Kejriwal asks Centre for 100 special trains to send migrant workers back
nNEWDELHI: Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has urged the central government to provide 100 shramik special trains to the Delhi government for sending back thousands of stranded migrant workers to their home states, senior officials in the chief minister’s office said on Tuesday.
The chief minister’s demand came amid the ongoing blame game on the matter between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Deputy CM Manish Sisodia said, “Around 65,000 migrants from Delhi have been sent to their home states by trains. We are seeking permission from different states to send back their citizens stranded in Delhi.”
However, the consent of destination states is not required for running Shramik special trains to ferry migrant workers, the ministry of railways said on Tuesday.
Senior officials in the chief minister’s office said the government had received online applications from around 400,000 migrant workers in the city wanting to go back home. The highest number of them belong to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
They said that so far, 59 special trains and over 200 buses had left Delhi in the past week.
“The government plans to scale up the process and schedule trains on an hourly basis one after another if more trains are granted. We are talking to more states,” an official said.
AAP spokesperson and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh criticised the Bjp-ruled Centre for its “deliberate reluctance” to send the poor back homes.
“To send these four lakh migrants, we need 350 trains, but the BJP government is running 100 trains across the country, which shows their apathy towards solving this issue. The BJP sent luxury flights for those stuck in other countries, but they do not care for the poor people who are walking hundreds and thousands of kilometres barefoot. This shows the BJP is an anti-poor political party,” Singh said.
Leader of opposition in the Delhi Assembly Ramvir Singh Bidhuri said the Central government had given 8kg wheat, 2kg rice and one kg pulses free to 72 lakh people of Delhi, but the AAP government failed to distribute the ration to all of the poor people.
“Only ₹6.5 crore was spent by the Delhi government on ration distribution. Union food minister Ram Vilas Paswan has already said only 1% of the ration issued by the Centre for the month of April was given by the Delhi government to the poor people,” he said.
AAP did not respond to BJP’S allegations on the distribution of ration.