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KOCHI: The police are having a tough time tracing and registering the thousands of migrants labourers coming to the district from various parts of the country. As per the police records, last year, around 8,000 labourers were newly registered in Ernakulam district. However, in sharp contrast, the Labour Department’s estimates point out that more than 20,000 people came to the district in 2011.Earlier, the security agencies had issued an alert cautioning against the entry of many Maoists and people with criminal background, into Kerala. Most of them had escaped from the states like West Bengal, Assam, Orissa, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh. In the wake of increasing number of crimes committed by some of them, the police have started the registration process. A directive that said that any employer using the labourers from other state must register the identity of these people with the nearby police stations, has been issued. However, it has not been put into action, completely.“There are many migrant labourers who are not employed with any particular company or factory. Many of them who are engaged in manual labour work like construction work are daily wages employees. So, the contractor won’t have any details of these people. Thus, these people remain unregistered. Even the owners of several hotels and plywood factories, who employee such people, have failed to register their labourers,” a police official said.According to the Labour Department officials, around 10,000 migrant labourers were included in the Labour Welfare programme. “We have added more than 10,000 people after inspecting the construction sites in the city. But the true number would be more than 20,000. One of the major problems in registering them is that the workers at construction sites keep changing every week. Several labourers are also manual labourers who work in the houses and these people remain unaccounted. We need to evolve more effective measures to register them,” District Labour Officer E V Narayanan Nampoothiry said.
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