Four more chartered flights, carrying more than 200 stranded migrants from Leh, will land in Birsa Munda Airport this week – a development that comes on the backdrop of Chief Minister Hemant Soren’s appeal to the corporate houses to help migrant labourers reach home.
Officials from the Chief Minister’s Office in Ranchi on Sunday announced that four flights – carrying 55, 60, 43 and 50 passengers respectively – will land in Ranchi this week. The flights will land here on Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. The first flight will land here at 10am on Monday and the second at 7.40pm on Tuesday, officials said.
Almost all the migrants, who will return home this week in the chartered flights, were working in projects of the Border Roads Organisation in Leh. The workers were working in projects at Himank and Vijayanak in Nubra valley, Diksit and Chunthug valley, sources said.
Last week, the Chief Minister took to microblogging website Twitter to seek the support of corporate houses in bringing stranded migrants back to Jharkhand. He also tagged some of the leading corporate houses in the country, including Tata Steel and Mahindra & Mahindra, in his tweet.
“We have made sincere efforts to bring back our migrants from inaccessible remote places like Ladakh and Andaman. We still have hundreds of workers stranded in such remote places. My humble appeal to all corporate houses to support us in evacuating our workers,” he tweeted.
The Government airlifted 60 stranded labourers from Leh last week. By the end of this week, the government will successfully rescue 268 migrant labourers from Leh if everything goes as per the plan.
More than 500 stranded migrants have returned to Jharkhand in chartered flights so far. It started with an alumni group of National Law School, Bangalore, leasing an Air Asia flight from Mumbai to Ranchi for 180 migrants on May 28. Later, the government airlifted 60 migrants from Leh and 180 from Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
The cost of the last flight from Andaman & Nicobar was borne by Interlink Foods Private Limited, a Delhi-based firm. The company decided to come to the rescue of the stranded migrants in response to the CM’s tweet, CMO officials said.
More than 5 lakh migrants have returned to Jharkhand so far by buses, trains and flights. More than 70 per cent of the over 1000 people tested positive in Jharkhand for Covid-19 are migrants, health officials have said.