Truck driver promises trip home, flees with migrants' Rs 1.36 lakh

There seems to be no end to migrants’ misery as more than 50 of them from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were not only cheated of their earnings of Rs 1.36 lakh by a truck driver who promised to take them home but were also beaten up by the police and made to walk back towards Bengaluru.

The incident happened at 3 am on Wednesday when the truck driver told the 56 labourers to get off the truck 20 km from the Andhra Pradesh border and cross over on foot and wait for him, saying there were checks at the Andhra Pradesh border post.

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“When we reached the border, the police stopped us and beat some of us for trying to cross the border,” Rajender Prasad, a labourer from Bihar, told DH.

Alibaba, president of Rashtra Seva Dala’s state unit, said he noticed the migrants walking towards Gauribidanur from Andhra. “It was already late afternoon and they hadn’t eaten since morning. Six of them were beaten up badly. We provided them with food but they just wanted to go back home. With the help of local police, we arranged a KSRTC bus and sent them back to Bengaluru,” he said.

Prasad said the bus dropped them off near Mehkri Circle. “The trucker is from UP and we trusted him. He told us he would wait on the Andhra side but stopped answering calls,” he said.

The labourers walked to Whitefield at night. On Thursday morning, about 10 of them got train tickets and left while the rest stayed near the police station.

When DH reached out to them in the evening, they said they had no food. Members of Whitefield Rising, learning about their plight late in the evening, organised food. “We are trying to find shelter for them. Calls to the Labour Department have not yielded any results,” a member of the Whitefield Rising said.

Prasad said they were yet to find shelter. “Some of the labourers have walked to Chandapura and Attibele to find jobs and earn enough for a train ticket,” he said.

Alibaba said the state government has failed to get its act together two months after the migrant labourers were pushed into the crisis. “They will die of hunger, if not the disease, if the system doesn’t wake up,” he warned.