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Journalism of Courage
The Pune district administration has, till now, run 97 Shramik Special trains to send nearly 1.22 lakh migrant workers back to their home states, but nearly 1,500 workers are still stranded in the district.
City-based activists and trade unions, which have worked to provide relief to migrant workers and others during the pandemic, have written a letter to Pune District Collector Naval Kishore Ram, requesting him to make arrangements to send the stranded workers home.
The group of activists have also reminded Ram about the Supreme Court directive earlier this week, which directed state governments to send stranded migrants home within a fortnight.
According to the group, there are 1,109 migrants from Jharkhand, 210 from West Bengal and 237 from Uttar Pradesh who are anxious to go home, but have not been able to do so as they were not summoned to board a Shramik train by the police, although most of them had registered their names. These include workers stranded in Talegaon, Kondhwa, Balajinagar, Chandannagar and Hinjewadi. The actual number of stranded workers is probably higher than those in the lists, said the activists .
They have also requested the Pune police commissioner, municipal commissioners of Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, as well as the chief executive officer of Pune Zilla Parishad to prepare lists of stranded workers in their respective jurisdictions and make arrangements to send them home.
“There have been no Shramik Special trains after June 1. On the other hand, we have a pending list of migrant workers from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and UP who are waiting anxiously to return to their homes,” reads the letter sent to the district collector by the activists.
“…We hope that based on the numbers, they will operate trains or in cases where the number is not big enough to operate a train, they will send the workers using buses,” said Johanna Lokhande of National Centre for Advocacy Studies, one of the activists who sent the letter.
Ram said the administration was working towards sending all the stranded migrants home. “Depending on the size of the group and distance of the destination, we are using various means… if the group is big, such as the Jharkhand group which has over 1,100 people, a train can be sent, if it’s smaller, we are trying to club them with other districts and send them via one train. If it’s a short distance – such as till neighbouring states like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh – then we can and are using buses,” said Ram.
