Rahul Maganti - Mega capital city, underpaid migrant workers
Most of the construction labourers at
Andhra Pradesh's upcoming capital city Amaravati are migrants from several
states who work long hours for months away from home, earning modest daily
wages
On platform number 10
at Vijayawada Junction railway station, around 10 workers are waiting for the
the Sanghamitra Express that starts from Bengaluru and goes up to Patna. The
train will take them home to Belgachhi, their village in Bihar, after months of
working to build Amaravati, the new capital city of Andhra Pradesh. “We were asked to show
our tickets thrice by different ticket examiners (TEs) in the last half hour,”
says Mohammad Alam, 24. There are several TEs on the platform. “These ‘labour
people’ don't buy tickets,” one of them tells me. “So for some trains we deploy
more TEs and are extra vigilant about those headed to the north and the north
east.”
The labourers
returning home to their village in Dagarua block of Purnia district have worked
for big construction companies such as Larsen and Tourbo (L&T) and
Shapoorji Pallonji Pvt. Ltd. These companies and others are building
Amaravati’s ‘Justice City’ (a High Court campus), houses for MLAs, and an IAS
officers’ colony, among other complexes. As the overcrowded
train arrives, the TEs rush to the general compartments, catch hold of the
labourers hanging off the edges, and ask to see their tickets. Meanwhile, Alam
and his friends struggle to get into the bogies packed well beyond capacity. “The rush is too much.
All the trains come here overcrowded because they start from Hyderabad or
Bengaluru or Chennai,” says Alam, who I first met at one of the construction
sites in Nelapadu village of Thullur mandal in Guntur
district.
I try to get into the
compartment to count the number of passengers. Around 200 male migrant
labourers are travelling in a bogie meant for 50. Many are standing or sitting
on the floor, trying to rest their backs. Others are sitting tightly together
on the seats. “We have to travel
like this for 40 hours to reach Patna. From there to our village, we have to
travel another 10 hours by bus,” says 19-year-old Mohammad Rizwan, Alam’s
brother. He has set up a makeshift bed for himself – a blanket tied like a
hammock to two rods. “There are 22 people from our village working in
Amaravati, all related to each other,” he adds... read more:
