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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | In Maldah: 'Nobody leaves out of choice' -Parth MN

In Maldah: 'Nobody leaves out of choice' -Parth MN

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published Published on Apr 19, 2021   modified Modified on Apr 20, 2021

-RuralIndiaOnline.org

With no industrial activity and low wages in agriculture, men from Bhagabanpur in Maldah district go to work in faraway places like Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, just to survive and send money home

Rehna Bibi didn’t think much when her phone call to her husband, Anas Shaikh, failed to connect at 10.30 a.m.on February 7, 2021. They had spoken less than two hours ago. “His grandmother had died that morning,” says Rehna, who had called him at 9 with the news.

“He could not have made it back for the funeral. So he asked me to do a video call at the time of the burial,” says Rehna, 33, sitting outside her one-room hut in Bhagabanpur village, in West Bengal’s Maldah district. Anas was more than 1,700 kilometres away – in the Garhwal mountains in Uttarakhand. When Rehna rang him the second time, the call wouldn’t go through.

Between Rehna’s two phone calls that morning, disaster had struck in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district. A portion of the Nanda Devi glacier had broken off and triggered a deluge in Alaknanda, Dhauli Ganga and Rishi Ganga rivers. Massive floods swept away homes on the riverbanks, trapping many, including labourers working at the hydropower plants in the region.

Anas was one of them. But Rehna didn’t know. She tried calling her husband a few more times. She started to worry and soon panic took over. “I kept calling repeatedly,” she says, breaking into tears. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

About 700 kilometers from Chamoli, in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh, Anas’s younger brother, Akram, saw the news on TV. “The location of the floods was not far from where my brother worked. I feared the worst,” he says.

The next day, Akram, 26, left by bus from Tapri village in Kinnaur district, making his way to Raini (near Raini Chak Lata village), the site of Rishi Ganga hydel project in Chamoli, where Anas worked. There, the National Disaster Response Force was combing the area for survivors. “I met someone who worked with my brother. He was the only one left from their team of 57. The rest were swept away.”

Akram called Rehna from Chamoli, but didn’t have the heart to break the news to her. “I needed a copy of Anas’s Aadhaar card, so I asked Rehna to send it to me. She immediately understood why I needed it,” he says. “I had to inform the police about my brother just in case they found the body.”

Anas, 35, worked as a lineman on a high-voltage transmission line of the Rishi Ganga power project. He was earning Rs. 22,000 a month. Like most men from his village in Maldah’s Kaliachak-III block, he had been migrating for work since he was 20 years old, returning for only a few days each year. When he went missing, he had visited Bhagabanpur only once in over 13 months.

A lineman's job at the power plant, says Akram, is to set up electrical towers, check wiring and correct faults. Akram, who also works as one, has studied upto Class 12. He started migrating to work when he turned 20. “We learnt on the job,” he says. He earns Rs. 18,000 a month at the hydropower plant in Kinnaur, where he works now.

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RuralIndiaOnline.org, 19 April, 2021, https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/in-maldah-nobody-leaves-out-of-choice/


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