Arundhati Roy, well-known writer and activist, released on Thursday, 18th January 2007 at Press club, Raisina Road, New Delhi a shocking report by Committee Against Violation on Women (CAVOW), on the atrocities of an extra-Judicial military outfit, Salwa-Judum, unleashed on the people, particularly on women in central India. Malini Bhattacharya, Chairwomen, of the National Commission for Women attended the release with other prominent persons. Prof. Uma Chakravorty, University of Delhi, Ilina Sen, CAVOW, Dr. Shoma Sen, Convenor, CAVOW, Dr.Bela Bhatia, members of the Fact-Finding team, Ms.Indira Pancholi, joint Convenor, CAVOW also addressed the Press Conference and the meeting.
CAVOW’s fact-finding Report "Salwa Judum and Violence on Women in Dantewara, Chhattisgarh", is based on the visit of an All India Women's team to Danthewara district in Chhattigarh in two spells. The Report documented the atrocities on women by Salwa Judum goons and state security forces. The Report was taken up by the National Commission for Women for further investigation and action. The Governor of Chhattisgarh also reacted to the report and specially invited the members of the fact-finding team for discussion.
Salwa Judum is a stark instance of state-sponsored repression of the worst-ever kind on the people, particularly the Adivasis of Chhattisgarh. Thousands of women and children have been the victims of the atrocities unleashed by the goons of Salwa Judum led by Congress MLA and the leader of opposition in Chhattisgarh Assembly, Mahendra Karma, accompanied by the police and paramilitary forces. After several Fact-finding Reports released by the several teams of eminent people, the Central Government, has said that it would review its endorsement to Salwa Judum. In this context, the present Report is the first ever fact-finding focusing on women victims of Salwa Judum.
January 25, 2007
The Question of Displacement and the call for an United Battle
The natural and legal rights of the people are being trampled on a scale unprecedented in post-1947 India. Successive governments at the centre would call this the needed drive for a New India marching forward in the 21st century as a major power. Development and Security are the twin needs of the Brave New World in which India and the sub-continent of South Asia is a vital cog. This development can only happen with the massive inflow of Foreign Direct Investment in the form of Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs), Foreign Institutional Investments (FII). Inequality has been considered as a necessary condition for mobilising savings and capital formation. To envisage the provision of infrastructure in the form of transport, communication, power, services etc. While it will give windfall profits to the imperialist multinationals and their domestic allies—big business houses, bureaucrats, politicians, et al, the masses have become further impoverished.
A decade-and-a-half of these policies have, pushed more than one lakh peasants to suicide. Massive unemployment have further impoverished an already devastated people in both rural and urban areas and marginalized millions.
The second wave of ‘economic reforms’ is a violent assault on the right to life and livelihood of the masses. Apart from continuing the ‘development’ driven through big dams, super highways and other infrastructural projects, the new phase of accumulation of capital involves gigantic mining projects, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), urban renewal and beautification.
Displacement as ‘Development’
All these policies are being implemented in the name of ‘development’, ‘modernization’, taking India into the club of elite countries. This is no doubt ‘development’, of a particular kind. It is the model of ‘development’ that gives gigantic amounts of wealth to the super-rich (foreign and Indian) while increasingly impoverishing more and more people. It is unmitigated loot of all our natural wealth and mineral resources on a scale never witnessed before. It is development OF and FOR the market; FOR the creation of a market based on the expenditure OF the very rich together with a growing upper middle class who live off crumbs thrown off the table of the super-rich. This development of displacement have pervaded the entire spectrum of diverse production of material life of the sub-continent—from hunters and gatherers, pastorals, shifting cultivators, forest dwellers especially in protected areas like sanctuaries, traditional cultivators, advanced farmers, trading centres, service and industrial centres, towns and cities. All the four dreaded Ds are fast engulfing our societies—Displacement, Disorganisation, Destitution and Decimation.
Massive Mining Projects of MNCs: Opening the Veins of South Asia
The mining projects in just the states of Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh entail investments of about Rs.5 lakh crores. Some 20 percent of the tribal people have already been uprooted from their homes. The resource rich region of Dandakaranya and its vicinity in the states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and the adjoining areas in West Bengal, Vidharbha and eastern Madhya Pradesh account for more than three fourth of the total mineral wealth of India. On a smaller scale, mining projects are also coming up in all the states wherever there is some wealth to extract. The regions within these states that have been set aside as prospective areas rich in mineral wealth such as coal, iron ore, bauxite, diamonds, uranium, thorium etc. is inhabited by the poorest of the poor in India. Hundreds of MoUs have been signed by the government with various Multinational Corporations and Indian Monopolies. Much of the mineral wealth is exported while the rest is used to serve the palatial needs of India’s neo-rich. New laws are being enacted to undo the rights of the people over these resources. The better known examples are the Indian Forest Act, Indian Fisheries Act, Indian Mineral Act, and various Urban Development Acts. In the process, lakhs and lakhs will be displaced—not only will their land and forests be seized, but also their livelihood, their right to a dignified existence destroyed.
Special Economic Zones (SEZs): Enclaves of Foreign Occupation:
The rural areas in India are facing massive unemployment due to lack of opportunities. A backlash of the state policy of opening up of the markets to monopolies. The traditional crafts have collapsed as machine goods are flooding the rural markets. The labour displacing machines have reduced the labour input per acre to less than one-third compared to the post-47 situation. Even in the so-called Employment Generation Programmes of the government commission agents and contractors are on to make a fast buck by using machines. Moreover a large part of the land is held by the absentee owners which results in a heavy drain of current income of the rural economy. These absentee land owners are prone to sell away their lands for profit. The crisis in the rural scenario is further exemplified with the abysmally low entitlement for work in agriculture hovering around 30 rupees a day. The ‘educated youth’ who are rather the deskilled force in rural India are not ready to soil their hands for such a low pay. The massive alienation of people in the rural areas from their current means of livelihood with no worthwhile substitute in sight is imminent.
The Special Economic Zones have been showcased as the panacea for skyrocketing unemployment and lack of opportunities in the urban and rural regions in India. These zones throughout the country will create enclosures where no laws of the land would hold. This tantamount to a modern form of the East India Company; foreign enclaves within the territory of the country which facilitates the SEZs. Even conservative estimates of the RBI projects a loss of about Rs.1.7 lakh crores in revenue for the Indian government over the next four years due to the Special Economic Zones. But the worst hit will be the rural populace whose prime lands are being forcibly seized. Lakhs of acres have already been taken over and every day new announcements come of more and more SEZs being granted permission. In the much hyped ‘Green Revolution’ belts of Haryana and Punjab where the suicide deaths of farmers are the order of the day, farmers who are deep in debt are even ready to take whatever crumbs thrown by the government as compensation for the acquired land. In fact this has proved to be the last straw on the farmer’s back leading to large scale alienation of land and unabating strings of suicides. The man made crisis is so acute in the Green Revolution pockets that for the farmer to hold on to the farming land as a viable enterprise has become an unenviable task.
There is no economic incentive for the farmer to continue agriculture in these lands. The government has refused to look into the root causes of agriculture being rendered non-viable as the insidious policy of the state. Instead it legalised the practice of usury by credit institution including even the cooperatives through the ingenious legal jugglery of excluding them from the very definition of moneylenders. In 1947, 70 per cent of the people in India were engaged in agriculture and allied activities. Their share in the Gross National Income was 65 percent. According to the Farmer’s Commission while the number of persons in the above category has marginally declined from 70 to 65 percent, their share in the National Income has nose dived to 20 percent. The projections of Vision 2020 envisages only a 6 percent share for the 60 percent depending on agriculture.
Already unofficial estimates show that more than 300 SEZs are on the pipeline. As per official estimates about 35-40% of existing industry and finance (including IT sector) will move to these enclaves to avail of the tax-free profits that these havens allow. The government talks much trash of generating employment but the reality is that it is mostly existing business that will shift location to these SEZs to avail of the huge benefits.
Urban ‘Visions’: Fortifying Urban Spaces for Free Exploitation of Monopoly Capital
Global policy advisory groups like the Mckinsey from the US is formulating and pushing the initiatives of organising and streamlining the urban spaces under the camouflage of urban beautification. This streamlining of the urban spaces offers minimum security risk for the operational needs of foreign and local capital in these areas.
It not only entails marginalizing the already impoverished poor, it is even hitting at the middle classes, small traders and industries. Lakhs of slum-dwellers have already been pushed out in the process. Small retailers must be crushed (as in Delhi) in order to make way for giant retailers like Reliance, Wal-Mart and a host of others; small scale industries must be pushed out, not only to ‘clean up’ the cities, but also to allow big business to widen its captive-market reach.
Urban ‘Visions’, with their creation of infrastructural and beautification projects for the elite is wrecking havoc in all the main cities of the country. The main metropolitan cities are the hub of operations of the money-bags. They demand all the best facilities in the form of infrastructure and entertainment. Dance bars in Mumbai must be forcibly closed so that 5-star cabarets thrive. And the beautification must proceed apace so that the rich and powerful can enjoy their ill-gotten wealth without the ‘polluting’ effect of the poor who are further ghettoised.
Thus 21st Century India means mega dams, mammoth power plants, oil and gas pipelines, super highways, flyovers, golf courses, fancy clubs and tourist resorts, national parks, malls, theme parks…
North East Power Grid: Development as Domination or Development as Counterinsurgency
The entire region of the North East will be inundated with no less than 168 mega-dams with a cumulative capacity to generate 100000 Megawatts of power. Only 5000 megawatts would be utilised in the entire region which has been witnessing various struggles for the right to self-determination of the peoples in this region. The rest of the power generated (95000 megawatts) would go to satiate the needs of the Southeast Asian market. The region has been often cited as a fragile zone prone to earthquakes. The surfeit of big dams under the garb of development will endanger the fragile eco-zone of this region not to say that it will totally subvert the cultural, political, social specificities of the various peoples of this region who will be displaced from their very territory which is central in their struggle for their right to self-determination. Many of their indigenous institutions also would be destroyed in this process.
Along with this is the plan to link the entire region of the North East with the Southeast Asian market by road. There are also efforts to combine the markets of these regions with separate market regime principles to make them as combined economic regions. The super highway that is being built from North Bengal to the Mekong Valley under the much hyped ‘Look East Policy’ is a definite step in this direction which is nothing but ‘Development’ as counterinsurgency.
Displacement as State Building
Already, the logic and the necessity of this kind of a development has been stated. But there is a method to this madness that is being parotted by policy pundits as ‘development’.
The question that has often been debated among the western academia and the ‘nation builders’ foreign and desi is that whether resources are at the centre of ‘conflicts’ in poor countries like India, Afghanistan or countries in Africa and Latin America. In a series of studies supported by the World Bank and as the result of a broad statistical analysis of virtually all civil wars since the mid-1960s it was concluded that the causes for conflicts cannot be due to the existing rulers, economic mismanagement, political rights or levels of ethnic homogeneity or heterogeneity. These studies concluded that economic factors were crucial. It emphasised that countries that were highly dependent on the export of primary commodities and were populated by large numbers of young men, with limited or no education were also highly susceptible to civil conflict and political instability. These ‘hordes’ of poorly educated youths and readily accessible resources were particularly susceptible to civil conflict and the emergence of rebels driven primarily by powerful economic (‘greed’) need to use violence to acquire wealth. Thus as per this logic the need of the hour is to promote ‘development’ for ‘security’ and ‘stability’.
The resources in these regions have to be extracted for ‘development’. The poorly educated youths have to be transformed through ‘capacity building’ with the help of ‘modern’ institutions of ‘good governance’. Hence in the North East and other regions such as Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh tribal institutions of governance are deemed unfit to empower the tribal youth. There are already projects supported by London School of Economics and other premier institutions from the West being undertaken in India by NGOs and a section of the academia which are promoting the process of ‘institution building’ for facilitating ‘good governance’. Premier institutions in India are also including courses on Good Governance, Peace and Reconciliation through which there is an effort to decontextualise and reduce the real reasons underlying the socio-economic plight of the vast sections of the various peoples in the sub-continent.
Thus the model of ‘development’ that is being promoted under the aegis of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation creates a greater class of rentiers, retainers, pimps, prostitutes, servants, lumpens, etc—a growing class of hangers-on, all at the service of this neo-rich generated in the process. It destroys the bulk of the agrarian masses; displaces millions from permanent employment and generates in its place thousands of temporary and contract jobs for a pittance; drives the bulk of the middle classes to destitution while accommodating a small section into the elite club. Significantly, it displaces lakhs and lakhs of people from their land and all possible source of livelihood. It is a ‘development’ of the destruction of people, natural resources not to say environment with the complete support of the violent state machinery, including the judiciary and the executive.
The ‘victims’ of these development projects are projected as a liability as they are unable to fit into the mutational changes that have been forcefully brought into their productive labour. They found their way into their familiar forest home where they deemed to be intruders or on to the cities as beasts of burden, rickshaw pullers, or as commodities for the flourishing ‘flesh market’.
This ‘development’ also brings with it an increasingly fascistic state as the extremes of rich and poor are creating acute social tension with the masses having no other alternative than militant resistance. The intensifying contradiction between the rich and the poor, between regions, between various peoples, communities have made it a necessity for the state to resort to a combination of brutal repression and numerous diversionary tactics. Both fascist repression and diversionary tactics of Hindutva communal hysteria are also an outcome of the existing policies of this model of development.
What then could be the alternative?
The only alternative can be a model that really enhances the well-being of the vast masses, preserves the people’s natural wealth, and protects its environment. That builds the domestic market for commodities by enhancing the purchasing power of the masses and thereby becoming the motor for industrial growth and development of the economy; which is holistic, serving both the needs of the people and environment. A model of development that is equitable, just, and humane.
But such an alternative is not possible without, opposing tooth-and-nail, the present model of development. There can be no half-way measures as the present model is an integrated whole, with each aspect linked to the other, all serving to extract maximum profit for the imperialists and their hangers-on in the country. Whether it is the mining projects, or the schemes for the SEZs, or the infrastructural developmental projects, or that of urban ‘renewal’—all are part and parcel of the present phase of ‘economic reforms’ inspired by globalization. These are nothing but a continuation of the earlier phase of ‘economic reforms’ started vigorously in the early 1990s and continuing apace no matter which government has been in power. Any attempt to find formulas of adjustment with the existing polices are doomed to failure as they have their own dynamics dictated by the needs of profit maximization and imperialist loot. There is no other way than to oppose in total all these projects and the policies that facilitate them.
And this challenge calls for a massive movement of the people to resist these projects at the ground level and also awaken the entire country against this model of ruin and penury for the people resulting in more and more enslavement to the imperialist exploitative machine, particularly the US. The various peoples of the region need to be aroused against the imperialists and their local lackeys who are selling the wealth of the people for a few dollars.
What then is the alternative model of development?
· It is a people oriented model based on a self-reliant economy free from enslavement by imperialism. The polices of development must, first-and-foremost, develop the well-being of the masses and must be in their interest—not at their cost.
· The natural wealth of the country must only be extracted to the extent that it serves the needs of the mass of people—neither for imperialist loot nor for the extravagant infrastructural needs of these money-bags. Not only should the SEZ policy be totally reversed but the emphasis must be on developing indigenous industry, protecting labour rights, and introducing land reforms. Land must not go to the big industrialists and imperialists through the SEZ policy but be redistributed to the landless and poor.
· Infrastructural development must also be people oriented where the prime need and immediate priorities are health care, hygiene and education.
· Environmental regeneration must be an important factor in this model which has been destroyed by rapacious rape of the environment for profit and the green revolution–type polices—this by extensive reforestation, scientific water management (inclusive of lakhs of small water projects) and top-soil regeneration.
· In this new model of development all decisions must be made by the people themselves at the grass-root level and built upwards in a genuine form of people’s government. It is the people themselves who know best what type of development is in their interest and what is harmful. They are the best to decide their future. For this they must take the future into their own hands and wrest control of it from the hands of the money-bags and their agents. This alone can assure all-round growth and not its ruin and destruction as is happening today.
· There should be also be resistance to build on a short term, people’s sectors which would have the negotiating power and will to initiate short-term relief measures for the vast sections of the masses while fighting the state.
But to build this new model it first requires an uncompromising opposition to the present model and all the policies that are coming up. For this, there is need to build a huge movement against displacement and the very model of development itself. All genuine democratic and anti-imperialist forces should unite to create a tornado of dissent that forces the rulers to stop this juggernaut trampling the lives of the people of the Sub-continent.
DSU invites you to be a part of an effort to build a countrywide movement against displacement, against forceful state/private takeover of people’s resources: land, water, forests…
A decade-and-a-half of these policies have, pushed more than one lakh peasants to suicide. Massive unemployment have further impoverished an already devastated people in both rural and urban areas and marginalized millions.
The second wave of ‘economic reforms’ is a violent assault on the right to life and livelihood of the masses. Apart from continuing the ‘development’ driven through big dams, super highways and other infrastructural projects, the new phase of accumulation of capital involves gigantic mining projects, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), urban renewal and beautification.
Displacement as ‘Development’
All these policies are being implemented in the name of ‘development’, ‘modernization’, taking India into the club of elite countries. This is no doubt ‘development’, of a particular kind. It is the model of ‘development’ that gives gigantic amounts of wealth to the super-rich (foreign and Indian) while increasingly impoverishing more and more people. It is unmitigated loot of all our natural wealth and mineral resources on a scale never witnessed before. It is development OF and FOR the market; FOR the creation of a market based on the expenditure OF the very rich together with a growing upper middle class who live off crumbs thrown off the table of the super-rich. This development of displacement have pervaded the entire spectrum of diverse production of material life of the sub-continent—from hunters and gatherers, pastorals, shifting cultivators, forest dwellers especially in protected areas like sanctuaries, traditional cultivators, advanced farmers, trading centres, service and industrial centres, towns and cities. All the four dreaded Ds are fast engulfing our societies—Displacement, Disorganisation, Destitution and Decimation.
Massive Mining Projects of MNCs: Opening the Veins of South Asia
The mining projects in just the states of Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh entail investments of about Rs.5 lakh crores. Some 20 percent of the tribal people have already been uprooted from their homes. The resource rich region of Dandakaranya and its vicinity in the states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and the adjoining areas in West Bengal, Vidharbha and eastern Madhya Pradesh account for more than three fourth of the total mineral wealth of India. On a smaller scale, mining projects are also coming up in all the states wherever there is some wealth to extract. The regions within these states that have been set aside as prospective areas rich in mineral wealth such as coal, iron ore, bauxite, diamonds, uranium, thorium etc. is inhabited by the poorest of the poor in India. Hundreds of MoUs have been signed by the government with various Multinational Corporations and Indian Monopolies. Much of the mineral wealth is exported while the rest is used to serve the palatial needs of India’s neo-rich. New laws are being enacted to undo the rights of the people over these resources. The better known examples are the Indian Forest Act, Indian Fisheries Act, Indian Mineral Act, and various Urban Development Acts. In the process, lakhs and lakhs will be displaced—not only will their land and forests be seized, but also their livelihood, their right to a dignified existence destroyed.
Special Economic Zones (SEZs): Enclaves of Foreign Occupation:
The rural areas in India are facing massive unemployment due to lack of opportunities. A backlash of the state policy of opening up of the markets to monopolies. The traditional crafts have collapsed as machine goods are flooding the rural markets. The labour displacing machines have reduced the labour input per acre to less than one-third compared to the post-47 situation. Even in the so-called Employment Generation Programmes of the government commission agents and contractors are on to make a fast buck by using machines. Moreover a large part of the land is held by the absentee owners which results in a heavy drain of current income of the rural economy. These absentee land owners are prone to sell away their lands for profit. The crisis in the rural scenario is further exemplified with the abysmally low entitlement for work in agriculture hovering around 30 rupees a day. The ‘educated youth’ who are rather the deskilled force in rural India are not ready to soil their hands for such a low pay. The massive alienation of people in the rural areas from their current means of livelihood with no worthwhile substitute in sight is imminent.
The Special Economic Zones have been showcased as the panacea for skyrocketing unemployment and lack of opportunities in the urban and rural regions in India. These zones throughout the country will create enclosures where no laws of the land would hold. This tantamount to a modern form of the East India Company; foreign enclaves within the territory of the country which facilitates the SEZs. Even conservative estimates of the RBI projects a loss of about Rs.1.7 lakh crores in revenue for the Indian government over the next four years due to the Special Economic Zones. But the worst hit will be the rural populace whose prime lands are being forcibly seized. Lakhs of acres have already been taken over and every day new announcements come of more and more SEZs being granted permission. In the much hyped ‘Green Revolution’ belts of Haryana and Punjab where the suicide deaths of farmers are the order of the day, farmers who are deep in debt are even ready to take whatever crumbs thrown by the government as compensation for the acquired land. In fact this has proved to be the last straw on the farmer’s back leading to large scale alienation of land and unabating strings of suicides. The man made crisis is so acute in the Green Revolution pockets that for the farmer to hold on to the farming land as a viable enterprise has become an unenviable task.
There is no economic incentive for the farmer to continue agriculture in these lands. The government has refused to look into the root causes of agriculture being rendered non-viable as the insidious policy of the state. Instead it legalised the practice of usury by credit institution including even the cooperatives through the ingenious legal jugglery of excluding them from the very definition of moneylenders. In 1947, 70 per cent of the people in India were engaged in agriculture and allied activities. Their share in the Gross National Income was 65 percent. According to the Farmer’s Commission while the number of persons in the above category has marginally declined from 70 to 65 percent, their share in the National Income has nose dived to 20 percent. The projections of Vision 2020 envisages only a 6 percent share for the 60 percent depending on agriculture.
Already unofficial estimates show that more than 300 SEZs are on the pipeline. As per official estimates about 35-40% of existing industry and finance (including IT sector) will move to these enclaves to avail of the tax-free profits that these havens allow. The government talks much trash of generating employment but the reality is that it is mostly existing business that will shift location to these SEZs to avail of the huge benefits.
Urban ‘Visions’: Fortifying Urban Spaces for Free Exploitation of Monopoly Capital
Global policy advisory groups like the Mckinsey from the US is formulating and pushing the initiatives of organising and streamlining the urban spaces under the camouflage of urban beautification. This streamlining of the urban spaces offers minimum security risk for the operational needs of foreign and local capital in these areas.
It not only entails marginalizing the already impoverished poor, it is even hitting at the middle classes, small traders and industries. Lakhs of slum-dwellers have already been pushed out in the process. Small retailers must be crushed (as in Delhi) in order to make way for giant retailers like Reliance, Wal-Mart and a host of others; small scale industries must be pushed out, not only to ‘clean up’ the cities, but also to allow big business to widen its captive-market reach.
Urban ‘Visions’, with their creation of infrastructural and beautification projects for the elite is wrecking havoc in all the main cities of the country. The main metropolitan cities are the hub of operations of the money-bags. They demand all the best facilities in the form of infrastructure and entertainment. Dance bars in Mumbai must be forcibly closed so that 5-star cabarets thrive. And the beautification must proceed apace so that the rich and powerful can enjoy their ill-gotten wealth without the ‘polluting’ effect of the poor who are further ghettoised.
Thus 21st Century India means mega dams, mammoth power plants, oil and gas pipelines, super highways, flyovers, golf courses, fancy clubs and tourist resorts, national parks, malls, theme parks…
North East Power Grid: Development as Domination or Development as Counterinsurgency
The entire region of the North East will be inundated with no less than 168 mega-dams with a cumulative capacity to generate 100000 Megawatts of power. Only 5000 megawatts would be utilised in the entire region which has been witnessing various struggles for the right to self-determination of the peoples in this region. The rest of the power generated (95000 megawatts) would go to satiate the needs of the Southeast Asian market. The region has been often cited as a fragile zone prone to earthquakes. The surfeit of big dams under the garb of development will endanger the fragile eco-zone of this region not to say that it will totally subvert the cultural, political, social specificities of the various peoples of this region who will be displaced from their very territory which is central in their struggle for their right to self-determination. Many of their indigenous institutions also would be destroyed in this process.
Along with this is the plan to link the entire region of the North East with the Southeast Asian market by road. There are also efforts to combine the markets of these regions with separate market regime principles to make them as combined economic regions. The super highway that is being built from North Bengal to the Mekong Valley under the much hyped ‘Look East Policy’ is a definite step in this direction which is nothing but ‘Development’ as counterinsurgency.
Displacement as State Building
Already, the logic and the necessity of this kind of a development has been stated. But there is a method to this madness that is being parotted by policy pundits as ‘development’.
The question that has often been debated among the western academia and the ‘nation builders’ foreign and desi is that whether resources are at the centre of ‘conflicts’ in poor countries like India, Afghanistan or countries in Africa and Latin America. In a series of studies supported by the World Bank and as the result of a broad statistical analysis of virtually all civil wars since the mid-1960s it was concluded that the causes for conflicts cannot be due to the existing rulers, economic mismanagement, political rights or levels of ethnic homogeneity or heterogeneity. These studies concluded that economic factors were crucial. It emphasised that countries that were highly dependent on the export of primary commodities and were populated by large numbers of young men, with limited or no education were also highly susceptible to civil conflict and political instability. These ‘hordes’ of poorly educated youths and readily accessible resources were particularly susceptible to civil conflict and the emergence of rebels driven primarily by powerful economic (‘greed’) need to use violence to acquire wealth. Thus as per this logic the need of the hour is to promote ‘development’ for ‘security’ and ‘stability’.
The resources in these regions have to be extracted for ‘development’. The poorly educated youths have to be transformed through ‘capacity building’ with the help of ‘modern’ institutions of ‘good governance’. Hence in the North East and other regions such as Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh tribal institutions of governance are deemed unfit to empower the tribal youth. There are already projects supported by London School of Economics and other premier institutions from the West being undertaken in India by NGOs and a section of the academia which are promoting the process of ‘institution building’ for facilitating ‘good governance’. Premier institutions in India are also including courses on Good Governance, Peace and Reconciliation through which there is an effort to decontextualise and reduce the real reasons underlying the socio-economic plight of the vast sections of the various peoples in the sub-continent.
Thus the model of ‘development’ that is being promoted under the aegis of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation creates a greater class of rentiers, retainers, pimps, prostitutes, servants, lumpens, etc—a growing class of hangers-on, all at the service of this neo-rich generated in the process. It destroys the bulk of the agrarian masses; displaces millions from permanent employment and generates in its place thousands of temporary and contract jobs for a pittance; drives the bulk of the middle classes to destitution while accommodating a small section into the elite club. Significantly, it displaces lakhs and lakhs of people from their land and all possible source of livelihood. It is a ‘development’ of the destruction of people, natural resources not to say environment with the complete support of the violent state machinery, including the judiciary and the executive.
The ‘victims’ of these development projects are projected as a liability as they are unable to fit into the mutational changes that have been forcefully brought into their productive labour. They found their way into their familiar forest home where they deemed to be intruders or on to the cities as beasts of burden, rickshaw pullers, or as commodities for the flourishing ‘flesh market’.
This ‘development’ also brings with it an increasingly fascistic state as the extremes of rich and poor are creating acute social tension with the masses having no other alternative than militant resistance. The intensifying contradiction between the rich and the poor, between regions, between various peoples, communities have made it a necessity for the state to resort to a combination of brutal repression and numerous diversionary tactics. Both fascist repression and diversionary tactics of Hindutva communal hysteria are also an outcome of the existing policies of this model of development.
What then could be the alternative?
The only alternative can be a model that really enhances the well-being of the vast masses, preserves the people’s natural wealth, and protects its environment. That builds the domestic market for commodities by enhancing the purchasing power of the masses and thereby becoming the motor for industrial growth and development of the economy; which is holistic, serving both the needs of the people and environment. A model of development that is equitable, just, and humane.
But such an alternative is not possible without, opposing tooth-and-nail, the present model of development. There can be no half-way measures as the present model is an integrated whole, with each aspect linked to the other, all serving to extract maximum profit for the imperialists and their hangers-on in the country. Whether it is the mining projects, or the schemes for the SEZs, or the infrastructural developmental projects, or that of urban ‘renewal’—all are part and parcel of the present phase of ‘economic reforms’ inspired by globalization. These are nothing but a continuation of the earlier phase of ‘economic reforms’ started vigorously in the early 1990s and continuing apace no matter which government has been in power. Any attempt to find formulas of adjustment with the existing polices are doomed to failure as they have their own dynamics dictated by the needs of profit maximization and imperialist loot. There is no other way than to oppose in total all these projects and the policies that facilitate them.
And this challenge calls for a massive movement of the people to resist these projects at the ground level and also awaken the entire country against this model of ruin and penury for the people resulting in more and more enslavement to the imperialist exploitative machine, particularly the US. The various peoples of the region need to be aroused against the imperialists and their local lackeys who are selling the wealth of the people for a few dollars.
What then is the alternative model of development?
· It is a people oriented model based on a self-reliant economy free from enslavement by imperialism. The polices of development must, first-and-foremost, develop the well-being of the masses and must be in their interest—not at their cost.
· The natural wealth of the country must only be extracted to the extent that it serves the needs of the mass of people—neither for imperialist loot nor for the extravagant infrastructural needs of these money-bags. Not only should the SEZ policy be totally reversed but the emphasis must be on developing indigenous industry, protecting labour rights, and introducing land reforms. Land must not go to the big industrialists and imperialists through the SEZ policy but be redistributed to the landless and poor.
· Infrastructural development must also be people oriented where the prime need and immediate priorities are health care, hygiene and education.
· Environmental regeneration must be an important factor in this model which has been destroyed by rapacious rape of the environment for profit and the green revolution–type polices—this by extensive reforestation, scientific water management (inclusive of lakhs of small water projects) and top-soil regeneration.
· In this new model of development all decisions must be made by the people themselves at the grass-root level and built upwards in a genuine form of people’s government. It is the people themselves who know best what type of development is in their interest and what is harmful. They are the best to decide their future. For this they must take the future into their own hands and wrest control of it from the hands of the money-bags and their agents. This alone can assure all-round growth and not its ruin and destruction as is happening today.
· There should be also be resistance to build on a short term, people’s sectors which would have the negotiating power and will to initiate short-term relief measures for the vast sections of the masses while fighting the state.
But to build this new model it first requires an uncompromising opposition to the present model and all the policies that are coming up. For this, there is need to build a huge movement against displacement and the very model of development itself. All genuine democratic and anti-imperialist forces should unite to create a tornado of dissent that forces the rulers to stop this juggernaut trampling the lives of the people of the Sub-continent.
DSU invites you to be a part of an effort to build a countrywide movement against displacement, against forceful state/private takeover of people’s resources: land, water, forests…
STRUGGLE FOR CONSTRUCTION WORKER’S RIGHTS IN J.N.U. CAMPUS:
Jawaharlal Nehru University claims itself to be one of the premier institutes of the country. And in the present age of liberalization, privatization and globalization, it is in the race to be one among the ‘world class’ universities. As a result, there is a huge expansion-drive going on within the campus in the last two years. The infrastructural expansion is variously termed as campus ‘beautification’ or campus development. More than Rs.90 crore has been earmarked in the current financial year alone for constructions in the campus. Every month new sites are cleared out for buildings and roads, etc. During this time, buildings for the School of Arts and Aesthetics, the Special Centre for Sanskrit Studies, Center for Law and Governance, School of Language Extension, the food court, and so on has come up in the academic complex. Three new hostels too have been constructed in the last three years. All these and much more have come up as part of the University’s X-th plan, and many are still in the pipeline, to be taken up or completed in the near future. A few of the prominent ones of these are the proposed extension building for School of International Studies, a thousand-seater auditorium, and the new building for School of Physical Sciences (SPS).
A nexus has been formed over the years among a section of the JNU administration, their preferred private contractors and public construction agencies like the CPWD, which has been given the task of many of these constructions. By all counts the JNU administration has been undemocratic, non-transparent and non-accountable in its everyday functioning as well as in long term policy-making in general, and in relation to ‘developmental works’ in particular.
Almost all the services in campus are now gradually privatized, and the jobs generated are made contractual in nature. Not only the construction worker’s, but all such contractual worker’s rights are deliberately and knowingly violated. This is in spite of the Guidelines drawn by JNU administration itself which clearly provides for all the basic facilities and ensures rights of the workers in the campus.
The present struggle for worker’s rights:
The construction work at the SPS site started in November 2006. The work was entrusted to the CPWD which subcontracted the project to M/S Jialal Malhotra & Co. The workers were hired through jobbers (called jamadars) and the project was divided into several parts (16 parts in total) depending on the nature of work. So, many such works were contracted out to groups of workers, and many others directly employed by the contractor through jobbers. While in the first case a lump-sum amount was arrived at as wage payment with the head worker for a particular task, in the later it was the jobber through which every worker was paid. So in this process we can see a hierarchy of middlemen who appropriates the worker’s wages: the main contractor (CPWD in this case), the subsidiary contractor (M/S Jialal Malhotra), the jamadar, and so on. Therefore, we found that while in the tender filled by the CPWD the wages for workers were quoted at the minimum wage, the wage-in-hand paid to the ‘unskilled’ labourer was between Rs.65 to Rs.70 per day. The balance amount due to the workers (which comes to be at least Rs.58, if a worker is paid Rs.70/day) is siphoned off in between. It was also revealed that the sub-contractors calculate their labour cost much below the minimum wage (i.e. at the prevailing market rate) even though in their tenders they figuratively quote the minimum wage scale. The overseer of Malhotra & Co., one Mr. Chandra Pal for example, told in a conversation that there is cut-throat competition in the real-estate business, and to survive this competition it is necessary that they only provide for the market rate of the wage and not the minimum wage. He also says that the labour market is saturated, and there are enough labourers at any given time in Delhi today who are ready to work at half the minimum wage.
The Demands:
In a situation like this it is almost impossible to demand even a raise of Rs.5 in their wages, as was found out by a group of workers in the JNU campus. This is a group of workers who have migrated to Delhi at various times in the past from Bilaspur region in Chattisgarh. A few of them, like Hari and Gonda have been living in the campus for last fifteen years, and Tiharu and Sushila for last ten years. Many more families have joined them since then, and by now their basti consists of around eight families. Prahlad and Guddu too have spent several years in JNU. Shanti, Binod, Vijay, Balla and a few others have come in relatively recently. They have been moving from one site to the other within the campus, living in makeshift tents (jhuggis), without any facility for drinking water, toilet and sanitation, crèche for their young ones, medical aid or for that matter a reasonable wage. For last few months they have been putting up under a shed behind the School of Computer Sciences, near the site of the electrical sub-station where till recently they have been working. From here they have also been working at the Nursery, the canteens in front of Tapti and Lohit hostels, as well as in Narmada hostel. The prevailing wage-in-hand at these sites was Rs.65/70. Their jamadar is Ganeshi, and as they found out later, for every ‘unskilled’ worker he used to get Rs.75/80 from the contractor, whereas he would only pay Rs.65. When work at the SPS site, nearby their basti, started in October, they also joined in. But early in the month of December, the wage rate was reduced by five rupees to Rs.65. They pleaded that Rs.65 is too less, and demanded Rs.70 from the contractor. Rather than heeding to their demand, they were dismissed from the work by the contractor. They then contacted the students. These same students a year back had forced the contractors to pay the workers the minimum wage at the School of Arts and Aesthetics site. That struggle came to be an one-off incident, but the experience of fighting, and winning their just demands, was still fresh on their minds.
The JNU Students’ Union held a public meeting on the 13th December where the workers also put forward their grievances. On the 14th, JNUSU gave a call for a protest demonstration in front of the JNU administration. The ensuing talk between the administration and JNUSU did not resolve the issue, even though the administration recognized the gross violation of worker’s rights in the campus. Keeping in mind the reluctance and utter inability of the administration to enforce labour regulations, JNUSU, likeminded organizations and individuals, and the workers formed a working group to carry forward the agitation. It was necessary at that moment to reach out to the other workers in the campus too, who numbered more than 150 at that time. A survey was conducted in all the known sites within campus to examine the wage rates and living condition of the workers, and it showed that none received minimum wage. Moreover, none was provided with the basic facilities which are statutory under various labour laws and regulations. The violation of JNU’s own guidelines for construction work and workers was openly violated. The workers were living in inhuman conditions, and even the basic medical aid was not in place at the worksites.
Along with this, it was found that no information relating to the ongoing works was available at the workplace. There was no muster-roll, nor any display signs enumerating the nature of the project. All these are mandatory, but there was no enforcement of these rules. Such non-transparency helped the agencies and contractors to exploit the labourers. Likewise, the JNU administration also was equally undemocratic, intransparent and unaccountable when it came to sharing documents about the constructions. They have so far declined to make public the papers related to the construction works in the campus, be it the X-th plan, the Master Plan, or the tender documents, despite repeated demands made from the student community. At no point the students, or for that matter the larger JNU community is involved in the decision-making process related to ‘campus development’. Proposals for many of the constructions were not even floored in the Campus Development Committee (CDC), a body to monitor and regulate in issues of development in the campus. The thorough undemocratic nature of the JNU administration is also a pointer to its nexus with the contractors and builders.
The 15 odd workers who were dismissed from work were determined to fight for their rights, but it was important to talk to the other workers in the campus too, especially to those who were on the SPS site. They were almost a hundred in number, and were relatively new to the campus. They came from Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, U.P., and Jharkhand. Most of them worked only for a few weeks in the site, and many others, just for a few days. They too live in makeshift jhuggis near the site, in equally appalling conditions. Moreover, the ensuing winter was making life more difficult for them. All the ‘unskilled’ workers here were paid a wage of Rs.65, the ‘skilled’ ones being given between Rs.110 to Rs130. All of them live by the day, taking advances from their jamadars, and getting paid every week when a part of it goes to repay the latter. This is in addition to the advances they have taken at the time of coming to Delhi from their jamadars, which come to a minimum of Rs.3000/4000 per family. Most of them, like Phulbai from Bilaspur in Chattisgarh, or Raju Das from Jharkhand have substantial debts back home, which they need to repay, at least its interest. The rate of interest, taken from local seths varies at Rs.3 to Rs.5 per Rs.100 per month. Additionally, a part of their income, which is no more than Rs.2000 for most of them, is regularly sent home for the sustenance of their extended family. Though most of the workers are moving with their immediate families here at worksites, with their children living with them, many have left some of their grown-up children in the village, so as to have a better life there, or even some education. Many of the workers said that they find life here as construction workers very tough, but have been forced out of their villages in search of a source of earning. They have little or no agricultural land back home, and there is no adequate work in either their villages or in the nearby towns to absorb them. However, it is usual for those who have agricultural land to go home during the cropping season to help out their keens in the field. However, agriculture by itself has no longer remained viable for them. Alienation from land subdivision or debt has become common toady in the regions they come from, and in search of livelihood they have become footloose labourers.
Their woes have not reduced in urban areas too, with rampant exploitation in evidence everywhere in the industrial sector, especially in the unorganized sector. And the workers in JNU, like in any other place, were so vulnerable and insecure that even after knowing that they have been unjustly deprived of their rightful wage, hardly anyone at the SPS site wanted to speak out about the underpayment of wages and the dismal working and living conditions, let alone fighting to claim a fair wage.
Students and workers participated in another protest demonstration at the administration building, and the latter assured that from now on minimum wage will be paid, and all the worksite regulation will be enforced in JNU. Moreover, they also agreed to pay the workers the minimum wage with retrospective effect. They also agreed in principle to fulfill the other worker-related demands, including the reinstatement of the fired workers. There was jubilation among the workers (especially among the 15 who were dismissed), but it was to be short-lived.
Students in the working group with the JNUSU had a meeting with the workers at SPS, who were still reluctant to speak on the wage rates they were being paid. Yet, the next morning the work at the site was stopped by the contractors, sensing ‘trouble’. Chandra Pal, the overseer proclaimed that it was difficult to work under situations where workers might demand their rightful wage, and if they had to pay it. Pressure was put on the JNU administration to resume work immediately, but in an all-organization meeting, JNU’s rector and the Chief Engineer expressed their helplessness in intervening to this effect. The Vice Chancellor too said that JNU had only moral and not legal responsibility to uphold and enforce worker’s rights in the campus, since they have contracted out the project to CPWD. This is despite the fact the JNU is the principal employer, and is thus legally bound to ensure the implementation of labour regulations.
A mobilization and fund-raising campaign was started by JNUSU among the students, faculty and the employees, and the JNU Teachers’ Association and the JNU Employees’ Association expressed their solidarity with the worker’s struggle. A community-kitchen was set up from the fund to support and sustain the workers in their fight, and also to create a common platform for struggle. For three days starting from the 25th November, the kitchen started functioning with the participation of the workers and students. But it was clear that most of the workers, except the initial 15, do not have the wherewithal to carry on with the fight, and they started vacating the site batch by batch. It was also to the liking of the contractors, since they wished to play for time and to frustrate and demoralize the workers by stopping work.
Nevertheless, the contractor M/S Jialal Malhotra & CO. was forced by the students and workers to pay the wages at minimum wage with retrospective effects to the 15 workers along with those few workers from the SPS site who joined the struggle, in the presence of representatives from JNU administration and the CPWD. The muster rolls, which revealed a great degree of omissions, discrepancy and manipulation, were forced to be sealed. Following this the other contractor, M/S Chaudhury and Chaudhury, was also forced to pay back the arrears. But the workers complained that they were paid for days far less than they have worked. It was difficult to verify, since neither the workers clearly remembered the number of days they have already worked, nor was any record with them. No muster roll was maintained, and the jamadar’s accounts were the only means to count the number of work-days. These registers were highly manipulated, and had to be acquired by the students forcefully. The jamadar pocketed a considerable chunk of the worker’s wages, apart from siphoning off his commission at the rate of Rs.5 to Rs.15 per worker per day. His account-books and documents were shared with and explained to the workers, and he remains their immediate enemy and center of ire.
The future of the workers and their rights in the campus:
Yet, the absence of work has still drawn the workers to him. He has also given advances to them, and that way he kept them under his thrall. They have also received threats from administration as well as from the contractors to vacate their shelters and to go out of the campus. The workers are searching for job every day, but have been denied everywhere. Repeated pressure on the administration from students and teachers till now has failed to provide them with any work. The SPS site is still closed, and there is no sign yet that they will get a job in the campus, being marked as ‘bawal labour’. The community kitchen still runs, the students are with them, and the workers are not ready to compromise on their legitimate demands. But every now and then they express their worries, as they feel that without work they will not be able to sustain themselves for long. Even though the need of food is partly taken care of by the community kitchen, they require cash to meet their daily needs, as well as to send money home. The struggle needs to be intensified in the coming days for their work and for a fair wage. But it will only be a small step forward in addressing the problems of the workers in the unorganized sector if their demands are successfully clinched. More importantly, it will have to be ensured that the workers, at least in the campus, are made free from exploitation, and also from the ties of debt and bondage emanating from the acute agricultural crisis in rural India. This can be a small beginning for ensuring worker’s rights, which can be successful only with a spirited and united struggle of the workers-students-teachers. As our own experience teaches us, no amount of enactments, regulations or guidelines can ensure this, unless it is enforced through a struggle, a consistent movement of the workers for their rights.
The Latest on the worker’s struggle:
As we expected, the administration and the contractors together had made life difficult for the struggling construction workers in the campus. They had been willfully denied work, and constantly faced harassment and humiliation. This has resulted in all the fighting workers, except one family, leaving the campus in the first week of January this year in search of work elsewhere. The JNUSU nor the students who have been fighting for the rights of the workers could ensure that the workers are protected and are given regular work in the campus. This is a setback in the movement, and a temporary victory for the contractor-administration nexus. The struggle has to be intensified and the workers and students must be prepared to fight a protracted battle against this nexus.
A nexus has been formed over the years among a section of the JNU administration, their preferred private contractors and public construction agencies like the CPWD, which has been given the task of many of these constructions. By all counts the JNU administration has been undemocratic, non-transparent and non-accountable in its everyday functioning as well as in long term policy-making in general, and in relation to ‘developmental works’ in particular.
Almost all the services in campus are now gradually privatized, and the jobs generated are made contractual in nature. Not only the construction worker’s, but all such contractual worker’s rights are deliberately and knowingly violated. This is in spite of the Guidelines drawn by JNU administration itself which clearly provides for all the basic facilities and ensures rights of the workers in the campus.
The present struggle for worker’s rights:
The construction work at the SPS site started in November 2006. The work was entrusted to the CPWD which subcontracted the project to M/S Jialal Malhotra & Co. The workers were hired through jobbers (called jamadars) and the project was divided into several parts (16 parts in total) depending on the nature of work. So, many such works were contracted out to groups of workers, and many others directly employed by the contractor through jobbers. While in the first case a lump-sum amount was arrived at as wage payment with the head worker for a particular task, in the later it was the jobber through which every worker was paid. So in this process we can see a hierarchy of middlemen who appropriates the worker’s wages: the main contractor (CPWD in this case), the subsidiary contractor (M/S Jialal Malhotra), the jamadar, and so on. Therefore, we found that while in the tender filled by the CPWD the wages for workers were quoted at the minimum wage, the wage-in-hand paid to the ‘unskilled’ labourer was between Rs.65 to Rs.70 per day. The balance amount due to the workers (which comes to be at least Rs.58, if a worker is paid Rs.70/day) is siphoned off in between. It was also revealed that the sub-contractors calculate their labour cost much below the minimum wage (i.e. at the prevailing market rate) even though in their tenders they figuratively quote the minimum wage scale. The overseer of Malhotra & Co., one Mr. Chandra Pal for example, told in a conversation that there is cut-throat competition in the real-estate business, and to survive this competition it is necessary that they only provide for the market rate of the wage and not the minimum wage. He also says that the labour market is saturated, and there are enough labourers at any given time in Delhi today who are ready to work at half the minimum wage.
The Demands:
In a situation like this it is almost impossible to demand even a raise of Rs.5 in their wages, as was found out by a group of workers in the JNU campus. This is a group of workers who have migrated to Delhi at various times in the past from Bilaspur region in Chattisgarh. A few of them, like Hari and Gonda have been living in the campus for last fifteen years, and Tiharu and Sushila for last ten years. Many more families have joined them since then, and by now their basti consists of around eight families. Prahlad and Guddu too have spent several years in JNU. Shanti, Binod, Vijay, Balla and a few others have come in relatively recently. They have been moving from one site to the other within the campus, living in makeshift tents (jhuggis), without any facility for drinking water, toilet and sanitation, crèche for their young ones, medical aid or for that matter a reasonable wage. For last few months they have been putting up under a shed behind the School of Computer Sciences, near the site of the electrical sub-station where till recently they have been working. From here they have also been working at the Nursery, the canteens in front of Tapti and Lohit hostels, as well as in Narmada hostel. The prevailing wage-in-hand at these sites was Rs.65/70. Their jamadar is Ganeshi, and as they found out later, for every ‘unskilled’ worker he used to get Rs.75/80 from the contractor, whereas he would only pay Rs.65. When work at the SPS site, nearby their basti, started in October, they also joined in. But early in the month of December, the wage rate was reduced by five rupees to Rs.65. They pleaded that Rs.65 is too less, and demanded Rs.70 from the contractor. Rather than heeding to their demand, they were dismissed from the work by the contractor. They then contacted the students. These same students a year back had forced the contractors to pay the workers the minimum wage at the School of Arts and Aesthetics site. That struggle came to be an one-off incident, but the experience of fighting, and winning their just demands, was still fresh on their minds.
The JNU Students’ Union held a public meeting on the 13th December where the workers also put forward their grievances. On the 14th, JNUSU gave a call for a protest demonstration in front of the JNU administration. The ensuing talk between the administration and JNUSU did not resolve the issue, even though the administration recognized the gross violation of worker’s rights in the campus. Keeping in mind the reluctance and utter inability of the administration to enforce labour regulations, JNUSU, likeminded organizations and individuals, and the workers formed a working group to carry forward the agitation. It was necessary at that moment to reach out to the other workers in the campus too, who numbered more than 150 at that time. A survey was conducted in all the known sites within campus to examine the wage rates and living condition of the workers, and it showed that none received minimum wage. Moreover, none was provided with the basic facilities which are statutory under various labour laws and regulations. The violation of JNU’s own guidelines for construction work and workers was openly violated. The workers were living in inhuman conditions, and even the basic medical aid was not in place at the worksites.
Along with this, it was found that no information relating to the ongoing works was available at the workplace. There was no muster-roll, nor any display signs enumerating the nature of the project. All these are mandatory, but there was no enforcement of these rules. Such non-transparency helped the agencies and contractors to exploit the labourers. Likewise, the JNU administration also was equally undemocratic, intransparent and unaccountable when it came to sharing documents about the constructions. They have so far declined to make public the papers related to the construction works in the campus, be it the X-th plan, the Master Plan, or the tender documents, despite repeated demands made from the student community. At no point the students, or for that matter the larger JNU community is involved in the decision-making process related to ‘campus development’. Proposals for many of the constructions were not even floored in the Campus Development Committee (CDC), a body to monitor and regulate in issues of development in the campus. The thorough undemocratic nature of the JNU administration is also a pointer to its nexus with the contractors and builders.
The 15 odd workers who were dismissed from work were determined to fight for their rights, but it was important to talk to the other workers in the campus too, especially to those who were on the SPS site. They were almost a hundred in number, and were relatively new to the campus. They came from Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, U.P., and Jharkhand. Most of them worked only for a few weeks in the site, and many others, just for a few days. They too live in makeshift jhuggis near the site, in equally appalling conditions. Moreover, the ensuing winter was making life more difficult for them. All the ‘unskilled’ workers here were paid a wage of Rs.65, the ‘skilled’ ones being given between Rs.110 to Rs130. All of them live by the day, taking advances from their jamadars, and getting paid every week when a part of it goes to repay the latter. This is in addition to the advances they have taken at the time of coming to Delhi from their jamadars, which come to a minimum of Rs.3000/4000 per family. Most of them, like Phulbai from Bilaspur in Chattisgarh, or Raju Das from Jharkhand have substantial debts back home, which they need to repay, at least its interest. The rate of interest, taken from local seths varies at Rs.3 to Rs.5 per Rs.100 per month. Additionally, a part of their income, which is no more than Rs.2000 for most of them, is regularly sent home for the sustenance of their extended family. Though most of the workers are moving with their immediate families here at worksites, with their children living with them, many have left some of their grown-up children in the village, so as to have a better life there, or even some education. Many of the workers said that they find life here as construction workers very tough, but have been forced out of their villages in search of a source of earning. They have little or no agricultural land back home, and there is no adequate work in either their villages or in the nearby towns to absorb them. However, it is usual for those who have agricultural land to go home during the cropping season to help out their keens in the field. However, agriculture by itself has no longer remained viable for them. Alienation from land subdivision or debt has become common toady in the regions they come from, and in search of livelihood they have become footloose labourers.
Their woes have not reduced in urban areas too, with rampant exploitation in evidence everywhere in the industrial sector, especially in the unorganized sector. And the workers in JNU, like in any other place, were so vulnerable and insecure that even after knowing that they have been unjustly deprived of their rightful wage, hardly anyone at the SPS site wanted to speak out about the underpayment of wages and the dismal working and living conditions, let alone fighting to claim a fair wage.
Students and workers participated in another protest demonstration at the administration building, and the latter assured that from now on minimum wage will be paid, and all the worksite regulation will be enforced in JNU. Moreover, they also agreed to pay the workers the minimum wage with retrospective effect. They also agreed in principle to fulfill the other worker-related demands, including the reinstatement of the fired workers. There was jubilation among the workers (especially among the 15 who were dismissed), but it was to be short-lived.
Students in the working group with the JNUSU had a meeting with the workers at SPS, who were still reluctant to speak on the wage rates they were being paid. Yet, the next morning the work at the site was stopped by the contractors, sensing ‘trouble’. Chandra Pal, the overseer proclaimed that it was difficult to work under situations where workers might demand their rightful wage, and if they had to pay it. Pressure was put on the JNU administration to resume work immediately, but in an all-organization meeting, JNU’s rector and the Chief Engineer expressed their helplessness in intervening to this effect. The Vice Chancellor too said that JNU had only moral and not legal responsibility to uphold and enforce worker’s rights in the campus, since they have contracted out the project to CPWD. This is despite the fact the JNU is the principal employer, and is thus legally bound to ensure the implementation of labour regulations.
A mobilization and fund-raising campaign was started by JNUSU among the students, faculty and the employees, and the JNU Teachers’ Association and the JNU Employees’ Association expressed their solidarity with the worker’s struggle. A community-kitchen was set up from the fund to support and sustain the workers in their fight, and also to create a common platform for struggle. For three days starting from the 25th November, the kitchen started functioning with the participation of the workers and students. But it was clear that most of the workers, except the initial 15, do not have the wherewithal to carry on with the fight, and they started vacating the site batch by batch. It was also to the liking of the contractors, since they wished to play for time and to frustrate and demoralize the workers by stopping work.
Nevertheless, the contractor M/S Jialal Malhotra & CO. was forced by the students and workers to pay the wages at minimum wage with retrospective effects to the 15 workers along with those few workers from the SPS site who joined the struggle, in the presence of representatives from JNU administration and the CPWD. The muster rolls, which revealed a great degree of omissions, discrepancy and manipulation, were forced to be sealed. Following this the other contractor, M/S Chaudhury and Chaudhury, was also forced to pay back the arrears. But the workers complained that they were paid for days far less than they have worked. It was difficult to verify, since neither the workers clearly remembered the number of days they have already worked, nor was any record with them. No muster roll was maintained, and the jamadar’s accounts were the only means to count the number of work-days. These registers were highly manipulated, and had to be acquired by the students forcefully. The jamadar pocketed a considerable chunk of the worker’s wages, apart from siphoning off his commission at the rate of Rs.5 to Rs.15 per worker per day. His account-books and documents were shared with and explained to the workers, and he remains their immediate enemy and center of ire.
The future of the workers and their rights in the campus:
Yet, the absence of work has still drawn the workers to him. He has also given advances to them, and that way he kept them under his thrall. They have also received threats from administration as well as from the contractors to vacate their shelters and to go out of the campus. The workers are searching for job every day, but have been denied everywhere. Repeated pressure on the administration from students and teachers till now has failed to provide them with any work. The SPS site is still closed, and there is no sign yet that they will get a job in the campus, being marked as ‘bawal labour’. The community kitchen still runs, the students are with them, and the workers are not ready to compromise on their legitimate demands. But every now and then they express their worries, as they feel that without work they will not be able to sustain themselves for long. Even though the need of food is partly taken care of by the community kitchen, they require cash to meet their daily needs, as well as to send money home. The struggle needs to be intensified in the coming days for their work and for a fair wage. But it will only be a small step forward in addressing the problems of the workers in the unorganized sector if their demands are successfully clinched. More importantly, it will have to be ensured that the workers, at least in the campus, are made free from exploitation, and also from the ties of debt and bondage emanating from the acute agricultural crisis in rural India. This can be a small beginning for ensuring worker’s rights, which can be successful only with a spirited and united struggle of the workers-students-teachers. As our own experience teaches us, no amount of enactments, regulations or guidelines can ensure this, unless it is enforced through a struggle, a consistent movement of the workers for their rights.
The Latest on the worker’s struggle:
As we expected, the administration and the contractors together had made life difficult for the struggling construction workers in the campus. They had been willfully denied work, and constantly faced harassment and humiliation. This has resulted in all the fighting workers, except one family, leaving the campus in the first week of January this year in search of work elsewhere. The JNUSU nor the students who have been fighting for the rights of the workers could ensure that the workers are protected and are given regular work in the campus. This is a setback in the movement, and a temporary victory for the contractor-administration nexus. The struggle has to be intensified and the workers and students must be prepared to fight a protracted battle against this nexus.
January 24, 2007
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Democratic Students Union (DSU) at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, welcomes you to this webpage. We would use this space for publication, documention and interaction. We expect your active engagement and participation in this effort.
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