Hotels and restaurants in Mumbai are finding it difficult to function normally as they face a serious shortage of manpower. Despite the easing of the lockdown, employees from states such as Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Odisha are unable to reach the city in the absence of trains and other modes of transportation. Ahar, the Indian restaurant and hotel association, has urged the government to make trains available for out-of-state workers.
Dharam Yadav works at Durga Hotel, opposite JJ Hospital. Four months ago he returned to his village in Jharkhand in the absence of work here. “I have been home for the past four months. There is no employment, no agriculture or any employment scheme for us here,” he told Mumbai Mirror. Yadav said all his savings are exhausted, and without money coming in, his very survival is at stake. “I hear hotels are reopening in Mumbai. I want to get back to work. But there is no way to travel from here. There are no trains, and taking a bus or a private vehicle is very expensive.” Yadav, who has been in Mumbai for 20 years, said that on his journey back home, he hitched a ride with passing taxis, but that option is not available now.
Yadav’s co-worker Babu Binnar is in Odisha; he too wants to return but faces the same problem: lack of transportation. “I have been working in the hotel industry for the past 13 years and I want to resume duty,” he said.
According to Binnar, even getting to Bhubaneswar – his village lies in Bhadrak District, around 200 kilometers from the state capital – to catch a train is difficult. “Train services are erratic and getting a ticket is next to impossible.
The government should make some arrangements so people like me can return to work. I have a small piece of land in the village but that is not sufficient to feed my family,” he said
Pintu Kamardas is a waiter at Khana Khazana, Charni Road; he too is stuck in his village in Jharkhand. Kamara's called his boss, the hotel owner, and asked for help, but he was also helpless.
“I don’t even know whom to turn to for help,” he said. “I am dependent on my elder brother; I have not earned any money for the past four months,” Kamardas said. His boss Jatin Henia said several of his staff had called him for help. “We are managing with a staff of eight; we had 25.”
Shashidhar Shetty, a member of Ahar, said 95 percent of hotels in Mumbai were suffering from staff shortages. “The workers are stuck in villages. There is no plan to bring them back. There are trains from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but not from other states like West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha.”
Shetty said the industry employed more than two lakh workers from other states, and without them, it could not function. Despite the lockdown, hotels had to pay, on average, Rs 3,000 to Rs 4,000 per day to the government in utility charges and taxes, he said. “You can imagine how many financial losses we have incurred. We urge the chief minister and the tourism minister to consider the transportation problem of these migrant workers and bring them back.”
Railway officials admitted train services from states other than Uttar Pradesh and Bihar could be improved. “However, occupancy in trains coming from other states is less than usual,” a railway official said. The railway time table said: there were 10 trains from UP, four from Bihar, one each from Jodhpur, Punjab, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Karnataka, Hyderabad, West Bengal, Guwahati, and Thiruvananthapuram.
News Courtesy: MumbaiMirror.
