UP accepts Cong offer to deploy 1,000 buses for migrants after initial denial of permission

Tribune News Service
Lucknow, May 18

After two days, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has accepted Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s offer of 1,000 buses to ferry migrants from Noida and Ghaziabad back to UP.

Referring to Priyanka Gandhi’s May 16 letter, Additional Chief Secretary Awanish Awasthi addressed his reply to her private secretary accepting the offer and requesting a list of the names and contact details of the drivers and conductors of the buses.

After dragging its feet for two days, UP Government clearly decided to give permission after adverse media reports of the mammoth crowds of migrants turning up at Ghaziabad to get themselves registered to return home in UP.

On May 16, the day when 25 migrants had died in a road accident in Aurraiya, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had written a letter to CM Yogi offering to bear the cost of 1,000 buses to bring back migrants to UP.

She had pointed out that despite the state government’s announcements migrants from various parts of the country were walking down to their homes.

She had pointed out that this had caused 65 of them to die on the road that was more than the COVID-19 tally in the state.

Underlining the need to provide them a safe mode of transport, Priyanka had offered the UP Government 1,000 buses the cost of which would be borne by the AICC.

She said 500 buses were being parked at Ghazipur border in Ghaziabad and another 500 buses at Noida.

“The nation-building workers cannot be left like this to fend for themselves. The Congress party is committed to help them,” she had declared in her letter to the CM.

After the UP Government accepted her offer, she thanked it in a tweet.

Earlier in the day in a series of tweets, she had criticised the UP Government for the mismanagement at Ghaziabad’s Ram Lila ground where a large unruly crowd of migrants had collected and were jostling and pushing each other, ignoring social distancing, to get themselves registered to return home.

“If this exercise had started a month ago the migrants would not have had to undergo such hardship. I had offered 1,000 buses and had parked them at the UP border but the UP Government kept playing politics and did not give permission. The UP Government is not helping those hit by this pandemic and is neither allowing others to do it,” Priyanka had said in her tweet.