TODAY -
Northeast people struggle hard to make distant lands their own
Knowing well their native places lack opportunities, Northeasterners return home, unwillingly
business-standard | Mahesh Kulkarni & Pradeesh Chandran / Bangalore Aug 18, 2012, 09:46 IST
'The girl from F&B' in Siddhartha Deb's book The beautiful and the damned: Life in new India describes the hopes and disappointments of Esther, who hails from Manipur and works at a high-end Delhi restaurant. Scores of Esthers work in beauty parlours, man front desks of hotels, take orders in restaurants and look after customers as shop assistants, availing of the boom in India's services industry to find work and build a life away from home. Through this week, a mix of technology-fuelled rumours of a backlash to the violence in Assam drove away these people, migrants from the northeast states, from several cities, including Bangalore, Pune, and Nashik. Hundreds lined up at railway stations in Bangalore to catch trains back home. The railways obliged, running special trains to transport them back.
The fear psychosis and the exodus left businesses that depend on contract labour from the northeast — restaurants, retail chains, security agencies, technology companies — scrambling to adjust. "It is difficult to find overnight replacements, be it in any field. We are asking existing employees to put in more hours of work until replacements come in with proper training,” said Darshan Bal, vice-president, Karnataka Security Services Association, a 9,000-strong security agency. Security agencies employ about 100,000 people in Bangalore, 15-20 per cent from the Northeast.
In 1994-96, for most voiced-based business process outsourcing offices, employees were recruited from this part of the country, since they had good command of English, partly owing to the influence of Christianity in most of these areas. That is why there is a major Northeastern population in Bangalore," said E Balaji, managing director and chief executive, Ma Foi Randstand.
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* This Post is uploaded on August 18, 2012
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