A group of young Calcuttans is using the network of its members in other cities to try and locate Bengal’s migrant workers who are still stuck there.

The group, started by former students of Jadavpur University, has created a Facebook page called “Gana Tadaroki Udyog (People’s Care Initiative)” to provide a platform for posting details about stranded migrant workers.

Former students of other institutes and teachers are also part of the group.

Once someone is posting updates about the distress of the workers in cities such as Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai, members of the group are activating their friends there to deliver help to the stranded lot.

A former student of the erstwhile Presidency College, who is now a central government employee, said he came to know about the distress of the migrant workers in Delhi from Facebook.

“I contacted a junior from the institute, who is in Delhi pursuing higher education. He raised funds through his network and delivered the ration to the workers, who are from South 24-Parganas and East Midnapore,” he said.

Migrant workers are among the worst-hit, robbed of their livelihood by the lockdown forced by the novel coronavirus.

Dwaipayan Banerjee, one of the administrators of the Facebook group, said: “Initially, we had started distributing relief through a Facebook group called ‘Humans of Patuli’ to the underprivileged in the neighbourhood. There we started getting alerts about the distress of the migrant workers from Bengal. That led to the birth of ‘Gana Tadaroki Udyog’.”

Banerjee is a research scholar at the Centre for Studies in Social Science, Calcutta.

Members of the group are in touch with batchmates and acquaintances who are spread across the country for higher studies or work.

“We were in touch with each other through a WhatsApp group. Now, this networking is being put to use,” said a member of the group.

Debojt Thakur, an alumnus of Presidency University who is now a doctoral student at the University of Trier in Germany, is among the volunteers that delivered help to migrant workers in Hyderabad.

Debojit is currently in Delhi for his fieldwork.

He came to know about workers from Bengal stranded in Hyderabad when a representative of the organisation called “The Quran Foundation” posted the details.

The foundation is an NGO based in Hyderabad.

“I got in touch with the person and we raised funds in Delhi. Later, I transferred Rs 12,000 through Google Pay to that individual. With that, each of the 50 stranded workers has been provided with 2kg rice, 0.5kg pulse, 2kg potato and 1kg onion on Tuesday,” said Debojit.

Soumya Sahin, a teacher of economics at the National University of Juridical Sciences, said he came across a phone number on the Facebook page and learned about the poor condition of the workers in Maharashtra.

“That was the number of a labourer stuck in Kandivali in north Mumbai. He wrote that a group of 150 workers from Baduria in North 24-Parganas district were stuck there. I advised him to buy essentials from a grocer and told the grocery owner that I would be transferring the fund through Google Pay,” said Sahin.

He said that was how they had helped the workers stuck in Navi Mumbai and Haji Kasim Chawl.