Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said today that of those killed in Assam, 51 are from Bihar and only four of them have been identified as migrant workers, the others having settled in the state.

These four Kamal Das (35), Raghubar Das (19), Pramod Das (36) and Babban Das (30), all extremely backward caste (EBC) members, had another important thing in common. They all had job cards but got no work under the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) and left for Assam after months of waiting.

They were not the only ones. Around 30 labourers from Sangrampur village in Vaishali district — incidentally, Union Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh also comes from here — had gone to Assam in October last year to work in brick kilns in Tinsukia and Silchar. Although some of them had visited Assam earlier, too, most of them were first-timers looking for employment since none was available in the village.

“This was the first time my husband went out. There was no work here to feed the families. The contractor came and assured good wages in Assam and so he left,” says Gaya Devi, wife of Kamal Das. The mother of four daughters and one son is down with tuberculosis. She weeps inconsolably asking everyone how will she feed her children now.

Kamal Das’s job card issued under the NREG is well-preserved in his thatched house. Entries in the card show that it was issued in March last year, a month after the UPA’s flagship scheme was launched, and he left for Assam in October. The job detail pages of the card are blank certifying that Das got no work from March to October.

... contd.