Special call centres urge migrant labourers to return home in MP for voting in LS polls

Alirajpur: These are hectic times for Sunita Kharat as she is busy calling tribal labourers from Madhya Pradesh, who have migrated to Gujarat to earn livelihood, in order to encourage them to return home to cast their votes in the Lok Sabha elections.

Kharat works at a call centre that has been specially set up by the local authorities for this purpose at the Alirajpur district collector's office premises. She is among 30 women employees entrusted with the task.

Apart from Alirajpur, another such call centre has been opened in Jhabua district to call a total of 1.10 lakh migrant labourers who are registered voters of Ratlam Lok Sabha constituency.

This tribal-dominated area of Madhya Pradesh is located along the border of Gujarat, where these workers have been migrating to hundreds of kilometres away from their home for the last several decades for better wages in the fields, factories and construction sector.

In the Ratlam seat, reserved for the tribal community, 20.9 lakh voters will decide the fate of candidates on May 13.

Talking to PTI, Alirajpur district magistrate Abhay Bedekar said on Thursday that there are around 80,000 labourers, who are currently working in Gujarat for employment, in the district and they are being called through a special call centre to encourage them to return to their villages for voting.

"The figure of migrant labourers is an eye-opener as there are around 5.80 lakh voters in the entire Alirajpur district. In this scenario, the voting percentage may be obviously affected as 80,000 of these voters are currently out of Madhya Pradesh for employment," he said.

But the good thing in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections is that after celebrating the festival of Bhagoria, many families of migrant labourers have stayed back in their villages and they are being called and requested to go to Gujarat only after voting on May 13, Bedekar said.

In Jhabua, seven women personnel have been appointed for this task of inviting migrant labourers to vote.

Jhabua District Magistrate Neha Meena said, "According to the data collected by us from different villages, more than 5,000 families of the district have migrated to Gujarat for labour. Of them, the number of voters stood somewhere between 27,000 and 30,000." "We are contacting the heads of these families through the call centre. We are appealing to them to return to their villages and vote," she said.

Meena said the Jhabua administration is also planning to send teams of officials to 12 districts of Gujarat where the number of such workers is very high to encourage migrant labourers to vote.

"Many marriages are scheduled to take place in the tribal community around May 13, the polling date. In such a situation, we are hoping that the migrant labourers of Jhabua district will return to their villages, which will improve the voting percentage," she said.

However, despite all the government claims of development, the migration of tribals for employment in Alirajpur and Jhabua districts does not seem to stop.

Migrant labourers say there are no job opportunities in these two districts in Madhya Pradesh and they get better wages in neighbouring Gujarat.

Deep Singh, a young member of a family of migrant labourers in Alirajpur district, says, "Almost every household in my village has someone or the other who goes to Gujarat to earn wages. There is no business for us in the village."