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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Reward of labour: eviction by Imran Ahmed Siddiqui

Reward of labour: eviction by Imran Ahmed Siddiqui

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published Published on Oct 5, 2010   modified Modified on Oct 5, 2010
Several thousand day labourers and their families were driven out of Delhi over the past couple of days to try and hide India’s poverty from foreign visitors to the Commonwealth Games, a police officer said today.

Most were taken to railway stations and put on trains under the Delhi government’s orders, said the officer who oversaw part of the operation. Those who couldn’t afford tickets had their arms branded with an “ink stamp” with the Delhi Police insignia.

“The stamp is meant as an identity card so that ticket examiners will know these people worked at the stadiums,” the officer said. “Labourers from neighbouring states like Uttar Pradesh and Haryana were herded into trucks and Matadors and sent home.”

Rights activists, up in arms against the drive, said the labourers — estimated to be at least 5,000 — had been told not to return within the next 20 days.

With the government banishing most of the labourers involved in Games-related and other projects, virtually all overground construction in Delhi has been stopped for the next three weeks.

A Metro Rail official said the utility’s projects were still on: these labourers work underground during the day and are ferried by vehicle between the sites and their shacks on Delhi’s outskirts. A few Delhi-based labourers are left in the slums.

Delhi police spokesperson, Rajan Bhagat, however, said: “We have not forced anybody to leave. They left after the work was over.”

He said the police had visited labourers’ slums only to verify migrant workers’ papers.

But the officer who spoke to this newspaper said the Delhi government had instructed the police to drive away the labourers since thousands of foreign delegates and visitors would be coming for the October 3-14 Games. “Most of the migrant workers were from Bihar and Orissa,” he said.

He said the railways had been informally informed about the move to “stamp” the labourers’ arms so that these people could travel without tickets, but railway spokesperson Anil Saxena denied this. “We are not aware of this; the police haven’t told us. We’ll try to find out,” he said.

Earlier, the Delhi government had driven out most of the capital’s 50,000 beggars and confined the rest in homes for vagrants, from where they would not be allowed to step out till the Games end.

The move came after other states, including Bengal, refused a request from the Sheila Dikshit administration to “take back their beggars”.

Still, the police are taking no chances: a source said 10 police teams had been formed to patrol areas frequented by beggars.

“The government’s actions are so strange: the whole world knows about the poverty in India,” said Rajender Kumar, a businessman who watched today’s opening ceremony.

The eviction drive “is a criminal act on the government’s part”, said Moushumi Basu, secretary of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights.


The Telegraph, 4 October, 2010, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1101004/jsp/nation/story_13015231.jsp


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