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.
Guna Nayak, a migrant labourer in Delhi, says he will never forget the month of May when he and his wife often had to skip dinner.
With the city in lockdown then, Nayak was confined to his one-room lodgings in Kotla Mubarakpur. He had no ration card entitling him to subsidised food.
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Nor, fearful of catching Covid, would he join the free-meal queues at the Delhi government’s distribution centres.
“We had limited rations and no money. Whoever I called for help had similar problems. My wife and I had to skip dinner some days,” Nayak said.
Nayak, who is from Kendrapada district in Odisha, has begun getting work after the lockdown was lifted two weeks ago. But his efforts to secure a ration card from the Delhi government have not borne results.
Migrant worker Sushil Raut has had no work since the Delhi government imposed a lockdown on April 17.
The plumber from Kendrapada, Odisha, who lives in a rented room in a south Delhi slum with his family has not received any assistance from anywhere, either.
Raut took a loan of Rs 30,000 from Muthoot Finance against his wife’s gold ornaments on Monday to feed his family of four, which includes two young children.
“There’s no point going back home. Travelling involves (Covid) risk. The Odisha government has imposed a lockdown too, so there won’t be any work there, either. I took the loan because I have no income,” Raut told The Telegraph.