Broken, beat and scarred

Driver promises to help guest workers, snatches their money, leaves them stranded instead

A driver and his associate dangled the hope on home in front of a group of guest workers from Odisha, only to mug them, leaving them bereft not only of all their money, but also of any hope they had left in humanity.

The seven guest workers used to work in a hotel near Chikkaballapur. For several days, they had been checking about the trains in Bengaluru, when they met this cab driver, who told them he could arrange transport for them. He took them to meet his brother in a car, snatched their money, left them on the road and fled. The incident left the workers so shaken that later when they were offered help, they rejected it and decided to walk all the way home.

Hemanth, one of the workers, spoke to BM from his hometown in Dhenkanal district in Odisha where he is undergoing quarantine now. “We had been going to the local police station since the day trains began but did not get a proper response. We are not very comfortable with using mobile phones and could not find anyone to help us register for the Seva Sindhu portal,” he said.

The group, he said, set out from Chikkaballapur towards BIEC in Dasanapura, Bengaluru, where many guest workers are put up and from where they are sent to their home states.

“When we reached there, we found out that trains were only for Bihar and Jharkhand. We were asked to go to some other place. We found some help and reached Yeshwantpur railway station where we were taking shelter. On the same night, we met a cab driver who stopped and asked us if we needed any help. We told him that we were trying to return to our hometowns and he told us that his brother is a driver and he would help us to reach home,” he said.

The group discussed and told the driver they had only Rs 4,000 with them. “He asked us to go with him to speak to his brother. It was around 1 am so we told him that we could meet him the next morning but he insisted that we should meet him immediately so that we could leave early,” Hemant said.

He said four of them collected money and left with the cab driver while the other three waited with the luggage near the railway station. “He took us to a deserted place where we spoke to his brother who asked us for Rs. 10,000 to drop us to our village in his car. We told him we did not have that much money and agreed to give Rs. 6,000, but he refused. We asked the cab driver to drop us back. He told us we had to give him Rs. 5,000 for dropping us back. We begged with them, but they forcibly put us in the car. They stopped in the middle of the road and threatened to call their friends and kill us. We were scared. They took the Rs. 7,000 we had with us and left us there,” he said.

The group walked back to Yeshwantpur railway station from where they began hitch hiking. They reached their village on June 11. “It took us nearly seven days to reach as we walked for a while and then boarded the buses as we did not have any money in our hand,” he said.

Shiv Anand, a civil defence personnel, said that his team had met this group on May 4 and given them food and promised to arrange shelter and transportation. “When we learnt they had been mugged, we went and met them. We told them we would arrange for shelter and transportation but the incident had left them fearful. They did not trust us, though we showed them our ID cards, and decided to go on their own.”