Twenty-year-old Naskar Mondal is eagerly waiting for the day to begin so that he could start his work on laying the Metro Rail viaduct over the Poonamallee Road.
Wearing a torn jeans with his hand covered by a glove, Mondal prefers to be at the worksite rather than the tin shanty on the other side of the road at Koyambedu, where the workers spend their night.
“It is too hot during the day. We prefer to stay outdoors during the day,” said Naskar from Nadia district of West Bengal.
Naskar is among the thousands of metro rail workers from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Jharkhand, who have been outsourced by sub-contractors to work in the metro rail project.
Interestingly, Naskar and his colleague Shankar, also from a nearby village of Nadia district, has kinder words for sub-contractor Birat, who, they feel, has taken adequate care of them and other workers by providing them with quality food. “We get an egg every night besides fish and chicken on alternate days. And when we want money, it is being arranged,” he added.
Naskar never got his salary in hand, which he claims would be around `8,000 to `9,000 for the nearly 12 hours of work they put in. He says the sub-contractor pays it to his parents in Kolkata. “If I require money here, it is arranged and after addition and subtraction, the remaining amount is paid once the contract gets over,” saidMondal, who will be going back to his village after completing his work next month.
There are also allegations of the sub-contractors taking a share from the workers’ salary. Arjun, a worker from Jharkhand, at another site, concurs: “Many sub-contractors don’t pay the salary due to the workers. The money is paid after they take their share,” he alleged. When City Express contacted a senior metro rail official, he said the workers are paid as per the norms stipulated by the government. To a query regarding the non-payment of salaries to metro rail workers contracted by Gammon India, another official said that the issue had been sorted out. Additional secretary of Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangh Geetha Ramakrishnan said that the workers, who work for more than eight hours a day, are entitled for double wages but they are not being paid. “A normal worker earns `230 a day. If he works for more than eight hours he is entitled for double the wages that is around `460,” she claimed. She also hit out at the welfare board for not registering the migrant workers. Meanwhile, workers felt that the condition of camps was much better now. “We are supplied with adequate water and get quality food,” said Arjun, who has been working with the project for two years now.
