Gzb closes Ramlila grounds, shifts workers 40km away

Ghaziabad: A day after 14,000 migrant workers thronged two Ramlila grounds in Ghaziabad, the district administration changed its strategy for ferrying those headed for Bihar and UP. On Monday night, the two Ramlila grounds were sealed and the workers who were still waiting there in the hope of getting a train ticket were sent to Modinagar and Morta in buses.
Modinagar was made the venue for registering those headed for Bihar and Morta for UP passengers.The Ghaziabad administration is currently running six trains and a number of buses to various places in UP and Bihar.
Hours after baton-wielding policemen had chased away migrant workers from the two grounds, hundreds of them were still roaming around in the vicinity, clueless about any mode of transport that would take them home.
“Around midnight, while we were waiting for another day to try our luck in getting our names registered for a train journey, a team of policemen arrived and asked us to board a few buses parked there,” said Ramakant, who wants to go home to Azamgarh. “Even as we panicked, we were herded in a corner and then shoved in the buses. None of us had any idea where we were being taken to. No one dared to ask either,” he added.
Raj Kumar, another migrant worker, said his slippers were lost in the melee on Monday as cops chased them with batons. “
Raj Kumar, Ramakant and hundreds of others like them were taken to a banquet hall in Morta that had been turned into a shelter home. “Around 2,000 of us were herded to this camp. With crammed spaces inside, many of us slept in open fields. On Tuesday morning, medical tests were conducted on some of us and we were allotted slips for a train journey home,” said Shobit, a migrant labourer. A group of migrant workers was taken to Ghaziabad station in buses.
Multanimal College in Modinagar was turned into a shelter home for workers from Bihar.
“After Monday’s fiasco, the idea was to send migrant labourers as far as possible from the two grounds. So, they were sent 40km away to Modinagar. We had to keep workers from Bihar and UP separate,” an official said.
District magistrate Ajay Shankar Pandey said 9,952 people from UP and about 37,000 from Bihar had registered for going home. Asked about the ruckus on the two Ramlila grounds on Monday, Pandey said, “On Tuesday, we changed our strategy. You can see for yourself that things went off quite well.”