Migrant workers and families Jharkhand Bihar
Migrant workers and families wait to get transferred to a railway station before boarding special trains to Bihar and Jharkhand states after the government eased a nationwide lockdown imposed as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Chennai on June 11, 2020. Image Credit: AFP
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Patna: The state government in Bihar is working hard to ensure returnee migrant workers don’t leave their home state in search of jobs again. Under part of the strategy, the state industry department has developed an application through which migrants can search for jobs and get notifications for jobs matching their skills.

Officials said a database containing the skill mapping details of migrant workers and the specific requirements of various industries has been built into an app. Very soon, migrant workers who returned to their homes after lockdown will start getting job alerts best suited for them if there is any vacancy available.

“We are in the process of uploading the details of the migrants generated through skill mapping in the industry portal and the migrants will be getting the job alerts very soon,” Bihar industry minister Shyam Rajak told the media on Thursday. According to him, existing industrial units have already started sending requirements for workers to the district industry centres which in turn are providing the availability of workforce.

3 million

migrants have returned to Bihar after the lockdown in India.

The development followed shortly after the authorities conducted the skill mapping of the migrants who were kept at the state-run quarantine centres on their return to the state. An estimated three million migrants have returned to the state after lockdown—while over 2.1 million returned by Shramik Special trains, the rest came by hiring vehicles or walking on foot, covering a distance of more than a thousand kilometres under sweltering conditions and living on paltry food.

As per a report of the Bihar industrial department, around 1.6 million skilled and semi-skilled workers have been identified during the skill mapping which last for over a month. Of them, 840,000 have been identified as construction workers, 57,000 tailors, 41,000 carpenters, 4,000 food processing workers, and 1,400 handicraft workers.

Reports said the majority of the tailors were employed in cotton industries in Gujarat and Maharashtra while the others were employed in various Indian cities such as Surat, Porbandar (Gujarat), Bangalore (Karnataka), Chennai (Tamil Nadu) and Delhi.