The invisible men behind Delhi's concrete and steel addiction

After the metro mishap happened in Zamrudpur in July killing at least six workers in Delhi, I walked through the lanes inside the urban villages, peeked inside the tiny hovels these contract workers were living in, and wrote about the horible conditions under which they worked and lived. Most of these workers weren't even paid minimum wages and were migrant labourers that had flocked to the megacity hoping to eke out a living somehow. Every room had stories of deprivation, of struggles, and of men who didn't complain, who perhaps had given up on hopes, and who had known no better. These were the people, the invisible men who were building the Delhi we envisioned.

Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 24, 2009

IF he hadn’t managed to loosen the safety belt and run that Sunday morning when the Metro tracks crashed killing six workers, Ravindar Kumar would have been yet another statistic, an addition to the body count that has emerged as Delhi lurches forward in its dreams of becoming a world class city.
Six workers died on Sunday, raising the death count in the mega project to nine in three accidents.
Kumar, 25, broke his hand on Sunday. As the dust rose in the skies amid shouts, for a brief moment Kumar, who is from Bihar, thought he would die, too. Perched on top of the slider, he saw the tracks fall.
There was a big jolt, and he would have been thrown in the air had it not been for the safety belt. And then the slider crashed too, bringing him down. He was trapped in the debris and finally managed to wriggle out of the safety belt that secured him to the machine and ran to safety.
Anil Yadav, a foreman, was on a slider too on that morning about 12 meters off the ground. When he saw the link break, he jumped off the slider.
“Safety belt was meaningless. I would have been trapped in the debris like others,” Yadav said.
Yadav was admitted to All India Institute of Medical Sciences Trauma Centre and remained there for five days undergoing treatment for head injuries. His family in Azamgarh called up a co-worker’s cell phone when they heard about the accident.
“They were crying. So I told Anil to go visit them,” Munna, another construction worker said.
Yadav was given Rs. 50,000 by the DMRC. That was in cash. He is still wondering if the government will give him any compensation at all.
Somewhere in the papers he read that Rs. 2 lakhs compensation had been earmarked for the injured but he doesn’t know if he will get any of that. While a petition was filed by an NGO in the court, the agencies have yet to revert to the court notices.

UNDER the shadows of the cranes trying to haul the debris, and the concrete mess on the ground, it is the hundreds of workers like Kumar, the invisible men, who are fuelling the city’s addiction to growth.
They are the poor migrant contract workers who flock to the city lured by the promise of construction jobs as Delhi gears for Commonwealth Games and a spate of construction projects mark its skyline. They work with little or no job security, get paid less than minimum wages and in some cases, don’t even have an identity proof.
These contract workers typically work under subcontractors who maintain the muster rolls and administer payments them. There are no unions, and no monitoring agency. There are too many layers, making it almost impossible to nail anyone. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, the principal employer in this project, has contracted the work to various contractors, who in turn have hired subcontractors or thekedars who bring the unskilled and semiskilled labourers.
Workers are not being paid the minimum wages. For an eight-hour shift, they get Rs. 100. If they do overtime, they get Rs. 150. Minimum wages in Delhi for unskilled labourers is Rs. 141. Semi-skilled workers make about Rs. 6,000 a month. The only benefit they get is free accommodation but the housing conditions are far from decent. The thekedar usually puts four people in a small room near the site where workers sleep in shifts because all of them wouldn't fit within its four walls at the same time. Room rents around Zamrudpur range from Rs. 1,200 to Rs. 1,600.
However, on paper, on muster rolls, everything looks fine. The files are maintained and nothing is amiss, DMRC spokesperson Anuj Dayal said.
“We haven’t heard any complaints. If the workers have any issues, they can come to us. Any discrepancies need to be highlighted,” he said. “All payments, all records are checked. We have proper procedures.”
And so the exploitation has continued.
“If we say something, we might lose our jobs,” he said. "What will we do then? Who will take care of our families? We have no land to till and even if there is, where's the money to buy seeds and irrigate the land?"
According to Dayal, engineers and DMRC officials visit the sites often to check for irregularities but so far they haven't reported anything.

BUT it only takes a trip through Zamrudpur village that lies just across the site where the Sunday accident happened, and through the maze of small rooms constructed in a haphazard way evidently for renting out, to see the conditions these contract workers are living in.
In a cramped room, Munna and three others sat against the wall talking. A fifth man, tired after his night shift at the site, slept in a corner in an embryonic position. Four people, if they all stretched, could barley fit in the room.
They all came from a village near Rae Bareilly to look for work. Munna who has been in Delhi for a few years now told them there were jobs at the DMRC construction sites.
Fourteen workers from Rae Bareilly are among the 70 odd workers that work under Upendar Yadav, a thekedar employed by Gammon India. Some of them have no identity cards and their only form of reassurance is an attendance card where the thekedar marks their hours. But then, neither their name nor the company’s name is on those cards. Their orange and yellow helmets are the only proof that they work at the Metro site and these plastic covers for their head are their only sheild, their only defense against a mishap. They know if a pillar were to fall, the helmets would crack, and their skulls would be smashed. But that's thinking too much, and if you thought of such things, you'd never work and you'd die of starvation anyways, they said.
“This is all we have. Now, after the accident we want to go back home but they haven’t paid us. We don’t know where to find Upendar and we don’t know if Gammon will entertain us,” Rajkumar, another worker said. “We feel trapped. We have no complaints but just give us some sort of identification."
Munna had been sleeping when the accident happened. At first he heard a thud, then the earth shook, and then there were shouts. He rushed outside, helped the injured, and then sat in his room thinking if it was worth it. If it wasn’t, where would the money come from, he said.
“There was water all over. The pipes had burst. Bodies were lying here and there. I stepped over a few too,” he said. “It was horrible.”
For Munna and others, this phase of construction was rushed, It was the pace, the obsession to finish so much and so soon that led to the accidents, Munna said.
"We all work overtime," he said.
In his black cheap plastic boots given to him by the officials, it hasn’t been easy working. They tear too soon because they are cheap quality, Munna said.
“There’s nothing for us. They are supposed to give us gloves but they always say the stocks are not there. If you see our hands, you’d be horrified. We pull the iron wires and rods with bare hands,” he said. “The palms harden. And there are no doctors at the site. The safety people keep some medicines. That’s all.”
Munna should have insurance but he doesn’t know about his rights.
There was no contract and the thekedar just made them sign on a paper and disbursed them their wages, he said.
“We were just hired and given the attendance cards,” he said.
But Dayal said he had no knowledge of all this. Upendar Yadav, the thekedar, refused
to talk to us. For days after the mishap, he was missing. Munna and some others had gone looking for him to ask him for their dues but he was nowhere to be found. His cell hpone was switched off, they said.
Some workers said usually it takes a couple of months for the new hires to get an identity card but Munna said he has been working for more than four months and still hasn't got any proof.
The thekedar gives them Rs. 300 for food per week, which is deducted from their salaries paid to them in cash at the end of the month.
The colony itself is divided into camps. The workers stick to their own people. While Bengalis cluster in one part of the village, the Biharis populate the interiors.
“The Biharis, most of them, ran away after the accident,” Munna said.
Three of those who died in Sunday’s mishap belonged to Bihar.
Sunday’s accident, which was followed by yet another accident within hours of the first one at the same site when three cranes deployed to haul the debris crashed Monday morning, wasn’t the first time the DMRC’s reputation was at stake. In October 2008, a 400-tonne span at Laxmi Nagar in east Delhi fell down while being lifted and killed two people.
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) also published a report on the plight of the contract workers in the spate of construction activity in the capital for the Commonwealth Games.
Gautam Navlakha, a PUDR member, said while there are labour laws meant to protect the contract workers, the labour office has been negligent.
“It is understaffed and there is no premium for defending the plight of workers. It is the construction workers whose beggar is used to subsidize the mega project,” he said. “This is the saddest part. Nobody is talking about it. At every level there is a violation.”
Unions have been barred on the pretext of terrorism threat, he said.
“But who is asking for unhindered access. In a class society like we live in, the anti union feeling. Nobody gives a damn. Rest of us are living well. What about the miserable hovels in which the workers have to live,” he said.
Unions' golden age is over. Gone are the days when the unions fought for workers' rights and won. After corruption seeped through their ranks, and industry and others looking to gain political mileage blamed the unions for stalling development, of being communist, and of being in the way of gainful employment and industry investment, unions have been slowly dying, too feeble to protest, too marred in their own olitics to be of any help.
Responsibility too gets camouflaged in the layers of contractors and subcontractors. But according to the Contract Labour Act of 1970, the central government remains the principal employer and is thus responsible for adhering to the provisions of the act, Navlakha said.
A Delhi state labour ministry official said this was a central government project and hence out of their purview but generally if cases of exploitation are brought to them, they usually take circumstantial evidence into account.
“If it is a death case. There is an FIR. In injury cases, we in the labour jurisprudence, we would presume a lot of things in the favour of the labourers,” he said. “Bt they have to file a complaint.”
But then Munna and other are hardly aware of the fact that they can resort to law. For them, the life in labour camps such as these will never end. When the Metro project gets over, they will move to some other site, again risking their lives for a less than minimum wages.