parents and two children to take care of,” he said. He plans to ask neighbours for help again.
A porter requesting anonymity said, “The meeting was held by the Association so that funds with the Union can be distributed among us to help us tide over the situation temporarily. A final decision will be taken in a couple of days.”
An official railway release said that another 100 grocery kits were distributed to porters on Wednesday. A similar distribution was done on March 29.