Gujarat continues to see clashes between restless migrant workers who want to return to their native places and the police.
A day after similar incidents in Rajkot on May 17, angry migrant workers clashed with policemen near the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) on the morning of May 18.
The police had to use teargas shells to disperse migrants, who work in a construction site in the IIMA’s new campus in Vastrapur area of the city.
Nearly 100 migrant workers gathered near the construction site and started demanding food, wages and that they be sent back to their native places. As the police came to disperse the crowd, a scuffle erupted between them.
The police said that they rushed to the spot following complaints about stone pelting by workers on the road in front of the new campus of prestigious business management school.
50 detained
More than 50 workers have been detained by the police after the incident.
On May 17, violence broke near Rajkot in an industrial area where police and migrant workers clashed over the issue of being sent back to their native States.
Ever since the lockdown was imposed to combat the COVID-19, Gujarat has seen around a dozen incidents of violence between migrant workers and police in Surat, Gandhidham, Rajkot and Ahmedabad.
Though there is no official figure about the exact number of migrants working in Gujarat, as per industry estimates, there are approximately three million migrant workers working in various industrial sites. The workers are mostly from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh.
So far, the State government has arranged more than 300 special trains to send back around four lakh migrant workers.
