Two elderly men sat on a charpoi outside a mango orchard in the outskirts of Sohi village in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday, May 3, evening, taking care to maintain a suitable distance from a pair of slippers lying nearby.

The slippers they were so careful about belonged to 59-year-old Ghulam Ahmad, a resident of the village, who was beaten to death the previous day by a group of men who claimed to be members of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a group set up in 2002 by Adityanath, now the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Even after more than 30 hours of the murder having taken place, the villagers believed that the police could come back for Ahmad’s slippers. “Who knows when the police arrives again and starts harassing us for touching exhibits related to the murder case,” one of the villagers said.

Around 9.15 am on Tuesday, May 2, Ghulam Ahmad was sitting on the same charpoi outside the 14-bigha mango orchard, which he had taken on lease from fellow villager Anil Sharma, when a group of six to seven men approached him. They forced him to sit on a motorbike and took him to a nearby orchard, where they beat him with rods and sticks and then fled, leaving him there, bleeding profusely. Ghulam Ahmad managed to make a phone call to Sharma around 9.30 am informing him about his condition. Around the same time, Ghulam Ahmad’s brother Islam Khan, who was working in the neighbouring orchard and saw him being taken away, called up Ghulam Ahmed’s son Vakeel Ahmed.

“I brought him here on my motorbike and offered him water while he lay on the charpoi,” Sharma said. “He had blood stains on his shirt and complained of pain near his heart, apparently due to internal injuries.”

Ghulam Ahmad died on the way to the hospital.
 

An elopement as a prelude to murder

The Ahmads have lived in Sohi village for generations. Sohi is some 20 kms from the town of Khurja in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr district, separated from it by large tracts of mango orchards and fields of wheat, inhabited by a population of around 2,000 – mostly Hindu, except for four Muslim families, including the Ahmads.

The trouble started a week earlier, on April 27, when 26-year-old Yusuf, son of Ahmads’ neighbour Raizuddin Khan, went missing. Later it emerged that he had eloped with a Hindu woman from the neighbouring Fazalpur village.

Yusuf had returned to India from Saudi Arabia on April 11, where his parents had sent him for work after taking loans, and set up a barber shop at the market in Pahasu town, around five kms from Sohi. On April 28, while some of the villagers, including the village chief and few other Hindu families in Sohi, were away looking for the missing couple, a group of men claiming to be from Hindu Yuva Vahini arrived in Sohi.

“It was around 10 of them who had come on motorbikes, with saffron stoles tied on their heads,” said Vakeel Ahmad. “There was only one known face in the group – a fellow villager named Govinder. On that day, we heard him saying for the first time that he was a member of the Hindu Yuva Vahini and those accompanying him were members of the group too and had come from neighbouring villages. They threatened that they would remove all Muslim families from the village if the girl was not found in a day or two.”

While villagers in Sohi had heard about Hindu Yuva Vahini, till that day they had been unaware of any fellow villager being a member of the group.

Meanwhile, the woman’s relative in Fazalpur had registered a case of abduction against Yusuf. The villagers went from town to town, visiting known people and relatives in search of the missing couple, and learnt from them that the couple was on the move, travelling from one town to another, frequently changing their telephone numbers.

The men claiming to be from Hindu Yuva Vahini were, on their part, visiting Sohi on a daily basis all these days. “We cannot recall most of the faces,” said Vakeel Ahmad, “as they would arrive at a time when most of us [the men] were away looking for Yusuf and the girl and the women stayed indoors.”
 

The number of men in the group varied from day to day, Vakeel Ahmad said. “At times they came in a small group of five to six men and at times it was 30-35 of them. They used to threaten the women family members and leave,” Vakeel Ahmad said. The group had visited the village on Tuesday, May 2, morning too, Vakeel Ahmad said, which is when they attacked Ghulam Ahmad as they spotted him outside the mango orchard on their way back.

Ghulam Ahmad is survived by his wife, a daughter who is married, and four sons – Yaseem, Vakeel, Shakeel and Salman. While Vakeel Ahmad, who is also the official complainant in the case, is a carpenter, the others work as farm labourers.
 

Links with Hindu Yuva Vahini?

The police have registered a case of rioting and murder in connection with the incident and named one person, Govinder, in the First Information Report. The other suspects were listed as 5-6 unidentified members of the Hindu Yuva Vahini. Till Wednesday, May 3, night, the police had arrested three persons – identified as Pulkit Sharma (18), Lalit Sharma (20) and Hani Raghav (20). While Govinder is absconding and most villagers of Sohi claim that they have never heard the names of the three arrested ones, the police are yet to disclose further details about the accused men, including which villages they belong to.

In the complaint attached with the FIR, the assailants are said to have asked Ahmad to get the missing girl immediately and when he said that the villagers would need time, they took him away.

While the Bulandshahr district head of Hindu Yuva Vahini has denied the group’s involvement in the incident, Neetu Sharma, the mother of one of the arrested men, Lalit Sharma, told reporters outside the Pahasu police station, that her son was associated with the organisation but denied his role in the incident. The police have not yet officially stated whether the arrested persons are members of the Hindu Yuva Vahini.

As the police look out for others involved in the incident and have detained a few men for questioning, over 100 police personnel from Pahasu and at least three other police stations now guard Sohi village. Groups of police personnel, entrusted with ensuring law and order, could be seen not only in every corner of the village but also the entire stretch connecting Pahasu to Sohi.

“After all it is a sensitive issue,” said a sub-inspector deployed there, as he questioned a few media personnel about what they were noting down about the incident.

Post Script: On Thursday morning, senior police officials said that the couple has been found and shall be produced at a court in Bulandshahr after medical examination. The police, however, did not disclose the location where the couple was finally tracked down.

This article was first published on Scroll.in

Few residents of a temporary camp set up on farmland on the outskirts of Hisar town in Haryana can understand what the oldest person among them mumbles. But on Thursday afternoon, Subeh Singh, 90, who sat on a cot outside his makeshift home, wearing several layers of warm clothing and a woollen cap, could be heard loud and clear: “We shall never return.”

The camp, at one end of Hisar’s Camry Road, is inhabited by 120 families of the Balmiki caste, considered to be among the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy.

In April 2010, these families fled their village, Mirchpur, around 70 km away from Hisar, after a mob of nearly 1,000 people from the village’s dominant Jat community burnt 18 homes in the Balmiki colony following a dispute among few men from both communities. Singh’s younger brother Tara Chand, and his teenage daughter, Suman, who suffered from polio and could not walk without aid, were burnt to death in that incident.

“The preparations were on for our eldest granddaughter’s marriage when the incident happened,” recalled Krishna Devi, 85, Singh’s wife. “They [people from the Jat community] just came inside our house with kerosene and petrol and set everything on fire. We had to run for our lives. The marriage finally happened nearly a year after we shifted to the camp.”

In 2011, a Delhi court convicted 15 of the 84 accused in the case.

The displaced families in Hisar never returned to their village despite repeated attempts in the past seven years to convince them to do so, both by their relatives – some of whom still live there – and the state government, which rebuilt the 18 houses that were set on fire.

An incident on Monday has ended any likelihood of that ever happening.
 

Inter-caste clash

On Monday, nine Dalit youths, aged between 14 and 25, were severely injured after a fight broke out between a group of Dalits and a group of upper-caste men in Mirchpur.

According to the villagers, the incident took place at a local playground where a cycle-stunt competition was being organised. It started with an argument over a group of youths from the upper caste allegedly passing casteist remarks against one of the participants, Shiv Kumar, 18, a district-level athlete.

The argument deteriorated into a full-blown assault within minutes, after several men from the upper castes joined in and started physically assaulting Kumar. When Kumar’s friends and cousins tried to intervene, they were thrashed too. The situation was only brought under control when a posse of police personnel arrived at the spot.
 

A case of rioting, unlawful assembly, criminal assault under sections of the Indian Penal Code and provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has been registered. The accused have been identified, but no arrests were made till Thursday. The police said that the accused men belonged to several upper caste communities, including Jats.

The clash took place just a month after the state government withdrew the additional security cover – provided by police and paramilitary troops – that had been deployed in Mirchpur after the 2010 attack.

On Tuesday, the 40-odd Dalit families still living in Mirchpur left their homes temporarily, which compelled the senior district and police officials to intervene.
 

Pitiful living in Hisar

The residents at the Hisar camp came to know about the clash when one of the villagers arrived there on Tuesday.

The displaced community is quite in a fix – while they feel returning to Mirchpur is no longer an option, life in the camp is equally difficult. The families in the camp live inside tents that barely can accommodate a cot, a few utensils and closets that they have purchased in the past six years. The families usually share cooking space. Two or three families use one earthen stove outdoors, with others using kerosene stoves.

The government sends the camp’s residents a tanker of water every day but there is no permanent toilet – defecation happens mostly in the open and there are temporary arrangements for bathing.

The men work as daily wage labourers, and offer their services at Hisar’s labour chowks.

“For how long are we supposed to live this way,” asked Mela Devi, 75, a resident of the camp. Devi and her husband Bhisma, 80, had suffered severe burn injuries when their house was set afire and their livestock stolen in the 2010 incident.

“When our relatives in Mirchpur try to convince us to return home, we ask them to come here instead,” she said. “Now it seems like we were right. We live in uninhabitable conditions, but at least there is no threat to our lives here.”
 

On Thursday, in Mirchpur, nearly 100 policemen patrolled the lanes of Balmiki colony. With over 100 unoccupied houses, the colony looks desolate. Most of the police teams stationed themselves at the abandoned houses. A few policemen were entrusted with taking down details of outsiders – including journalists – coming to meet Dalit families after Monday’s incident.

This reporter was grilled by a policeman who asked for details like name, address, telephone number, and name of publication, as well as how much he knew about Monday’s clash.

Before the 2010 attack, as many as 250 Dalit families lived in this colony. Now only around 40 are left. While most of the others have settled at the Hisar camp, some left for Jind, Adampur, Barwala, Fatehabad in Haryana, and Delhi. Most of them also work as daily wage labourers.
 

Living in fear

“These 40 families will also not live here anymore if the situation remains like this,” said Prem Prakash Chauhan, 65, who is related to one of the injured youths. “This is not the first such incident post-2010. Around two months ago, two senior residents of the Balmiki colony were thrashed by Jat youths at the village temple. Many such incidents happen but they do not materialise into police cases as they are settled among the communities.”

Chauhan added that the reasons cited as triggers for such inter-caste violence are just excuses. For instance, in 2010, it was a Dalit man’s dog that had barked at a group of upper caste men, while this time it is a sports contest, he said.
 

According to Ved Pal Singh Tanwar, a Dalit activist in Haryana, who owns the four-acre plot in Hisar where the displaced families have settled, the state should have provided them with an alternate resettlement and rehabilitation facility by now.

In 2013, the Supreme Court asked if these families could be be brought back to Mirchpur. In a report submitted to the Supreme Court that year, a joint inspection team led by the chairman of the district legal services cell and an assistant professor of Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences had recommended that the Balmikis of Mirchpur be immediately resettled at a safe place, and rehabilitated.

It had also asked the state to provide the displaced families with education facilities for their children, adequate healthcare facilities, and help to enable them to obtain official documents like Below Poverty Line cards, ration cards and voters cards. It also recommended psychological trauma counselling for them.

Tanwar said that though the state government has made several attempts to convince the families to return, they are reluctant to do so because of the fear of being attacked again. Monday’s assault has confirmed those fears.

“There is no chance of us ever returning home after what happened on Monday,” said Krishna Devi.

This article was first published on Scroll.in

Image credit:  Abhishek Dey

On a crowded platform of the New Delhi Railway Station on Thursday, Angad Tiwari, 28, ran as he stole hurried glances at the overcrowded Poorvottar Sampark Kranti Express – scheduled to depart in the next three minutes – looking for a place for himself for the nearly six-hour journey to his village near Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh.

Till last week, Tiwari had a job with a cardboard carton manufacturing unit in Faridabad. Then, the owner closed down the section that employed Tiwari and 27 others. “The factory owner said he did not have the cash to run the unit in full production capacity or to pay our wages,” he said. “Fourteen of us were laid off while the others were accommodated in another process.”

On November 13, five days after he announced the demonetisation of Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes as a tool against black money and counterfeit currency, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had appealed to the people to give him 50 days to deliver to them the “India of their dreams”. And he promised that he would suffer any punishment if any fault was found in his intentions and actions.

On Thursday, a day before the December 30 deadline, Scroll.in met factory workers and labourers who had migrated from their villages, mostly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, to the National Capital Region to earn a living. These interactions took place at the New Delhi Railway Station, as they waited to catch various trains to take them home. Their reasons for returning – from steep declines in income to being laid off – all boiled down to the severe cash crunch brought on by the demonetisation exercise.

“Had things really changed for the good in these 50 days, I would not be heading home,” Tiwari said. “For factory workers, the demonetisation announcement has dealt a double blow. Our wages for October were pending on the day of the announcement [November 8]. And we had to accept old notes and later get them exchanged at the banks after standing in long queues, sacrificing our wages for those days.”

Angad Tiwari, who lost his job, waits for his train on Platform 13 at the New Delhi Railway Station on Thursday.

And on pay day on December 7, he added, even as the workers demanded their wages in the new currency notes, the factory owner offered them cheques or bank transfers. But most of the workers, including Tiwari, neither had bank accounts, nor the documents to open one in such a short span of time. “I asked the employer to credit my wages to a colleague’s bank account, which he did,” he said. “But that will not work any longer as that colleague, too, had to leave after the department in which the he was employed shut down earlier this month.”

Tiwari said he would not be coming back to Delhi to look for work for at least a month, adding, “I do not see the situation changing much till then.”
 

Going back empty

The days following the demonetisation announcement were probably tougher for 36-year-old Madan Nishad, a resident of Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh, who was unemployed and looking of work. “I had lost my last job after I took leave for two months to attend to urgent matters at home,” he said. “I was already facing a tough time finding a new job and after the November 8 announcement, there was no chance of getting any work.”

He arrived in the Capital last week, hoping the situation would have settled somewhat. “We were expecting things to get smoother by this month as we trusted the prime minister,” he said. “So last week, a friend from Mirzapur, who is working at a construction material manufacturing unit in Delhi’s Narela, asked me to come over. I arrived on Sunday [December 25]. However, the factory owner refused to employ me, saying he is still to recover from the cash crisis.”
Ramdev Rai, a 30-year-old rickshaw-puller who worked in the areas around the University of Delhi, also gave up on hoping for better days. On Thursday, he was at the railway station, waiting for a train to take him home to Banka district in Bihar.

“In November, my daily income dropped to Rs 150 from what used to Rs 350 to Rs 400 in normal times,” he said. “I was expecting better days in December but that did not happen. After this cash crisis, people do not spend at all.” Rai added that he would not be returning to Delhi for another two to three months at least.
 

Cash is still king

This reverse migration of workers has left the Capital with roughly one-fourth of its total migrant workforce, said Rajesh Kumar, general secretary (Delhi) of the Indian Federation of Trade Unions. Most were left with no option but to head home after their employers shut shop or reduced operations massively.

Kumar said roughly 95% of units in Delh’s industrial areas – Mayapuri, Okhla and Wazirpur being the biggest ones – come under the unorganised sector and have been hit the hardest by demonetisation. “To lay off employees on such a scale without the government’s permission is also a violation of the Industrial Disputes Act, no matter what the reason,” he said. “This demands the immediate intervention of the labour department.”

But the employers, too, claimed to be in a helpless situation, facing circumstances never seen before. Many of them criticised the push for cashless transactions.

“The last 50 days have shown us that we cannot be a cashless economy,” said Neeraj Sehgal, a factory owner and general secretary of the Mayapuri Industrial Welfare Association. “Most factories have cut production capacity by over 25% owing to the cash crisis, which persists. The major hurdle is to deliver the final goods from the point of production to the point of sales as transporters demand only cash.”

Workers, too, prefer being paid in cash because the other alternatives, such as cheque payments and bank transfers, lead them to another problem – withdrawal. “But nothing can be done as the employers, too, are short on cash even after 50 days of the demonetisation move,” Sehgal added.

Courtesy: Scroll.in
 

On the morning of October 15, Najeeb Ahmed, a 27-year-old first-year postgraduate student of biotechnology at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, was spotted getting into an autorickshaw on the campus. He has not been seen since.

In this period, his case has been shifted to a special investigation team, formed on the orders of Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, from the crime branch of the Delhi Police. The reward for information on him has been increased from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 10 lakhs. The university authorities, fearing protests by students, have set up iron grills around the administration building. There have been numerous rumours about Ahmed being spotted in cities in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and even Nepal. None of these leads have worked out. Najeeb Ahmed is still missing.

“In the past two weeks, we received a lot of phone calls from people claiming to have spotted Najeeb,” said his brother, Mujeeb Ahmed. “Most of the callers later started asking for contact details of former JNU students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar and former vice-president Shehla Rashid Shora, whom they have seen on TV. All such calls have so far turned out to be hoaxes.”

He added, “In the end, the last information about Najeeb is the one given by the crime branch, which claimed to have traced the autorickshaw that dropped him outside the Jamia Millia University campus on October 15.”

According to the police officer who headed the special investigation team, the number of calls from people claiming to have spotted Najeeb Ahmed rose with the increase in the reward money, from Rs 1 lakh in the beginning to Rs 2 lakhs, then Rs 5 lakhs and finally, Rs 10 lakhs. “Following such leads, we sent teams to several cities including Darbhanga, Bhopal, Bareilly, Aligarh, Ajmer and even Kathmandu,” the officer said.
 

Protests on campus

The night before he disappeared, Najeeb Ahmed was involved in a spat with members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad – the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s student wing – who had come to his room at the Mahi-Mandovi hostel seeking votes for the mess elections. He allegedly slapped one of them. The row had quickly turned ugly and a big group of students later attacked Ahmed. He had to be rescued by campus guards.

However, the university authorities named Ahmed as an accused in the brawl and expelled him from the hostel the same night. Ahmed’s family claims he was abducted and the police have filed a case in this regard.

Since then, students at JNU have kept up a steady stream of protests against university authorities for their handling of the case. On October 19, they had confined the vice-chancellor and top university officials in the administration block for 24 hours during a lock-in protest.

On Sunday, they organised a candle light march on campus to protest the alleged shielding of those who had attacked Ahmed. On Monday, they rearranged the potted plants placed on the stairs outside the administration building to spell out “Najeeb”.
 

Lost, not found most of the time 

The lack of progress in finding Najeeb Ahmed is characteristic of missing persons cases in the Capital. Delhi Police records show that of the 16,297 people reported missing till August 31 this year, over 6,400 remain untraced. If one were to add the numbers from 2014 and 2015 to this year’s figure, of the 64,144 people reported missing, 20,800 are yet to be found. This means that nearly one-third of the cases remain unsolved.

The cases counted as traced include those in which the subjects came back on their own, without the police having done anything to tracked them down. However, no separate data is available for this category.

The police seem to have a better record in finding missing minors – they traced 15,400 of the 20,323 who disappeared between January 1, 2014 and August 31, 2016. This means only 24% of cases remain unsolved as against one-third in the case of both adults and minors.
When the police manage to trace a missing person, it is mostly through technical surveillance or the human intelligence network. The former did not work out in Ahmed’s case as he left his cellphone behind and did not try to contact any of the people the police have been in touch with so far.

“From preliminary investigation, we concluded that Najeeb left the hostel on October 15 on his own,” said the additional deputy commissioner-rank officer who headed the special investigation team. “But he left his phone in his hostel room. The next thing to kept track of was whether he tries to establish contact with anyone. We started with his closest relatives – mother, sister and brother.”

In the next two weeks, the team spoke to many people – Najeeb Ahmed’s relatives, his classmates at JNU and at Aligarh Muslim University, where he studied geology for a few years, students of a private college in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, from where he graduated in biotechnology, and batch-mates at a medical coaching centre in Uttar Pradesh.

“But Najeeb contacted none of them after he went missing,” the officer added. “Some of those friends even accompanied police teams on search operations.”

After surveillance comes human intelligence, often called the eyes and ears of the police system. But this traditional resource, too, seems to have failed investigators in this case.

“The question is of visibility,” said the officer. “Even the hardest of criminals leave footprints in a certain pattern that add to their visibility, even if they hide in a densely populated area. In Najeeb’s case, as far as we have come to know, Najeeb is unpretentious and highly introverted. The subject in this case has no visibility.”
 

Keeping the faith 

Last week, the Delhi High Court pulled up the police for having failed to find the student even 50 days after he went missing, saying such a situation would create insecurity among people. “It is over 50 days and still, the police do not know his whereabouts,” it said. “How can somebody vanish suddenly and the police have no clue about it? Even if we think of the worst, something has to be found out.”

Frustrated at the phone calls that lead nowhere and the lack of progress in the case, Najeeb Ahmed’s family is, however, unwilling to lose hope. “We cannot give up hope,” said his brother Mujeeb. “The phone number that we have published in the posters belongs to our uncle. We will make sure the phone is never switched off until we find my brother.”

This article was first published on Scroll.in

On platform number six of Old Delhi Railway Station on Tuesday afternoon, a lean man in his 50s stood close to a loudspeaker transmitting information about arrivals and departures to make sure that he was waiting on the right platform for his train .

“It is 10 minutes past 2 pm. The train should have come by now,” said the man fretfully, as he walked towards the edge of the platform and leaned forward to check on a locomotive that seemed to be moving towards the station.

The man, who identified himself as Moti Sahu, said he works at a sandal manufacturing unit in northwest Delhi’s Tri Nagar. He said that he was heading to his nephew’s room in Ghaziabad, which adjoins Delhi, where he would stay for a day or two before moving back to his village in Bihar’s Darbhanga district.

On Sunday morning, Sahu’s employer asked him and nearly 150 other workers to go on unpaid leave for a month. The employer expressed his inability to pay their wages at the moment, and attributed the cash crisis to the Union government’s November 8 decision to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes overnight.

“I have worked in the factory for over four years now but this has never happened before,” said Sahu. “I shall come back in January and check on my employer. He is not a bad person. What I need to take care of at this moment is the cash crunch. I manage to save Rs 4,500 every month and send that home. I failed in doing it this time.”

While his wife and younger son, who is still a teenager, live in the village, his older son works at a jeans factory in Delhi. “We are fortunate that he still has his job,” said Sahu. He then rushed off to another platform to catch his train after realising that he was waiting on the wrong one.
 

Compelled to go home

Like Sahu, thousands of other migrant labourers, who are paid wages by the day, have been severely hurt by the government’s overnight decision to withdraw high-value currency notes, which sucked out 86% of the cash circulating in the country. The lack of new currency to replace the withdrawn notes has meant that many employers are unable to pay their workers. This has compelled many workers to head back to their villages where they may not have to pay rent for their homes, but will nonetheless have several mouths to feed – and insufficient opportunities to earn a living.

On platform number five, 45-year-old Raju Mukhiya squatted in a corner, waiting for his train. Mukhiya too is a native of Darbhanga, Bihar, and was part of a group whose members were scattered across the platform.

“Every year we leave our village after Dussehra and work as farm labourers in Haryana, working first on clearing the rice harvest and then on sowing wheat,” he said. “For the past three years we have been working in fields in Jind [a district in Haryana] and there was never any problem, until this year when the zamindar told us that he could not afford our labour for sowing wheat as he did not have cash. He also got our train tickets done.”

Mukhiya and his friends said that their employer paid them for the rice harvest that they cleared. However, things changed around a fortnight ago when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the plan to demonetise high-value currency notes. Mukhiya said the announcement coincided with the time he and his friends were readying to be deployed in the fields to sow the wheat crop.

“It takes eight to 10 labourers to sow wheat in one acre of land,” said Mukhiya. “The total wage of Rs 2,500 to Rs 3,000 is distributed among them for the day. Our employer did once try to offer us old notes for our labour but we had to refuse. After all, where shall we go with those invalid notes?”

Raju Mukhiya waits for a train to Darbhanga, Bihar, at Old Delhi Railway Station. (Photo credit: Abhishek Dey.)

Prior to November 8, Mahesh Rai, 40, and five others were also employed with a landlord in Haryana’s Jind district. On Tuesday afternoon, they huddled near a pillar at the centre of platform number 16 at Old Delhi Railway station. The six of them were heading back home to Bihar’s Sitamarhi district.

“There was no work for the past seven days,” said Rai. “When our employer gave up owing to a cash crisis around a fortnight ago when the wheat sowing was to be done, we waited there looking for work in other fields for another week until our savings dropped down to zero.”
 

An unlucky season

Mohabbat, 30, a resident of Chharra Rafatpur village in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, was also on his way home. “I left home earlier this month to work at a field in Rewari [Haryana],” he said. “Call it bad luck, I could not earn a decent income this season. In fact there is no income at all for the past 10 days. Many farmers are offering old notes that have been scrapped.”

Asked about the government’s decision to take out Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes from circulation, he replied, “What is black money for a labourer who has hardly seen any money in life?”

The others refused to comment on the demonetisation decision.

On Wednesday morning, many migrant workers, mostly from Uttar Pradesh, converged at East Delhi’s Anand Vihar inter-state bus terminus too where they planned to catch buses home.

“I have to come back in another 15 days,” said Vinod Kumar, 35, who was heading to his village near Kanpur.

Kumar has been employed by a contractor to repair underground telephone wires in Faridabad, near Delhi, for the past four years.

“I have payments amounting to Rs 20,000 that I was supposed to receive this month,” said Kumar. “But the contractor is now offering me the amount in Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. When I did not accept those notes, he asked for a fortnight’s time.”

His wife and two sons live in the village, and he manages to save and send them at least Rs 8,000 a month. “But there will be a little crunch for a while,” he said as he boarded a state transport bus.

Vinod Kumar sits in a bus at Anand Vihar ISBT on Wednesday, heading towards Kanpur. (Photo credit: Abhishek Dey.)

‘Never seen this before’

Another migrant worker, 40-year-old Avinash Kushwaha, sat on a bench waiting to catch a bus to Hamirpur town in central Uttar Pradesh. He is employed as a labourer at a construction site in northwest Delhi’s Shalimar Bagh for a daily wage of Rs 300 but is temporarily out of work.

Kushwaha said that he has worked as a construction labourer for nearly 22 years but has never seen a similar situation before. “I have lost jobs earlier but this time it is not so,” said Kushwaha. “The contractor does not have sufficient notes to pay our wages. He gave me money for the ticket two days ago and asked me to come back in 15 days.”

Notwithstanding the fact that he will not earn anything for over two weeks, Kushwaha was in favour of the government’s demonetisation move. “The problem which we have to face is temporary,” he said. “Once all the black money is seized by the government, we all shall get the benefits.”

Courtesy: Scroll.in