‘We don’t know how long more we will be left to live like this’

PANAJI: Ajay Bacuria, 20, was all set to get married in his native Khandwa, in Madhya Pradesh, on March 28. All preparations were complete, and his family was awaiting his arrival. But four days before the wedding, PM Narendra Modi ordered a nationwide lockdown, and since then, Bacuria has been living in a train coach at Vasco railway station.
He is one of 50 who share the same fate.Mostly from Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, they were employed by a contractor as cleaning staff for the railways. When trains were operational, they shuttled between destinations, always on the move, with food and bedding provided.
But now, with their payment stopped the day the lockdown was announced, they’ve been surviving on free meals served by a few good Samaritans and the state government, outside Vasco station.
“We are provided free lunch and dinner, but there is no breakfast to eat when we wake up,” said M D Hanif. “Now, the homeless and beggars from all over Vasco have come here in search of food. From the initial 50 of us being served, there are now 350 in queue. We are lucky if our turn to be served comes before the food is over.”
Bacuria tried to coax another young friend to speak, but he did not. The young man, from Delhi, remained in his coach after learning of the death of his mother in Delhi, and the funeral being carried out in his absence.
“Until Friday, we stood outside the Vasco municipality to get our names registered for the trains. But yesterday, only the contractor for the railway pantry workers came to pack them off in a bus. We later learnt that those workers were sent off on a train to Madhya Pradesh. No one informed us,” said a disheartened Gajrat Singh Tomar, from MP.
A policeman said that the registration for the return trains at the municipality closed after around 8,000 registrations from Mormugao taluka.
Meanwhile, in a state shelter at the government primary school, Vasco, 13 workers from Assam live inside a classroom-turned-sleeping facility. A policeman, sitting behind iron grills, watches their movements 24x7.
“We were working as servers in a restaurant. We sensed that there could be a lockdown. We took our salaries and completed all other settlements with our employers and set out to leave on March 24. But the lockdown was imposed and we missed the train by a whisker. We spent Rs 60,000 just to stay at a guesthouse. Broke, we finally had to dial the state helpline,” said Krishna Chettri.
The workers are grateful for the government shelter, but speak of their growing anxiety.
“We heard a train left for MP yesterday with 1,200 workers. But there is no sign of a train to Assam,” said Dhan Bahadur Chettri. “There seems no possibility of the lockdown ending soon. The food we are served here is good, but we do not know how long we will be left to live like this. Our families call us up every day to enquire about our return.”
Back at the railway station, there is chicken curry and rice for lunch. But Bacuria and his friend Nitesh Thakur eat disinterestedly.
“The government is only playing politics with poor people like us,” said Thakur. “We haven’t even received any acknowledgement that we registered to return by train to our state. We have no hope of hearing from them. We are stuck here now till the lockdown is lifted. The contractor wants to keep us hanging here so we are available to work if train service resumes.”