After much trauma, 21 migrant workers head home

Recount tale of abuse that pushed them to leave a nursery in Shoolagiri

On Friday morning, Pintu shared a selfie of smiling faces from inside a bus that was headed to Chennai from Hosur to catch the train to Uttar Pradesh. The bus was arranged by the district administration, with the security of a police constable, to carry Pintu and his extended kin of 20 members including seven women and seven infants to Chennai Central Railway Station.

It was only four days ago, on Monday night, Pintu and his kin from Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh were spotted with their belongings at Hosur bus stand by a reporter of an English daily. They had spent ₹ 4,000 on a tempo to reach Hosur from Malur, a border taluk of Karnataka. They recounted a tale of abuse pushing them to leave the nursery, where they were employed for flower picking.

They left, when a worker was beaten up for raising his voice to the supervisor. “The supervisor told one of us to transfer the rose cuttings to another bucket. When the worker replied loudly, the supervisor got agitated and abusive.

He started to hit the worker. His wife intervened to protect her husband from the supervisor and the rest of us tried to stop him,” said Pintu. The men were paid ₹240 a day, and the women ₹180 a day.

They hired a tempo from the nursery in a border hamlet of Shoolagiri to Malur and found another vehicle from there to Hosur. Here, they were helped by DYFI functionaries Sridharan and Vignesh and were taken to a school for shelter with the help of the revenue officials.

Till late evening on Thursday, Revenue Inspector of Berigai C. Vasanthi was a witness to their accounts.

“They had gone through a lot of suffering. They were evicted without payment from an earlier nursery. They found work here, but the supervisor had been abusing them since the lockdown.

Two of the workers are partially blind. When they packed their belongings to leave, the supervisor did not ask, where they would go with the children. They did not have money, even to buy food for the babies.”

Moved by their plight, RI Vasanthi handed them ₹ 1,000 from her pocket, said Sridharan, district president, DYFI.

The first two days of their rescue was however lost in translation. The workers would only repeat the name of a hamlet in Karnataka that bordered Vasanthi’s jurisdiction.

There was the challenge of jurisdiction, and that of finding a train. Only a day before, the administration had sent off over 2,500 U.P. workers in two trains. Pintu and others refused to go back to the nursery. The RI Vasanthi was called in since their village appeared closer to her jurisdiction.

But soon, Vasanthi realised they were staying in Sinnachandiram in Berigai that fell under her revenue jurisdiction. “This meant I could act. They just did not know to say the name. They were repeating the name of D.N. Dhotti, a border village in Karnataka, where they went to buy their provisions,” said Vasanthi.

Ms.Vasanthi also lodged a complaint with Berigai police stating that the workers were harassed during the lockdown, when the employers were ordered to provide shelter and food.But, the workers did not want to pursue it.

Since the lockdown, we have been receiving several distress calls in our control room and in my jurisdiction, wherever we went to hand out rations to migrants, I left my number for them to call. But, we did not know about them or we could have acted earlier,” Vasanthi said.

On Thursday night, with the intervention of the DSP of Hosur Murali and Special Sub Inspector Kiruba, the owner of the nursery was made to transfer the pending salary of ₹ 47,500 for the workers.

“We never thought we would go back home with our salary,” said Pintu. They were packed off, like all other migrant workers from here, with food, snacks, juice to last them for two days.