Kendrapara: The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has sought an Action Taken Report (ATR) from the Koraput district Collector on the issue of migrant workers who had to walk from Bangalore to Koraput after being refused their wages. Acting on the petition filed by rights activist Radhakanta Tripathy, the apex right body May 10 sought a detailed reply within four weeks. The petitioner stated that distress migration is a chronic problem and cited that workers who were not paid wages were forced to migrate to their native place and walk from Bangalore to Koraput. He alleged that there was gross negligence on the part of the Odisha government to protect the rights of these workers and narrated the accounts of three different migrant families who were subjected to barbaric acts.
Citing the case wherein justice still eludes a 60-year-old migrant worker Chamru Paharia of Nuapada district, who had left for Maharashtra with two middlemen, Tripathy narrated the ordeal of this construction worker. He said when Paharia asked for his wages, the agents chopped five of his toes and three of his fingers. During Rath Yatra in the year 2019, Paharia left for Nagpur with the two middlemen, Dolamani Satnami and Bidesi Sunani, who belonged to his native Tikrapara village. The duo who took Paharia to Maharashtra refused to give him wages and cut eight of his fingers following a heated argument over payment of wages. Paharia lost consciousness at that point and woke up to find himself admitted to Nagpur city hospital by the RPF. Scared of running into the agents, he ran away from the hospital.
At the station, he was helped by strangers and was able to travel to Bolangir where he was spotted by a familiar villager who brought him back to his village. The victim, Tripathy said, is yet to get justice and the real criminals are yet to be tried under the law. In 2013, the right hands of two migrant labourers from Odisha were chopped off by a labour contractor and his accomplices in Kalahandi district. In this case, at least the conviction order of the criminal contractors has been passed by the district court.
In Gajapati district hand and leg injury of the migrant worker Sanka Murmu has been coloured as a railway accident, the petitioner said. These are the ground realities of the poor migrant workers in the state, Tripathy alleged. He further stated that these facts and circumstances revealed the naked truth of a defective society, economy, politics, and governance in the Koraput-Bolangir-Kalahandi districts in Odisha. He requested the NHRC for a permanent solution to the issue and suggested certain short-term and long-term measures to check the plight of distress migration.