Editorial: Anonymous Road Workers Should Not Go Unheard

It has been some days since this newspaper reported about the flight of two labourers from a GREF/ BRO road gang and of their allegations of inhuman working conditions bordering on torture which convinced them to flee Sikkim. These labourers had been brought in from Jharkhand, and it was only after they had made it back that they went public with their horror story. They have filed a police complaint and pleaded that their friends, taken along with them as labourers to a road project in Sikkim and still engaged there, be rescued. Unfortunately, they duo does not know where in Sikkim they were engaged. What they do clearly remember is that the work was dangerous and the working conditions even more so. They were obviously unwilling to work at the site they were deployed to and have claimed that they were forced to labour away. Agreed, theirs is only one side of the story, but it is still a story corroborated by the police authorities in Jharkhand as one which has been officially lodged with them. Shouldn’t the allegations have fetched a response from the BRO? Do not other agencies in Sikkim, say the Labour Department for instance, have a responsibility towards labourers brought in from outside Sikkim to repair and restore infrastructure damaged by last year’s earthquake? As per rules in place, every agency which ships in labourers from outside, is required to submit detailed lists of personnel, and where they are deployed, with the Labour Department. As per the duo, they were part of a work-gang of 36; surely some record should have been maintained somewhere about them. As a first step, the names of the labourers who have filed a police complaint in Jharkhand, should be crosschecked, and the Labour Department should visit the work site to ensure that no one is being forced. Anyone who has seen the kind of damage Sikkim roads have suffered due to the earthquake will attest to the fact that repairing/ restoring them is not going to be an easy task. Even driving through stretches where BRO is undertaking road expansion works is unnerving when the weather turns foul, and the earthquake-damage zones on North Sikkim Highway take the harrowing factor to whole new levels. For all the engineering or funds BRO might marshal, the repairs will need human muscle and nerves to complete. It is a daunting task no doubt and there is also the need to have the road network repaired, but these challenges/ requirements should not be allowed to justify instances of people being lured into road gangs with promises of higher than normal wages without being told of the risks involved. To do so is cheating, and then forcing them to work when they obviously want to leave is a criminal offence. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Sikkim learnt to its chagrin of how shoddily labourers are treated here. Labourers from villages which have never seen an earthquake in living memory were left abandoned and forgotten in remote recesses of North Sikkim, left to their own devices to escape the trauma and in many cases, taking flight without even collecting their dues. Unfortunately, no State agency or civil society groups demanded better treatment last September, and none appears moved enough to even comment on the latest instance of tribals from Jharkhand spilling the beans on the working conditions in Sikkim. No one even notices labourers at road project sites. They should be feted because they run a gamut of risks and dangers on a daily basis so that Sikkim can travel and remain supplied. And even if thanking them is too much to ask for, they least that the State and the Sikkimese can do is ensure that they are not abused. The anonymity and destitution which leads them to accept work in faraway lands and at potentially hazardous sites have already made victims of them, and a disinterested people take away even hope...