The Congress party has offered to run 1,000 buses from Delhi NCR to take migrant workers back home in different parts of Uttar Pradesh.
Uttar Pradesh Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra wrote a letter to state chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Saturday seeking permission to run these buses.
“Despite the announcements made by the government, no arrangements have been made to safely take these workers home. Almost 65 workers have been killed in different road accidents till now, which is much more than the total number of deaths among the migrant population caused by Covid-19,” Priyanka Gandhi Vadra wrote in her letter.
The Congress offer entails running 500 buses from Ghazipur border near Ghaziabad and another 500 buses from the Noida border.
All the expenses, the letter said, will be paid by the All India Congress Committee.
In her tweets, after road accidents in UP’s Auraiya, and Unnao, and Sagar in Madhya Pradesh, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had implored the state government to safely ferry back migrant workers in buses.
24 migrants were killed and more than 30 injured when two trucks collided in Auraiya district, about 200 km from the state capital Lucknow on Saturday.
In another incident, a couple travelling back in an auto were killed in an accident on the Agra-Lucknow expressway near Unnao. On the same day, 5 migrants were killed and 19 others injured in an UP-bound truck which overturned in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh.
The central and state governments have started trains and bus services, but they aren’t proving to be adequate. We are flooded with visuals of migrant workers struggling to walk back home every day.
“We had come to submit this letter to the chief minister in this matter, but it is ironic that he has nothing to do with the pain and suffering of his people. He is only attending meetings sitting inside his home,” Pradesh Congress Committee president Ajay Kumar Lallu told the media after Adityanath refused to meet him.
More than 15 days ago, the Adityanath government had begun the challenging task of bringing back a million migrants back to Uttar Pradesh. The UP chief minister earned praise when he sent buses to ferry migrant workers back home soon after the lockdown was declared on March 25.
In a press briefing on Friday, the UP additional chief secretary Awanish Awasthi had claimed that more than 13.5 lakh migrant workers had returned to the state via trains, buses and personal vehicles. He also claimed 6.5 lakh labourers came from Delhi between March 1 and April 30.
On Sarurday, Awasthi said a total of 449 trains have so far brought over 5.64 lakh migrant workers back to Uttar Pradesh, claiming it to be the highest in the country. He also informed that about 200 buses have been deployed on state borders.