Rajouri,
Despite no immediate response to their demands by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh during his visit to Nowshera, border dwellers are satisfied that they have been recognised as migrants by the Central government.

“Rajnath Singh has assured us that he would take up our demands with the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister and even in Parliament. This is a big achievement for us and we hope that something better comes up in future,” said Purshotam Lal, president, Migrants’ Association, Nowshera.

More than 4,000 people from 10 border villages have been living in relief camps at Nowshera for the last more than four months. They had to leave their homes as Pakistan shelled their villages.

“We are only being provided potable water, electricity, classrooms to live in, 2-kg rice and 8-kg flour per head, per family, every month. No cash relief or any other facility has been provided to us. Around 30-40 members of several families live in a single room like livestock,” said Ravi Kumar, an unemployed youth from Jhangar.

Saroj Devi from Sarya village, who has more than 20 kanals of agricultural land, said they were facing hardships at the relief camp. She said men were forced to work as labourers in Nowshera towns to meet the daily expenses. Many migrants said they feared they would not be able to provide good education to their children because of continuous skirmishes on the LoC since 1947 and frequent migration.

“As we live in schools here, it has affected the studies of the children of the area. It is all because the government has failed to construct bunkers and provide plots to the migrants in safer places,” said Bahadur Nath, former sarpanch of Kalsian.

A specially abled, Ashok Kumar, said he had established a shop at Jhangar for which he had taken a bank loan of Rs 3 lakh. “Items worth more than Rs 1 lakh were damaged in Pakistani shelling. To feed my family of nine, now I run a small shop in a classroom, where we live along with 35 other migrants,” said Ashok.