A chartered flight, carrying 55 Jharkhand migrants from Leh, landed at the Birsa Munda Airport in Ranchi on Monday, officials from the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) said. State Ministers Badal and Mithilesh Thakur welcomed the migrant labourers at the airport.
The flight that landed on Monday is the first of the four flights that will be bringing stranded labourers to Jharkhand this week at the behest of Chief Minister Hemant Soren. The development comes in the backdrop of Soren’s appeal to corporate houses to help the return of migrants to Jharkhand. The CM took to microblogging website Twitter last week and sought the support of industrialists in arranging chartered flights for the migrants stranded in Leh, Laddakh.
Officials from the CMO 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 landed here at 10am on Monday and the second will land 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.
More than 550 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. 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 also migrants, health officials have said.