New Delhi: With no end in sight for the ordeal faced by stranded migrant workers in Delhi, tens of thousands of workers who had successfully registered to board Shramik Special Trains from the Capital are now also being made to wait for several days despite turning up to screening centres across the city as and when required.
With Delhi government having set up more than 30 of these centres for migrant workers to be medically checked before leaving the city, many of them are seeing hundreds waiting and even living outside these centres as they are being turned away citing full trains and not enough buses.
"We had registered for the special train nearly 12 days ago and were asked to arrive here at 9 this morning. But till now we have not been able to go inside to get checked and no official is talking to us," Bablu Kumar (33) said as he waited with his family outside an East Delhi screening centre.
On Thursday afternoon, officials outside Rajkiya Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya (RSBV) in Vinod Nagar said: "There is no procedure in place for these people to be registered now. The only thing they can do is wait here."
Over 400 migrant workers and their family members were found waiting outside the school in the afternoon heat and the same situation was seen in at least four such centres in East and South Delhi on Thursday afternoon.
"We have not received even a single glass of water from government authorities. My family and I have been living on the road here for two days now. Whatever we are getting is from concerned citizens," Mohammad Jalal (36) said. Jalal, who wants to go back to Purnia, Bihar had paid Rs 30 per head to get online registrations done for him and his family through an agent.
In fact, many workers had paid up to Rs 50 per head to get their online registrations done from agents as they either did not have smartphones or the knowledge to register themselves. Another migrant worker, Tauhit said there were many who did not even know the registrations could be done online and were merely spending all their savings trying to reach the screening centres.
The same situation was found outside screening centres in Lajpat Nagar and Mehrauli-Badarpur. Although the Mehrauli centre was found registering workers manually and boarding them on buses, there were small settlements of migrants along the Delhi Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research University, who had been living there for days now with their luggage.
"We have spent so much money registering and coming all the way here to the screening centres. We could have paid for the whole train tickets with that money. But now officials are saying that we will have to wait outside as all trains for the day had already been filled up," Nazrul (24), another migrant worker in East Delhi said.
However, there were also many migrant workers who had not received confirmation even weeks after weeks registering. Their plight was also the same.
Outside the RSBV school in East Vinod Nagar, the workers had protested on Wednesday when they were not allowed to get screened, but they said police was sent to the centre with lathis and the workers had then stood down out
of fear.