Click to play videoLudhiana: A city that has changed fast and is almost entirely dependent on the migrant labor population to power it is Ludhiana in Punjab.
However lately in the wake of Mumbai violence, this city with a migrant population touching almost a million has had its share of questions being raised over the increasing migrant population.
On October 14, 2007, an explosion ripped through Ludhiana's Shingaar Cinema where a Bhojpuri movie was being screened. Six people were killed — all labourers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The blast raised several troubling questions. Speculations of the blast being a warning to the rising migrant population were high.
“The Shingaar Cinema blast was a planned blast to scare the North Indian migrant labourers out of Ludhiana,” a migrant labour union leader Prem Pandey says.
Pandey's stakes are high. He came to Ludhiana 20 years ago and started as a factory assistant. Today he owns two factories in what he calls his karmabhoomi (place that gives me my bread and butter).
Punjab's biggest industrial city is powered almost entirely by its million strong migrant population, which keeps its hosiery units, hand tool factories and other industries running. Ludhiana, naturally, is sensitive to any issue that concerns migrant labourers.
Raj Thackeray's statements in Mumbai against migrants have become a rallying point for labor unions across the northern city.
“We have played a major role in its economic development. We wont let anyone do any injustice to us even as we respect our workplace,” Pandey says.
Local industrialists say Punjab needs the migrants as much as the migrants need Punjab. They say, without them, the much-envied prosperity of Punjab would not have been a reality
“There was a demand during the days of militancy to push the migrants out, but industrialists and politicians did not let it happen realising the consequences of such a move. Now no one will raise such a demand,” President Ludhiana Handloom Association SC Rallan says.
With inputs from Jasbir Singh
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