Migrant labourers’ movement a problem in Dhanbad

Apr 27, 2020, 05:00 IST

Sindri: Despite the lockdown, migrant labourers continue to pour into Dhanbad, leaving the district administration clueless about their movement.
When Dhanbad police stopped 10 persons riding on five bikes for checking at Randhir Verma Square on Sunday morning, it was found that all of them were coming from Chhattisgarh.
The labourers said they hail from West Bengal and work as cloth vendors in Chhattisgarh. They further said that they were in home quarantine for 14 days in Chhattisgarh. However, police, as a precautionary measure, took them to PMCH for medical tests and sent them to 14 days’ quarantine at Dhanbad sadar hospital.
Dhanbad SDO Raj Maheshwaram said, “The fact that the labourers could cross state and district borders indicates that there is some leniency at the checkpoints as they were all coming on bikes and could not have gone unnoticed at so many places.”
He added, “On our part, we are maintaining the lockdown strictly and have even stopped nearly 400 miners coming to duty to BCCL area 1 from Bokaro on Sunday. They are working in BCCL, but their colonies are situated in the administrative area of Bokaro district. We are trying to devise ways to solve this problem,” he added.
The SDO also admitted that movement of migrant labourers and their management are proving to be a bigger task. “We caught 39 persons coming from Odisha on bikes around 20 days ago and they all have been kept in isolation at Purbi Tundi. Similarly, 278 have been kept in isolation in Maithon. Around 50 migrant labourers, who completed their quarantine period at PMCH and sadar hospital, were moved to the isolation centre at Nirsa on Sunday,” he said.
“All of them want to get back to their homes in Bihar and West Bengal, but we cannot allow that,” he added.