Three labourers from Murshidabad, including a teenager, reached Bengal on a truck from Telangana on Tuesday after spending nearly three months without work in the southern state.
The medicine-laden truck had left Telangana on Sunday. The three had to get off at Par Dankuni on Delhi Road in Konnagar, around 2km from the Dankuni toll plaza, after police stopped the truck.
The three met scores of migrant labourers stranded on Delhi Road, some of who had reached Bengal on foot from Andhra Pradesh, covering close to 1,500km. After spending the night on the road, close to 40 labourers, including the three from Telangana, were put on a bus on Wednesday.
The bus will travel via multiple districts to drop the labourers who have to be in quarantine units in the districts, a police officer in Dankuni said.
“I don’t want to put others at risk. I want to spend time in quarantine. But being holed up in a different state without money or food was a nightmare,” Rohul Amin, 29, one of the three labourers who came from Telangana, said.
Amin, Azad Hossain, 25, and Masood Shaikh, 19, are residents of Goraipur village in Murshidabad, around 25km from Behrampore. The three had moved to Telangana in late February. They were supposed to work in the construction of a railway overbridge in Penuballi Tehsil of Khammam district in Telangana.
“We reached Khammam on February 22. But the work got delayed. Our contractor did not say why but we never got to work, neither did we get any money. We were only given food and shelter,” Shaikh, who had to start working at 10 to help sustain his family, said.
The work was supposed to start on March 22, the day the Centre had announced a Janata Curfew. The lockdown started the day after. “We got stuck without work or pay for close to three months. The contractor was untraceable from mid-April,” Amin said.
Their money got depleted with time. The three said they would have starved but for residents who provided them with food. “We kept getting phone calls from family members back home. Staying so far away was becoming unbearable,” Amin, who has his mother, wife and a 18-month old daughter back home, said.
They spent the past two weeks doing the rounds of VM Banjar police station and the local Mandal revenue office, pleading with officers to arrange for their journey back home.
The announcement of special trains for migrant labourers reignited hope in the three, but it was short-lived. “A police officer said the train’s quota was full,” Hossain said.
On Saturday, the three left their accommodation in Mandalapadu village, in the Penuballi Tehsil of Khammam district, determined to reach Bengal, more than 1,400km away. “We went to the police station and said we could not stay any longer,” Hossain said.
They spent the night at the station. The next day, they were issued “road permits” and put on the truck. They paid Rs 1,000 to the driver.
The road journey was reasonably smooth. The only jarring note was the frequent sight of “men, women and children walking along the road”.
“They were not lucky enough to hitch a ride,” Amin said.