Gujarat authorities advised the court docket that the Railways has been gathering transportation fare from employees
Ahmedabad: Of 22.5 lakh migrant employees in Gujarat, solely 7,512 had been registered underneath the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (IMW) Act and had been thus eligible for journey allowance, the state authorities has knowledgeable the Gujarat High Court.
In a written reply to a Public Interest Litigation, the federal government knowledgeable a division bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and IJ Vora on Friday that round 22.5 lakh inter-state migrant employees lived in Gujarat as per the state labour division’s knowledge.
But the provisions of the IMW Act of 1979 had been relevant to solely 7,512 employees who had been registered underneath the Act, it stated.
“Most of the 22.5 lakh migrant workers have come on their own and provisions for payment of travel and displacement allowances as required by section 14 and 15 of the IMW Act, 1979, were not applicable to them,” it stated.
Under sections 14 and 15, contractors are required to pay journey and displacement allowances to employees.
The court docket was listening to a PIL filed by lawyer Anand Yagnik alongwith a suo motu petition (a petition initiated by the HC by itself) and different pleas searching for a route to the federal government to offer free transport facility to migrant employees stranded resulting from coronavirus lockdown.
Of 22.5 inter-state migrant employees, 11.5 lakh are employed in and round Surat alone, the federal government stated.
By May 31, just one.5 lakh migrant labourers can be left behind in Surat, of which 1.15 lakh had already returned to work, it stated. Around 3.94 lakh employees from different districts of Gujarat had been additionally employed in Surat however most of them returned to their hometowns in 30,975 buses, the reply stated.
The state authorities additionally advised the court docket that the Railways had been gathering transportation costs from employees regardless that journey preparations had been being made on the district-level by NGOs and civil society organisations.
States together with Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have stated they might reimburse journey bills to the Railways immediately, it stated.
“No migrant worker has been denied travel to his hometown on account of non-payment of travel charges,” the Gujarat authorities claimed.
The lockdown on account of coronavirus has seen a digital exodus of migrants to their house states.
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