19 Odisha women rescued from TN garment factory

Chennai: The Tirupur district administration rescued and sent 19 women, who were working at a garment unit at Velampalayam on low wages, to their hometown in Odisha, said officials familiar with the development

Chennai: The Tirupur district administration rescued and sent 19 women, who were working at a garment unit at Velampalayam on low wages, to their hometown in Odisha, said officials familiar with the development. The move came after their families in Odisha alerted local officials, who in turn contacted Tirupur police on Saturday.

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The women, who were shifted to a temporary shelter at a wedding home on Sunday, boarded the train on Monday at 1.15pm to their hometown in Rayagada district.

The women arrived at the garment unit in December 2020 for a three-month training programme and were offered employment. Police, however, rejected the reports that the women were forced to stay and work against their will. “Initially, the women had agreed to work but after the second wave of Covid-19 infection started, one of them contacted her family and said she wanted to return…,” Velampalayam police inspector P N Rajan said, adding, “When we went to enquire yesterday, all of them wanted to return home, so we arranged for the same.”

Meanwhile, activists pointed out that there were several such cases where women are brought from Jharkhand, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to work in garment factories, where labour laws are violated, and the women want to go back. “They are put through excessive working hours and double shifts, but their wage is 30-40% lower than that of Tamil workers,” said Viyakula Mary, executive director of Tirupur-based SAVE (Social Awareness and Voluntary Education), which works for promotion of fair labour standards. “Their movement is restricted. Basically, they’re under control of their owners,” she added.

Mary said that they visited the wedding hall but were not allowed to meet or speak to the rescued women. “We were told that low wages were the problem,” she added.

In December, the organisation had rescued and sent back 38 women, who had also complained of low wages, to Jharkhand. Those women had also contacted local activists back home who got in touch with the police. “Since the outbreak of the pandemic, a lot of migrant workers are directly making distress calls to helplines and local police are altered, which is a huge development in awareness amongst them,” said Mary.

The general procedure, Mary said, was for the labour department to take action. Police said the labour department would inquire into the incident under provisions of the labour law.

Mary said these women, who are mostly in their 20s, accept the jobs due to lack of work back home.

Former Tirupur police commissioner Sanjay Kumar, who headed several operations of sending migrant workers back during the first wave of the pandemic, said he began creating a database of migrant workers and their dependents in 2019. “We have no idea about the whereabouts of migrant workers in the state,” Kumar said. “Even if we want to help them, send them back we have no identification and authentication. The government portal would have a figure, but the actual number is much more. The Tirupur, Erode, Coimbatore industrial belt is fed by migrants and a large number of them are from north east states. We need to start registering them.”

SAVE has also petitioned the government to open up self-registration for migrant workers. “Now, the system is for the factory owners to register their migrant workers, but they either don’t do it or do it for only a handful of workers,” said Mary. “If a migrant worker can register themselves with the Tamil Nadu labour department, they will have a receipt for themselves and we will also be aware of the interstate workers. Now, who even knew that these 19 women were working in Tamil Nadu?” Mary said.