While metro stations along the Namma Metro Green Line wear an air of festivity and strings of marigolds adorn their gates and railings, for the thousands of migrants workers who have brought the massive project linking the four ends of Bengaluru to fruition, it is yet another day at work.
They are busy giving finishing touches to the stations from Kempegowda Interchange station to Yelachenahalli, and expect to go home in another three to four months.
Sunil Paswa, now working at Kempegowda station, has been working on Namma Metro for the last four years. He has left his family, consisting of his parents, wife, and two small children, at Samastipur in Bihar. “I go home once every four to five months. I do labour work,” Mr. Paswa said. He has seen the metro station come up at Majestic from the base to the current four-level interchange. “There are nearly 5,000 workers here, and newer groups keep coming in every few months,” Mr. Paswa said.
Nobeen Kumar Mahanto. Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
This is one of the biggest projects he has worked on. “I started work on the interchange station from ground up and saw the four floors come up. One level connects the north-south corridor and the other east-west corridor,” he said.
All the men live in a dormitory-like set-up at Yelahanka and are herded into a bus to the construction site every morning and return once their shift is done.
The other men working on the shift include Nobeen Kumar Mahanto from Balasore, Odisha; Saleem from Kolkata, and Uday Ghosh from Bihar.
At 20, Mr. Ghosh is one of the youngest on the shift. He has been in Bengaluru for the last two months, after a three-year stint at a construction site in Kerala, and looks forward to going back to his mother and elder siblings in Bihar.
While the food and accommodation provided is satisfactory, he said they have been having problems with the quality of water supplied where they live. “There are worms in the water. Once or twice a month the tanks are cleaned, but the worms come back again,” Mr. Ghosh said.
Saleem. Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy
Mr. Mahanto has been working in Karnataka for the last 25 years, and his wife and two schoolgoing girls live in Mysuru. He has been involved with the metro work since the initial days. “I have worked on Yesvantpur metro line, and Delhi Metro before this. I have seen the work start from putting the base,” said Mr. Mahanto.
While the workers were happy to get some attention, in many places, contractors refused to let the workers speak. “Let them be, they are busy at work,” said a supervisor in-charge of a team working on one of the buildings at the Majestic station.
For these workers, while there is a sense of completion seeing the project getting inaugurated, there is not much of a change to their daily schedule.
There are still walls to be plastered and roads to be white-topped. And once their job is done, they will disappear and move on to other building sites and big-ticket projects being announced with great fanfare across the country.