Shanmughasundaram.j@timesgroup.com
Chennai:
Sathish Garg and 10 of his friends started their homeward journey by foot on May 14. Losing his job as a carpenter post-lockdown, Garg decided to walk to his hometown in Kanpur from Redhill where he had worked for nearly three years. But Garg and his friends were ferried back not once but twice after they were spotted by Andhra Pradesh police; the first time at Tada, and the second time at Sullurpeta.
“We reached Tada on May 15, a day after we started to walk. The AP police put us in a truck and dropped us back at Redhills. Where can we go? So, we started to walk again as we had no choice. But again, we were stopped by the police at Sullurpeta on Saturday, and we ended up at a government shelter in Gummidipoondi,” Garg, a father of two children, recounted.
However, this was not a case in isolation. For the past few days, several migrant labourers, who walked for several kilometers, were made to return in trucks once they entered AP and are spotted by the police.
Like him, Rohith Kumar and two other guest workers - who worked in Ambattur Estate - walked for three days and nearly 300 kms to reach a point near Vijayawada from Ambattur on their journey towards their hometown in Uttar Pradesh. However, hours later, they along with several guest workers were ferried back in trucks to TN and dropped near the inter-state border of TN-Andhra Pradesh near Gummidipoondi in Tiruvallur district.
Braving the soaring mercury levels, many of these guest workers start their journey on foot after there were no signs of help from the government. Left penniless and fighting starvation, they trudged along National Highway 16 only to be stopped by the AP and brought back to TN border.
Kumar said they were abandoned on the road with no direction on how to continue their journey.
A few days ago 200-odd guest workers from Bihar, Jharkhand, UP and Himachal Pradesh were dropped at the border. On Sunday too, another group of 200 labourers were stopped from proceeding further at Sullurpeta and dropped back in a lorry near Redhills.
Akshay Jain, one of the volunteers who has been distributing food to migrant labourers near Sullurpeta, witnessed the incident. While they were distributing food, police rounded the labourers and took them away. “We followed the labourers and took a video. The police, in fact, lied to the workers promising to take them to a transport registration spot at a local revenue office in Tada but instead took them across the border,” he said.
Deputy Collector of Tiruvallur district Panneerselvam, who is handling issues related to migrants, said that the district administration has opened 12 shelters to accommodate the migrant labourers. “We have been housing the migrant labourers dropped at the TN-AP border in the government facilities in Gummidipoondi and surrounding areas,” he said. The authorities are making arrangement to send the labourers in batches and two specials trains operated to Bihar and Odisha on Sunday from Tiruvallur, he noted
A police officer attached to Tiruvallur district said that neither the TN nor the AP police were allowing guest workers to cross the border. Police personnel from either side have been deployed at the integrated check post at Elavur on the AP-TN border. “However, there are several porous routes along the inter-state border and the migrants have been using them. They were stopped at multiple spots along the Chennai-Kolkata NH in Nellore district and sent back into TN. On an average, the (AP) police brings back 300 to 350 labourers, who are stopped at several places,” he said. /eom/shan/
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