Not enough reverse migrants from west UP to get Centre’s sops

LUCKNOW:The ‘Garib Kalyan Rozgar Abhiyan’, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday, seeks to boost employment and livelihood opportunities for migrant workers returning to villages. The scheme will run for 125 days.

However, western UP districts will fail to get their share in the Centre’s new job scheme just because they do not have enough migrant workers returning to qualify for the scheme. The benefits of the Rs 50,000-crore scheme are available only to districts that have received above 25,000 migrant workers.

Applying this criterion, the Centre has selected 116 districts across six states—Bihar, UP, MP,

Jharkhand, Odhisha and Rajasthan – with an objective to create infrastructure through public works that support job-creation in villages.

In UP, only 31 of the total 75 districts have been identified to be included in the scheme, since only these districts were found to have more than 25,000 returning migrant workers. The beneficiary districts are Siddharthnagar, Prayagraj, Gonda Maharajganj, Baharaich, Balrampur, Jaunpur, Hardoi, Azamgarh, Basti, Gorakhpur, Sultanpur, Kushinagar, Sant Kabirnagar, Banda, Ambedkarnagar, Sitapur, Varanasi, Ghazipur, Pratapgarh, Rae Bareli, Ayodhya, Deoria, Amethi, Lakhimpur Kheri, Unnao, Shrawasti, Fatehpur, Mirzapur, Jalaun and Kaushambi.

While all other regions have

got their due with the eastern UP having a lion’s share, none of the Western UP districts have been considered for the benefits since they did not qualify the criteria for the scheme.

“A major chunk of migrant workers has returned to Eastern

UP because the region has traditionally been on the top in sending workers to other states unlike Western UP, which is comparatively more prosperous and able to create jobs locally,” additional chief secretary (labour) Suresh Chandra explained.

A report (available with HT) prepared by the office of the relief commissioner shows that more than 26 lakh (26,01,449 to be precise) migrant workers returned from other states to their respective districts in UP between May 1 and June 11.

There are a number of western UP districts including Ghaziabad, Shamli Hapur and Meerut where the number of returning migrants is only around or even less than 1,000. Ghaziabad received the least number of merely 289 workers. This is in sharp contrast to several eastern UP districts including Gorakhpur and Prayagraj that received more than one lakh migrants each. With 1,60,455 returning workers, Siddharthnagar is on the top. Lucknow received just 3,449.