Porters demand regular jobs

Avneet Kaur
Jalandhar, January 16

During a press conference held here today porters from Jalandhar, Pathankot and Beas, under the banner of the All-India Lal Vardi Coolie Union, criticised the Narendra Modi-led Central Government for its failure to redress their issues.

They said: “There are 20,000 porters in the country, while 350 in the state. Among them, many are graduates and postgraduates, but they are earning Rs 100 or Rs 150 per day and sometimes not even that.”

They lamented that escalators, lifts, ramps, advanced suitcases and luggage carriers had took away their jobs and passengers don’t ask for porters anymore.

They demanded the regularisation of their jobs in the ‘Group-D’ category (In the railways, the Group- D category) posts are the lowest grade jobs that were given to Class XII or graduates. They are generally hired as gangmen, trackmen and gatemen in the Railways, besides jobs for the dependents of the elderly.

Sarvan Singh, general secretary of the union and a porter from Jalandhar said in 2010, there were 160 porters in Jalandhar. However, with the advancement in technology, stations are getting escalators, modern machinery, the number of porters have reduced to 28.

“Nowadays, the porter has just one task to do at the station that is to inform passengers whether on which platform the train will arrive or depart,” he added.

Another porter, Balram, who works as a porter in the morning and as servant at a private hotel in the evening, said: “I am post-graduate and has been working as porter since the past eight years. But as the demand of the porters has decreased, it has become a cumbersome task for us to make both ends meet. Therefore I am working as part-time servant at a hotel.”

He said, when Lalu Prasad Yadav was the Railway Minister, he had regularised the jobs of a majority of porters as gangmen, trackmen and gatemen at various railway stations in 2008, but after that nobody had regularised our jobs.

He said, “Despite having held a number of protests, posting letters to the PMO, Railway Minister, General Managers nothing concrete has been done so far,”.

“If our demands are not met in the upcoming budget, we will be forced to step onto the tracks, block rail traffic and boycott the BJP in the general elections,” he added.

The Railway Ministry must understand that with changing the names of porters to ‘Sahayaks’ or changing their uniforms, the situation of their homes won’t change. So the government must address their issues on priority basis.