Migrants cry out for help

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Bangilu phoned his wife Mona Mahavi two days back and promised he would be home at Mayurbhanj in Odisha for Durga Puja this October.

He had asked the excited 26-year-old wife what she would want from Chennai.

He had taken a basket of goodies, when he went home for Puja last year; but this time Bangilu will not keep his word.

The body of Bangilu was among the 10 pulled out of debris after a 40-foot wall, which the migrant workers were building for an engineering college at Kunnam near Sunguvachatram in Kancheepuram, collapsed on Monday.

Sadly, it appears that only Bangilu’s wife will grieve for him. Apart from their immediate families, the victims of Monday’s mishap have already been forgotten and are just statistics related to the misery of migrant life.

Every morning, trains that arrive at Chennai Central from North India bring hundreds of migrant workers travelling thousands of kilometers from their arid home districts in search of livelihoods.

Agents, who are mostly migrant workers themselves, procure them for major construction contracts.

The agents get a commission from the workers’ wages, besides fees from the contractor.
Migrant labourers are paid less than half the wages paid to locals.

Their living conditions are also pathetic as they live in tin sheds with no proper toilets / bath, water and medical facilities.

It seems that in the latest case, they were pushed to meet an impossible construction deadline and the concrete was not adequately cured.

Workers also told this newspaper that they were not given safety helmets. “We were working for a construction company at OMR.

When the work ended there, the contractor asked us to move to this place. Right from the beginning we had been asking for safety helmets and the contractor kept promising he would arrange for them.

Had we worn helmets, many lives wouldn’t have been lost ,” said a weeping Nilesan, 24. who struggled to communicate in his broken Hindi.

About 160 migrant labourers had moved to this construction site a few months ago.

They cooked their own food and were saving money to send to families back home. But now, the revenue officials are grappling with the issue of how to preserve the bodies and transport them to their grieving families.

Five bodies were sent by train to Odisha on Tuesday, while the remaining would be airlifted on Wednesday.