Bihar chief minister and BJP ally Nitish Kumar slammed his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Yogi Adityanath’s government on Saturday for arranging buses to bring back students stranded in Rajasthan’s educational hub Kota, calling it a violation of the lockdown.
Nitish described the selective evacuation as an injustice to the people of various states, including migrant workers from Bihar, stuck in different parts of the country and are not allowed to return home.
The Bihar chief minister, in turn, was slammed by Prashant Kishor, poll consultant and former national vice-president of Janata Dal United, for not doing anything for the people of Bihar stranded across the country because of the lockdown.
The Bihar government has said that through its resident commissioner in Delhi, it has so for addressed the problems of 10.86 stranded migrant workers in various states. Besides, cooked food is being arranged at 10 camps in Delhi for the workers.
Stranded students from Kota arrive at a quarantine centre during the nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the coronavirus pandemic, Prayagraj, Saturday, April 18, 2020. Nearly 3,000 students stranded in Kota due to the ongoing lockdown left for their home in 100 buses sent by the UP government. PTI
On Saturday, Nitish said: “Movement of buses from Kota in Rajasthan to Uttar Pradesh to ferry students is a violation of the lockdown. This is a violation of the rules and regulations of the lockdown. This is injustice towards workers and labourers. When the labourers moved from Delhi in March it was also a violation of the lockdown.”
“People of other states stranded in different parts of the country will also pressurise their respective governments to arrange for their travel to their native places. Our migrant workers will also ask us to bring them back on special buses and trains to Bihar,” the chief minister added.
Pointing out that students staying in Kota hail from well-to-do families and a majority of them stay with their guardians there, Nitish wondered what the urgency was for the Uttar Pradesh government to get them home while migrant workers from Bihar and elsewhere are stranded at various places since the nationwide lockdown started from March 25.
Several thousands of workers from Bihar, Bengal and Uttar Pradesh had congregated at railway stations and bus stands in Maharashtra and Gujarat in an attempt to travel back home.
Kota has emerged as an educational hub in Rajasthan over the past few decades and is known for hundreds of coaching institutes that help students from different parts of the country to prepare for engineering and medical entrance examinations.
When a bus-load of students from Kota had reached Patna earlier this week, the state government ordered them to be traced and quarantined.
The incident prompted the Bihar chief secretary to write a letter to his Rajasthan counterpart over violation of the lockdown when passes were granted to private vehicles to transport the students.
Nitish had earlier objected to Adityanath’s move to provide buses to transport migrant workers from Delhi borders to places up to Bihar at a time several thousands of them had set out on foot to reach their homes.
Officially, around 1.81 lakh workers, many of them on foot, reached Bihar, while thousands more were thought to have filtered in from different places at the porous and unmanned borders of the state. One of the triggers of the mass exodus was the information about the availability of the buses at Noida and Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh to take them home
