Lawyer who offered Rs 25 lakh for return of migrant workers to UP urges SC to give it to kin of 5 who died on way home

“Since trains had started going to UP from June 1, many migrant workers had already returned home. The court had said I could withdraw the Rs 25 lakh I had deposited for their repatriation but I proposed that since I had already deposited the amount in the court, let Rs 5 lakh each be distributed to the families of five migrant workers who had died on their way home. The court has allowed it,” Khan told The Indian Express.

The other deceased workers who Khan has named in his petition included a man from Machlishehar in Jaunpur, whose body was found in the toilet of a Shramik train; Mohammed Javed, who died in an accident in Nashik while taking his family from Bhiwandi to Lucknow in a mini-truck; Suraj Bali Chauhan who died in Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa district while walking to Siddharth Nagar from Bhiwandi; and Tabarak Ansari, also from Bhiwandi, who died at Barwani in Madhya Pradesh while cycling to Maharajganj.

In their order of June 12, Justice Ashok Bhushan, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice M R Shah directed the SC registry to transfer the amount to the Legal Service Authority (LSA) of the concerned five districts that the deceased hailed from. It said the LSA should ensure the disbursal of the amount to next of kin of the workers after due verification.

In his petition, Khan wrote that he had named the five workers based on limited research from information available in public domain. None of the deceased were known to him or related to him.

“A large number of migrants have also died on their way home due to hunger, exhaustion and other unfortunate reasons. The migrants are the poorest among the poor, therefore, the dependent family members of the migrants, who have died enroute, are living in a very precarious condition,” Khan’s petition stated.

Khan, who had migrated to Mumbai from Mahuari in UP’s Sant Kabir Nagar, had first moved the SC in May. He said in his petition that his “conscience is not allowing him to let poor migrants remain in the lurch” and offered to pay to facilitate their journey from Mumbai to UP “irrespective of caste, creed and religion”.

Speaking to The Indian Express earlier, Khan, whose journey to a 3-BHK in a plush Wadala highrise began with living in a furniture shop in Vasai and included a three-year stay in Dharavi, had said: “It is not about food or shelter. It is about self-respect. They (migrant workers) may be poor but they have self-respect.”