Thousands of migrants jam highway in Saharanpur
LOSING PATIENCE The migrants, who were housed in a shelter home, ran out of patience and blocked the Saharanpur-Ambala highway, demanding that they be sent home to Bihar. The protest prompted the admn to arrange 150 buses
MEERUT: Thousands of migrant labourers, most of them from Bihar, who were kept in a shelter home in Saharanpur, came out on the road on Sunday morning and jammed the Ambala highway for hours, demanding that they be allowed to go to their villages.
Officials somehow pacified them and arranged 150 buses to send them to Bihar.
The labourers were housed in a shelter home of Radha Swami Satsang on Ambala Road after they descended here from different towns of Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir, covering hundreds of kilometres on foot, braving heat and hunger.
Ranjeet Sahni arrived on the border with his 9-month pregnant wife Babita and 14 other fellow villagers from Jagadhri town of Haryana. “We walked over 50 km and police stopped us from venturing into Saharanpur on Saturday. We were kept in a shelter home. But we want to go home to Motihar district of Bihar,” said Sahni.
To note, the UP government has issued orders, directing officials to not allow migrants to walk to their destinations and keep them in shelter homes till buses and trains were arranged to drop them to their native places. But after walking hundreds of kms without money and food, these hapless labourers did not want to wait for a week or so to get transported by bus or trains. They wanted to reach their villages as soon as possible. Hundreds of them even waded through river Yamuna to avoid cops manned on highway to prevent them from venturing into Saharanpur.
On Sunday morning, the migrants housed in the Radha Swami shelter home ran out of
patience and blocked the SaharanpurAmbala highway with the sole demand to go to their native villages in Bihar. “Hame ab yaha nahi rahna hai. Hame jane do”, (We don’t want to stay here. Let us go) demanded labourers Gagandeo, Vinod and their family members who arrived in Saharanpur from Jagadhri of Haryana.
Divisional commissioner of
Saharanpur Sanjay Kumar and DIG Upendra Agarwal rushed to the spot with Saharanpur SSP Dinesh Kumar P, district magistrate Akhilesh Singh and force. They tried to persuade the angry labourers to vacate the highway and return to the shelter home as efforts were underway to arrange trains for them. But the labourers were adamant on walking to their destinations without waiting for buses and trains.
Using their wits, commissioner Sanjay Kumar and the DIG, both from Bihar, started talking to the labourers in Bhojpuri dialect which helped calm them down.
Both officials persuaded them to not walk and assured to arrange buses to send them to Bihar border.
“We stopped them almost 5 kms inside the border of Haryana and persuaded them to not walk to their destinations,” said Sanjay Kumar, adding that over 150 buses had been arranged to take them to the Bihar border and approximately 25 buses had already left with the labourers.
Earlier, the Saharanpur administration had sent 1,320 and 1,240 labourers through Shramik trains in the past two days. But there was panic when the labourers came to know that the Bihar government had not given approval to trains for the next two days and they began marching towards their native villages.
They were intercepted and persuaded to wait for the buses which were diverted from Muzaffarnagar, Meerut and Moradabad depots after coordinating with additional chief secretary (home) and MD UPSRTC. The migrants were given biscuits and food packets and sent to their native places. However, thousands of labourers are still on the road, desperately waiting for their turn to get a bus.
This was the second time when the labourers came out on the road in Saharanpur which shares its border with Haryana. Hundreds of labourers had also come out on the road on Wednesday and raised slogans against the Bihar government. SSP Dinesh Kumar P had persuaded them to stay at the shelter home till buses and trains dropped them in Bihar.