Next
to my flat is a construction site for an upcoming shopping mall that you will
go to, sometimes to buy yourself objects that will add to your list of
acquisitions that will define your place in society, and more often to just
chit-chat over a cup of coffee. The labourers who work at this construction
site, just as in most others, get Rs 120 for a day of labour, which is less than the price of that
coffee you will drink often for no particular reason. They work entire days in
scorching sun and blowing mud. They are not spoken to 'professionally' :
"Could you please take care of this task? - Regards, your site
supervisor". Their work entails not sitting on their butts and complaining
about the weather, or passing grand moral judgements like I'm about to, just
now. Their work entails hard, physical work, with kilos and kilocalories of
energy lost every hour. They do not get paid leaves, they are provided no home
rent allowance, there are practically no rights they can avail. The work they
do is harder than what you, dear reader, and I do. Is their work clearly less
important to society than the work that you, dear reader, and I, do, that they
are paid so much lesser than us? Unless you are a doctor who treats these same
people for something they can afford, no. Their work is exponentially harder
and maybe also more important to the functioning of our cities than our work.
Those of you who think, as many of us do, that the work these workers do is
only physically harder, while what you and I do is mentally much more
challenging and therefore more difficult on the whole, are deluded. Actually,
you are not deluded. You are corrupt (and every time you criticise our politicians for being venal, you should write in your diary - "I am phony"). Thinking like this suits you, because
this way you can justify to yourself the worth our society accords you
vis-a-vis them. If you can evaluate a balance-sheet they can't, or debug a
piece of code that they can't, the one and only thing it means is that you were
more fortunate to have been born in the right household. If you are a
reasonable person, you can probably figure out that by no means does it mean
that you are more talented. By the way, sshhh between you and me, not that it matters, but in all
likelihood the work you do is actually pretty dumb, hardly requires anything
that must especially be called intelligence instead of common-sense, and you
know it. Anyway, my problem is not particularly that no one is doing anything
about it - I am not doing anything about it either (and am pretty ashamed about
it). My problem is how it is a non-issue
not only in our public discourse but also in our coffee-table intellectual
manicures. How no one has it on their minds, is what is sad. Bright city
youngsters will put all their neural firepower on show in their dismissal of
reservations, in their advocacy for the wife-like rights for female live-in
partners, in their tenacious arguments against scrapping of one exam in favour
of another. They make me sad not because of what they fight for - all fairly
valid issues generally, in their own right. What is saddening is how none of
those smart and savvy youngsters ever include the plight of the construction
workers in even their casual coffee-table conversations. How they choose to act
totally oblivious to this glaring injustice. The labourers of India are
discriminated against, and the mobile India consists of two types of people -
those that exploit them, and those that ignore them altogether. Construction
workers are just one of the many kinds of labourers that do not remotely get
their due in the Indian society - parallels exist for labourers of all kinds.
When I say that they do not get their due - I mean not just monetary but also
social. It is not just the paltry 120 Rupees that they will earn for a day of
work worth more than yours, it is also that they will be social downcasts after
that day is over and they head home (if they have one). For the most part, it
is as if their life is isolated from you, confined within their own world of
abject living conditions and fellow hardworking labourers. It is as though they
do not exist in the larger society, until they must physically arrive at your
doorstep. At which point, they will get
your shortlived, suspicious glance when they come to repair the leaking tap in
your house, and your maid or handyman will be asked watch over them while they
are at work and talk them through with it, because you, yourself, won't do even
that. If there's one thing that can be said about the concept of Dignity of
Labour in India, it is that it's non-existent.
