Some guest workers choose to stay back
Hope of work resuming in city beats temptation to return home
Ramjeet Rajdhar was just another 16-year-old lad from a far-away state who came to Hyderabad in 2007 to find work, earn some money, and send some of it back home to his family.
Now 29, Ramjeet, whose family lives in a small village, about 20 km from Siddarth Nagar in Uttar
Pradesh, is determined to stay back in the city.
As the exodus of guest workers from Telangana continues in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown that has left thousands unemployed, Ramjeet had to convince his 20-year-old younger brother Durgesh that returning home was not a good idea.
“There is nothing for us there. Our extended family has 16 members. Unless we work and send them money, it will be impossible for them to survive,” Ramjeet told Deccan Chronicle.
After days of arguments with his brother, Durgesh agreed to stay back in the city but he is not happy about it.
“Our village is home. I want to go back home; meet my parents. That is where my childhood friends are,” he said. He has been in Hyderabad for two years and works as a stone-setter, but misses his village: “I miss sitting under the trees and chatting with friends. I also miss the Dasara mela there,” he says wistfully.
Older brother Ramjeet says he understands the pull of home, but they both have to work at whatever they can. “I started working when I was a kid, after my father made me join work in a small hotel. Then as years went by, I found myself ending up as a stone polisher,” he said.
He says Durgesh is lucky. “He even went to school for a few years, and has friends from his childhood. I do understand he has his own good reasons for wanting to go back home.”
Watching some 72 of their neighbours clamber into a lorry and leave was particularly hard for Durgesh. “Now there are just eight of us in all. I miss home too. I have a wife and two daughters — four-and-a-half year old Asha and two-year-old Asta. My wife works in the fields as a labourer whenever she finds some work. Our father is sick, our elder brother is bedridden. Two other brothers go to school while we are somehow managing to ensure that our sister goes to college," Ramjeet said, laying bare the excruciating poverty that drives so many people to look for that little extra edge a job in another state or city might give them.
As the lockdown began making itself felt, the Rajdhars, along with their neighbours living in Telephone Colony, Chaitanyapuri, were helped by the Rachakonda Police Commissionerate with food and groceries. Ramjeet Rajdhar grimaces as he experiences a stab of pain from sciatica he developed over the past few months. “I have to work and cannot complain about the pain. If I do, I might lose my job as I might be seen as someone who cannot work anymore,” he said. “I wanted to go home but I have decided to stay with my brother and work and earn some money,” Durgesh said. “Things appear to be getting better here for work now,”he adds hopefully.