The Hindu
May 7, 2012
Rights and wrongs
Most of your readers would have
missed the very important (almost historic) pronouncement of the Delhi High
Court reported in The Hindu of April 5 under the heading "Casual
Worker Also a Workman", that the "Principal Employer" of a
worker is not the contractor who hires him but the person who hires the
contractor. This rare declaration by the court under the Amendments
made by Parliament in 2000 AD to the Workman's Compensation Act
will have far reaching consequences for thousands of businesses, industries,
housing colonies and others who hire their workforce through so-called
security agencies, under the mistaken belief that the supplying agency
and not the "Principal Employer" would be responsible for
any violation of the labour laws in the salaries and working conditions of the
workers.
The judgement which should be
widely publicized should come as a relief to millions of workers who have
to suffer numerous hardships and ignonimities in their place of work while the
contracting agency takes a hefty cut from the wages which should rightly belong
to the workers. While Parliament has done it's duty more than a decade ago, it
is upto the State Governments to implement the amendments to put a stop to the
rampant ruthless exploitation of workers by employers under the cover of these
employing "agencies".
_____________________________
Glamour of the New Urban Colonialism
We were all very happy when in July 2011 Rekha, daughter
of our neighbour’s maid, Nandi, got admitted to a Delhi University college
where the “cut-off” point is above 80% marks in the CBSE exam. A few days ago
in the first week of November, she came home donning plaited bobbed hair, her
pony tails cut off by the ladies barber who changed her hair style to make her
look more modern and attractive. Ever since that day Nandi has got seriously
busy to look for a suitable boy and get Rekha married off to him as fast as
possible, thus ending her further education.
Nandi is
a divorcee with three daughters to support. She cannot take any chances of her
eldest daughter going astray. “All day her mobile phone keeps ringing with
calls from boys and girls of her college”, she complains about Rekha and adds
“she can compete with them in marks but she cannot compete in other things.
Some of them come in a chauffer driven cars. Most of the boys have motor-bikes,
the girls wear fancy dresses to look like English Mem Sahebs. All of them have
computers and all kinds of machines we cannot afford. They buy costly snacks
with Pepsi-Coke bottles, go to expensive movies and so on. How can we ever be
equal to them in these things? Together with the Rs.3000 I get as alimony from
my ex-husband I make Rs.8000 to Rs.10,000 in a month and am always under a loan
to the madams I serve.”
Nandi is fortunate to own room ten foot long and ten feet
wide in a slum adjoining our colony with a bathroom which is shared by four
families. If she had to live in a rented room Rekha would have had to work like
her mother as a house maid to earn the extra Rs.4,000 needed to rent such a
room. Several girls who have passed their CBSE 12th class
examination and are working as maids like their mothers in our colony. They
like doing these jobs because it gives them some extra money to indulge in
luxuries like buying beauty aids.
Rekha’s case reminded me of Bholu, son of our family cook
Bishen Mishra back in 1938. Bishen was paid nine rupees per month and lived
with his wife and son in a servant room at the back of our house. Bholu
attended the same school with me. It was a mile away and we both walked to it,
wore shirts and shorts and had no pocket allowance whatsoever. In those days
you could busy a leaf bowl of spicy “chaat” for just one paisa, but that paisa
was never given to me. Bholu passed high school and fulfilled his father’s
ambition by becoming a clerk. In those days matriculation was the equivalent of
today’s graduation.
I am relating these two examples because Bishen Mishra
and his son Bholu were more comfortable on a salary of nine rupees per month
than Nandi and Rekha are on an income of nine thousand rupees. Has Independence
of India brought any real benefits to the poor classes or has it made their
lives even more miserable than they were seventy years ago? Nandi and Rekha are
typical examples of their class in urban India . They are living on razor’s
edge, always struggling, always pining, hardly ever getting peaceful sleep.
Bishen and Bholu had no such tensions in their lives.
Bishen, being a Brahmin used to preside over the daily
afternoon gossips of the servants of two or three houses in our lane, each
smoking his own hookah and sharing it only with members of his caste.
Occasionally I would drop in at these gossip sessions.
Bholu played in the street with his friends and had no
worries about the future. If not a Babu he could always become a peon in an
office and that would be fine too. He could still make both ends meet and live
comfortably.
What has 65 years of independence brought to the poor
classes?
In the first place we should not mix up the issue of
poverty with women’s emancipation which is a historic social development that
would be inevitable in India
under any economic system. The seeds of this had been sown during British days
and it was only a matter of time for women to take their rightful place in
society. In the old days a divorced woman like Nandi and her three daughters
would have spent their entire life like beggars. Today, in their own circle of
the poor classes, they enjoy a respectable position.
On the economic front, however, opinions clash.
Proponents of the “trickle down effect” theory would argue that the large scale
development projects, including the urban sprawl of huge dimensions, has
created a variety of jobs for the poor who would have been otherwise rotting in
villages without hope and without even food. So far so good. Nobody denies this
elementary fact. But let us not forget that this is not a new phenomenon. This
has been the way of all feudal and imperialist civilizations throughout history.
The Aryans created an elite of Brahmins and Kshtriyas and also created a
two-tier service class of Vaishyas and Shudras with no rights of citizenship.
The Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires of Pre-historic times captured or brought
willing slaves from Black Africa. The British Empire adopted the Aryan two-tier
practice and took Indian doctors traders, teachers, babus and also ordinary
menial labour in very large numbers from India to its numerous colonies
around the world. The White settlers of North and South America bought from
Arab slave traders African slaves in millions to work on the numerous
development projects with practically no wages and make the Americas what
they are today.
In India ,
the mother of this well structured system of ‘Slave labour’ since the days of
the Aryans, we needed no tutoring to adopt this barbaric practice of treating
ordinary human beings as mere beasts of burden. What is interesting to observe
and study, however, is the manner in which this pernicious system of mass exploitation
of humanity has been modernized to extract the maximum output from the helpless
wage earners with the minimum actual compensation to them, by the use of all
devious devices of new economic theories and modern technology. In India this feat
is being accomplished step by step and the last extreme steps are yet to come
unless they are prevented by a social upheaval.
How do these maids spend their salary which, as I said
above, is a thousand times that of their counterparts in the Nineteen Thirties?
Nearly half of it willy-nilly goes on house, transport and fuel. These are
products of modern civilization whose chief beneficiaries are builders,
contractors, manufacturers of cement, concrete, steel and other materials that
go into the building of a great city. They include manufacturers of whole
plants and distribution networks for power and water supply, bus and car
makers, traders who run movie houses, hotels, restaurants and other expensive
“necessities” of city life like fuel gas cylinders. It is to be noted that the
real beneficiaries of creating all these facilities are the rich. Life in the
cities is like a railway train in which the poor can travel only on its roof at
their own risk, without bars or railings to save them from falling off the
train or any warning signs to make them duck their heads before passing under a
bridge or tunnel. With each new “facility” added to the city the burden of the
rich on the poor increases. A whole new mass of elite springs up overnight
claiming a large share of whatever is left, squeezing the poor into a still
tighter corner, or pushing them out of city limits to some remote slum and
forcing them to spend more money on transport and also more time and energy
travelling in crowded buses, which they could have spent otherwise on
productive work.
Believe it or not, despite all these hardships these
maids, and also their male counterparts, spend at least one-fourth of their
incomes on aping the rich. There is no maid in my colony in the below 30 age
group who does not visit a beautician once a week. My own full time maid keeps
in the bathroom fancy cosmetics, advertised on TV, which visitors to our house
often mistake to be the property of a female member of the family. A year back
she spent her two months’ salary to get her front teeth pushed back and
properly set by an expensive dentist. She spurns home food on her days off and
must dine with her friends in a restaurant.
Most of the maids regularly visit tailors to get their
dresses in proper shape. They abhor free government schools and put their
children in private schools which have mushroomed in response to the public
demand. The children, in turn, demand cokes, bottled water, chocolates,
ice-creams and packaged foods like pizza and nodules. Higher college education
has been privatized and placed beyond the reach of the poor classes.
When some one falls sick, and this happens quite often
because of the polluted environment and their living conditions, many of them
avoid the government dispensary and go to a private doctor. They all watch TV
ads and buy whatever they can afford among the advertised products.
One fact that no one sees in this whole phenomenon of
massive urbanization is the hidden arm of the multi-nationals who thus force
the poor to spend whatever they earn on the products of their companies and
work for them for free. They or their Indian subsidiaries and collaborators are
the manufacturers of all the items that go into the making of a city. Whatever is
notionally believed to be the job of the government or the public sector is in
fact a task outsoured to specialized firms in the private sector.
The more a city grows the greater is the hold on it of
the upper class which spreads out in every direction, flaunting its wealth. You
have shopping malls in every quarter which sell every thing from a match box to
sugar to salt to flour in retail stores run by big chains owned by the likes of
Birlas and Ambanis. Slowly but steadily the big companies are taking over the
small man’s job of not only vending everyday needs but also of making them. A
multi-national has recently taken over one of India ’s biggest manufacturer of
sweets and salted snacks. They have already ventured into agriculture and
horticulture to produce grain, fruit and vegetables. Even the small man in the
city prefers these products because of their nice packaging and neat looks.
The small trader, farmer and industrialist is being
slowly pushed out and with him what used to be the middle class which has no
place left to hide its head under a roof but the slums. Can you believe it? The
price of housing plots in Delhi
has shot up 1,00,000 (one lakh) times in 50 years. Plots which were being sold
in fully developed colonies by big developers for Rs.10 per square meter are
today selling for Rs. 10 lakh per square metre or even higher. We are
consciously creating a society in which only the rich will have the right to
live. The mass of the poor will work for them like the “shudras” of olden times
with no rights and prospects whatsoever, notwithstanding what the constitution
and our democratic laws may say.
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