Thousands of Congress supporters and all six MLAs of the party in Malda district participated in a sit-in demonstration in front of the district magistrate’s office, demanding inclusion of Malda district in Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana.

The inclusion in the scheme, the Congress claimed, would help thousands of migrant workers in the district.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyaan on June 20 to boost employment and livelihood opportunities for migrant workers, millions of whom had returned to their native places in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak and the resultant lockdown.

As a part of the scheme, skill mapping of the migrant workers would be done to help them work near their homes, Modi had announced then.

However, no district in Bengal was brought under the scheme although thousands of migrant workers from the state, including from districts like Malda, work in different states.

So far, 116 districts from states like Bihar, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha were brought under the project that is supposed to be in force for 125 days.

“The central government is spending people’s money on the scheme and it has no right to discriminate against the migrant workers of Bengal. All those who are from the district should get monetary benefits of the scheme and food grains as was announced by the PM,” said Mostaq Alam, a Congress MLA and the district president of the party.

Other Congress MLAs of the district — Arjun Haldar, Isha Khan Choudhury, Asif Mehbub, Mottakin Alam and Al Birun Zulkarnine — said the state government did not take necessary initiative to ensure that the Centre included districts like Malda in the scheme.

“The provision was to include a district having 25,000 or more migrant workers in the scheme. Malda has at least 50,000 migrant workers and they are yet to get the benefits of the scheme,” Alam said.

The Congress also claimed that the party had filed an RTI with the district administration to know the exact number of migrant workers in Malda.

“Although delayed, the district administration has finally informed us that it has a list of around 48,000 migrant workers, who returned home from different states during the lockdown,” said a senior Congress leader.

According to Congress leaders, Adhir Chowdhury, party’s leader in the Lok Sabha, would visit the Union labour and employment ministry in New Delhi with a plea to extend the scheme to the migrant workers from Bengal.

Rajarshi Mitra, the district magistrate of Malda, however, claimed that he had not received any official communication about the scheme so far.

“I do not have details of how a migrant worker would benefit from the scheme. But once I receive an official communication, we can act on it,” Mitra said.