Migrant labourer Raja Kumar’s lockdown-induced miseries in successive years may have been less acute if the country’s governments had not sat on a 42-year-old legal provision that the Centre is now set to implement under a Supreme Court nod.
Kumar, 25, who worked in Noida for a paltry Rs 225 a day, had to return home to Sameswari village in Bihar’s Banka district in April when work became unavailable amid the second wave of Covid. But the labour contractor who engages him did not give him a transport allowance.
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“I had to borrow money to go home,” Kumar said.