BENGALURU: Seventy eight migrants from Chhattisgarh, Assam and Madhya Pradesh, who had boarded a wrong train from the KSR Railway Station to many states including Uttar Pradesh on June 18, have alighted in different parts of the country and NGOs are scrambling to help them. This comes a day after 29 migrants, who were meant to reach Madhya Pradesh, landed in Uttar Pradesh on Friday. The absence of proper information channels and the decision to reduce the number of registration centres for these labourers has led to such confusion, said volunteers.
The train that 78 labourers boarded was to reach multiple states, including Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar and UP. Madhu Prasad, who volunteers with the NGO -- Bengaluru for Migrants, received a call at 3 am on Saturday from three migrants from MP saying their train was heading to Gorkakhpur. Another 25 migrants who were planning to reach West Bengal and Assam, and 50 passengers, who wanted to go to Chhattisgarh, were all wrongly seated in the train, she said. Volunteers called up nodal officers, police and district administration officials in different states to help the migrants.
Labourers heading to Chhattisgarh and MP were made to get down at Jhasurguda in Odisha. “Then, they were transported by a bus to Raigad in Chhattisgarh,” she said. Meanwhile, the three migrants (Krishna Patil, Rajkumar and Ashish), who wanted to go to Hoshangabad in MP, took a lift on a truck to Nagpur in Maharashtra and hope to go to their hometown, she said. “The groups from West Bengal and Assam alighted at Barauni Junction in Bihar,” she said.
“The Karnataka government should put up help desks at migrant registration centres to give proper information to these workers,” she insisted. BBMP Commissioner N Manjunatha Prasad said, “When the migrants are seated in buses, announcements are made about the buses taking passengers to a particular train and to a particular state. The migrants have not paid attention to the announcements and boarded wrong buses and trains.”
‘HELPLINE NOT WORKING’
Bengaluru: The BBMP helpline number to help migrants workers is inadequate and does not respond, alleged Bangalore for Migrants, a community to help the migrants. In a memorandum sent to N Manjunatha Prasad, Nodal Officer for Migrants on Friday, they stated that the numbers were misleading and neither of them has nothing to do with Shramik trains. The operators kept pressuring callers to register on Seva Sindhu app, the memo added.