The story was published in the Indian Express on October 25, 2009.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 23, 2007
The girl, with her happy eyes, didn’t falter one bit. She looked into the camera and announced to the whole wide world she was lesbian. No justifications. No fear. No shame. Only pride, the raw, unfiltered pride tinged with hurt and anger, shone in those dark eyes.
Behind the camera, Ranjit Monga, the filmmaker, gasped, and let the camera roll. Yes, the young girl, who walked in the city’s pride march, came out to the world on the camera, beaming, defiant and yet tragic. And he shot her just like that, recording each moment of her coming out. Later, in his film on the pride march just days before the Delhi High Court gave its landmark judgment, the girls’ story became
one of the many personal tales that the six-minute documentary captures in their honesty and their unhindered optimism.
For Monga, the expression, the coming out was all part of the pride march, induced by it, and upheld by it as hundreds marched to Jantar Mantar, the designated protest street, in anticipation, carrying the rainbow flags, wearing head gears, and smiles.
A year ago, he had felt the rush, too, at the city’s first gay pride parade. For many years, the filmmaker and journalist had lived a life in the closet, attending underground parties, dodging uncomfortable questions, and hoping people would understand he was gay, that they will accept, and they will let him be.
Then, the city’s gay pride march happened. And it liberated him, he says.
From the other side of the street, Monga had watched the swelling crowd approach, he then crossed over, and marched with the rest of them, mingling with the young students as they danced drunk on the freedom, the opportunity, and the old who watched with a certain satisfaction as the city’s first gay pride march gained momentum. They had been in denial, in a limbo, not sure if the famed gay pride
marches of the west would ever happen here.
“It was an intense experience for me,” he said. “I came out. I celebrated. I was able to tell people I was gay. There were so many of us. There were others like me.”
So, next year, armed with a camera, Monga again crossed over.
The six-minute film New Delhi’s Pride 2009 will be shown at the Nigah Queer Festival on Sunday. In its third year, the festival, one of the very few in India to showcase films and arts that focus on LGBT issues and lives, has become a popular forum for filmmakers and artists who otherwise had a tough time negotiating for space. Until this year, homosexuality was illegal. After the Delhi High Court’s landmark
judgment, that space has expanded and more artists have dared to experiment with “unusual stories”.
For many years, entries from South Asia even in international film festivals have mostly been documentaries, or independent films.
Mainstream commercial cinema focusing on LGBT relationships are a rarity, Ponni Arasu, one of the organizers said.
“The lack of funding and screening opportunities is major hurdles,” she said. “From the western world, we receive a lot of mainstream film entries. I guess things will change because now homosexuality is not illegal here and public will be more accepting.”
The LGBT film movement started years ago in the west when filmmakers cast such characters like the comic homosexual, the tragic transgender or the villainous dykes, in their films. The movement itself can’t be categorised as one. It was a trend that slowly emerged. Most of these came from independent filmmakers who didn’t have to justify their stories or the theme to corporate and mainstream interest, or
preference. It didn’t matter if the public recoiled at the idea, or rejected the unusual love. It was an expression, unfettered.
The films, and its themes, reflected the movement’s journey over the years, including a barrage of films and television serials in the 1980s like Early Frost that focussed on AIDS. In the West that had an awakening to the alternative, to the other and to the queer side much before the other world, the world where being gay was condemned and was dismissed as deviant behaviour, finally the films gave way to
mainstream cinema that celebrated the gay life like Transamerica, Milk, and Brokeback Mountain.
But in India, the journey has only begun. In fact it started in the 1990s, but then the films were on the fringes, almost never making it to the mainstream cinema. A few attempts like My Brother Nikhil, a low-budget drama telling the story of a gay man’s tryst with AIDS and his struggles with his family and society were brave but except in the urban settings where the audience is perceived to be educated and
aware and fashionable, the film didn’t really make an impact. Not that it was made to be a success. A few producers even refused to fund the difficult project.
But that’s the story any filmmaker would recount.
Monga too went through a similar ordeal. When he decided he wanted to make a movie on the pride march because it made sense for him as a filmmaker to express his own struggles and his own pride that he claimed at the pride march itself years ago, he could not find sponsors. He put in the Rs. 6,000 that he had towards the project and
then a friend said he would pitch in the rest.
When he told his friends at Nigah he was planning to make a film on the pride parade, they were more than happy to showcase it during the festival.
“It is difficult but things are looking better,” he said. “I want to stick to this theme. We need more commercial cinemas on LGBT community.”
In 2006, an attempt was made to bring lesbian lovers into mainstream cinema by Ligy J. Pullappally who wrote, produced and directed a film depicting the love story of two lesbian lovers in The Journey that depicts the story of Kiran and Delilah, young Indian women who grow up together in a small rural village and then fall in love. But the film didn’t get the permission to screen in theatres in Kerela, Arasu said.
The first gay film in India was made by a young filmmaker Riyad Vinci Wadia. Called Bomgay, the documentary released in 1996 and is based on the poetry of gay poet R. Raj Rao and is a depiction of gay life in urban settings, in a metropolis where men accost other men in subways, and in dark, dank rooms. Many more came, made films, and showcased them at international film festivals, earned accolades but back home,
it was a muffled existence.
And even though the gay and lesbian expression is at an all-time high in the country now and many artists are coming out like Monga who hesitated for years before he mustered enough courage to shoot the film on gay pride.
“I was afraid. I didn’t want everyone to know. But I felt I must do it,” he said. “It took years but I did it. My next project will be a story on gay love in hinterlands, the acceptance of it. I don’t where the money will come from but I will see.”
But slowly, such films be it documentaries or low-budget films that play in multiplexes are testing the waters, teasing the audience, tempting them, challenging their limits, urging them to step out and see the other life. And festivals like Nigah are one of the first steps towards breaking the boundaries.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Of Saints and Fakirs
When I first saw the fakirs, they were encircling the shrine, and I asked them if I could come with them and then this fakir led me through lanes to the dhuni where many of their community members sat smoking and singing.
I spoke to Barshad and kept asking him if the feats of endurance that he performed didn't hurt him and he said he didn't care. The faith carried him through.
We came back in the night for the Dhammal. One fakir pierced a sharp sword through his cheeks, the other lashed himself with a whip. An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on Oct. 12, 2009.
This one is for the fakirs.
"Come, come, whoever you are. Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter.Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come." Rumi
Saints and fakirs
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 10, 2009
Barshad Ali Khalifa Rifai emerged from a throng of fakirs chanting,and dancing on the third day of the Urs at the famous Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Aulia, knelt down and put a dagger right through his shoulder.
His face twitched, his eyes rolled, but no blood colored the floors.
And no shouts of pain rose through the cacophony of drum beats and clanging cymbals.
Jaws dropped, cameras flashed, and nobody blinked through the Dhammal, a combination of magic tricks like walking on fire, endurance of physical torture like flagellating with chains dangling with knife-blades, and rhythmic skipping from foot to foot. The faith seemed infectious. It was as if they were all awed by the feat, yet they all knew he would be fine, and that he won’t die. Nobody cared to probe further, to question the antics, to get into a debate.
All this while, the fakirs who had gathered at the Rifai Chowk, the site of the scared fire or the dhuni at Nizamuddin Basti, from all over the country, traveling hundreds of miles to pay homage to Sufi poet Amir Khusro, the disciple of the 12th centrury saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, shouted “Mast Kalandar”, and whipped themselves as part of the performance.
The air was heavy with sweat, the scent of rose petals, the dying embers from the dhuni, and the waft of hashish from the chillums the fakirs smoked. It also throbbed with anticipation, dread, and disbelief.
Then Barshad stood up, and in a state of rapture pulled out the dagger, smiled, and walked back to his seat, swaying wildly.
No, he never felt any pain. It was a sweet trance, he said.
“I don’t think about the pain. It’s ecstasy. This is for Sarkar (Nizamuddin Auliya). Jis wali ke dar par fakir na gaya toh Urs kaisa. (No Urs is complete without the fakirs) So we come, we dance, we do dhammal, and we smoke,” he said. “He sees us through this. We keep the faith and he sees us through.”
The three-day Urs at the 705th death anniversary Khusro, culminated on Friday, a fortnight after Ramzan. The annual affair that celebrates the death because it signifies the ultimate union with God is an orgy of qawallis, mushairas, feasts and prayers and also intoxication, both literally and spiritually because the fakirs claim they are drunk on God’s love, and the tricks are to add to the enigma of the saint. Urs is also Arabic for marriage. For Sufis, it is time to celebrate, to
feast and pray. Thousands attended the Urs.
Rongila Bibi came from Bengal for the blessings of the saint.
"He is a special man of God. Khusro is his companion," the pregnant woman said. "I have come here to ask for his grace at the Urs. They say this is the best time."
For the wandering fakirs who converge at shrines, smoke, and do Dhammal, the Urs at Nizamuddin holds special significance, too. They claim they are sent invites to come and pay respects to the saint.
So they come, dressed in long robes, eyes lined with kohl, and with matted hair, chanting and dancing and encircle the shrine while the faithful stick Rs. 10 notes on to their swords, or daggers that they proudly brandish. And even though a certain disdain line their faces, many step aside to make way for them because they dread their curse.
Qalandar, whose name the vagrant fakirs invoke, was one of Pakistan’s Sufi saints who didn’t belong to any order. The fakirs say he performed miracles, brought the dead to life and such were his powers.
The fakirs are ascetics who are either born into the order like Barshad who says he was always a fakir, or are inducted like Islamuddin Khalifa who left his family in Delhi to become a wandering ascetic. When he was inducted in a ritual where his coffin was prepared symbolizing the death of his previous life, he was expected
to remain true to the fakirs, living a nomadic life, and sever all ties with the world.
As he sat in a corner watching the tricks of endurance performed by the fellow fakirs, he looked happy.
“I got peace here. I found God here,” he said.
While many doubt their beliefs and denounce their practices as being against Islam, the fakirs say they are too lost in their love for God to care. Justification isn’t the way of the true mystics, they said.
“Dervishes. Well, a lot of them might just be traditional and cultural. A true Sufi would call himself Fakir. But a lot of this is tradition and a way of earning. True qalandars are true Sufies lost to the world. I wouldn’t think they are true mystics,” Sadia Dehlvi, who authored a book on Sufism, said. “The true Qalandars are all gone.”
The Urs itself has transformed over the years. For the old-timers, the Urs has now become a tourist must-watch thing after the shrine was included in the Lonely Planet list, Dehlvi said.
Dehlvi has been going to the two Urs – of Nizamuddin Auliya and Khusro – for more than two decades and recalls the days when only the devoted came to the shrine. The qawallis too were different.
“Now it feels like a concert. The qawalls sit in a semi-circle but the middle path is supposed to be kept free so the djinns can come and listen to the music,” she said. “All that stands diluted now. So many things have changed.”
But even though many have dismissed them as petty mendicants who reduce to cheap magic tricks to beg for alms, the fakirs are as much part of the tradition of Urs as is the qawalli.
People made way for them as they came in. For at the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
“The world comes here on Urs. The fakirs come, too,” he said. “But these days it is not the real Qalandars who were the high masters. They have the knowledge. The fakirs are a show. They resort to cheap tricks.”
They can’t ask the saint to cure ills, to mediate and fulfill wishes. That’s forbidden, he said.
Khwaja Hasan Saani Nizami, the hereditary keeper of the shrine, said the fakirs are not real Sufis. They are mad men because in Sufism, the boundaries are defined. Fakirs are deviant, he said.
But then, the fakirs scoff at these notions. Sufism, they say, is a
tradition. Saints are venerated and even sinners have a chance at redemption, the self-styled mystics said.
“Maybe we are sinners. But I have left all to be with God,” Islamuddin said. “At the Urs, we come to see our saint. He doesn’t despise us.”
As for the endurance tricks, he said they did it to show their devotion, to show the powers of the venerated saints, and to add to the Urs festivities.
“We go where the Urs is,” he said. “We have come from Kolkata, Mumbai, Uttar Pradesh, everywhere. The power of Urs brings us here.”
Such endurance tricks are not unique to the the Muslim fakirs. Many other sects practice such piercings. In the 1960s in the West, circuses started getting fakirs to perform piercing tricks in front of the crowds.
In Shia branch of Islam, on Muharram many followers mourn and commemorate the death of Imam Husayn ibn Ali , a grandson of Prophet Muhammad , and other family members in the Battle of Karbala. Flagellation is part of the mourning rituals.
However, the Fakirs don’t do it as mourning but as celebration of the supernatural powers of their saints and believe that by piercing and flagellation, they prove they are so lost to the faith that pain ceases to exist. They also claim it has been part of the Urs tradition for many centuries. While the Rifai fakirs indulge in piercing and other tricks, the Jalalis shackle themselves in heavy iron chains, which sometimes weigh as much as 70 kgs, Islamuddin, who claims to be a fakir in the Qadiri- Rifai Sufi order, said. At the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
On Saturday, the fakirs walked to the Dargah with a shrowd of flowers, and offered to the Saint. And then, they smoked once again, sang qawallis and boarded the buses to return to where they came from.
I spoke to Barshad and kept asking him if the feats of endurance that he performed didn't hurt him and he said he didn't care. The faith carried him through.
We came back in the night for the Dhammal. One fakir pierced a sharp sword through his cheeks, the other lashed himself with a whip. An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on Oct. 12, 2009.
This one is for the fakirs.
"Come, come, whoever you are. Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter.Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come." Rumi
Saints and fakirs
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, October 10, 2009
Barshad Ali Khalifa Rifai emerged from a throng of fakirs chanting,and dancing on the third day of the Urs at the famous Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Aulia, knelt down and put a dagger right through his shoulder.
His face twitched, his eyes rolled, but no blood colored the floors.
And no shouts of pain rose through the cacophony of drum beats and clanging cymbals.
Jaws dropped, cameras flashed, and nobody blinked through the Dhammal, a combination of magic tricks like walking on fire, endurance of physical torture like flagellating with chains dangling with knife-blades, and rhythmic skipping from foot to foot. The faith seemed infectious. It was as if they were all awed by the feat, yet they all knew he would be fine, and that he won’t die. Nobody cared to probe further, to question the antics, to get into a debate.
All this while, the fakirs who had gathered at the Rifai Chowk, the site of the scared fire or the dhuni at Nizamuddin Basti, from all over the country, traveling hundreds of miles to pay homage to Sufi poet Amir Khusro, the disciple of the 12th centrury saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, shouted “Mast Kalandar”, and whipped themselves as part of the performance.
The air was heavy with sweat, the scent of rose petals, the dying embers from the dhuni, and the waft of hashish from the chillums the fakirs smoked. It also throbbed with anticipation, dread, and disbelief.
Then Barshad stood up, and in a state of rapture pulled out the dagger, smiled, and walked back to his seat, swaying wildly.
No, he never felt any pain. It was a sweet trance, he said.
“I don’t think about the pain. It’s ecstasy. This is for Sarkar (Nizamuddin Auliya). Jis wali ke dar par fakir na gaya toh Urs kaisa. (No Urs is complete without the fakirs) So we come, we dance, we do dhammal, and we smoke,” he said. “He sees us through this. We keep the faith and he sees us through.”
The three-day Urs at the 705th death anniversary Khusro, culminated on Friday, a fortnight after Ramzan. The annual affair that celebrates the death because it signifies the ultimate union with God is an orgy of qawallis, mushairas, feasts and prayers and also intoxication, both literally and spiritually because the fakirs claim they are drunk on God’s love, and the tricks are to add to the enigma of the saint. Urs is also Arabic for marriage. For Sufis, it is time to celebrate, to
feast and pray. Thousands attended the Urs.
Rongila Bibi came from Bengal for the blessings of the saint.
"He is a special man of God. Khusro is his companion," the pregnant woman said. "I have come here to ask for his grace at the Urs. They say this is the best time."
For the wandering fakirs who converge at shrines, smoke, and do Dhammal, the Urs at Nizamuddin holds special significance, too. They claim they are sent invites to come and pay respects to the saint.
So they come, dressed in long robes, eyes lined with kohl, and with matted hair, chanting and dancing and encircle the shrine while the faithful stick Rs. 10 notes on to their swords, or daggers that they proudly brandish. And even though a certain disdain line their faces, many step aside to make way for them because they dread their curse.
Qalandar, whose name the vagrant fakirs invoke, was one of Pakistan’s Sufi saints who didn’t belong to any order. The fakirs say he performed miracles, brought the dead to life and such were his powers.
The fakirs are ascetics who are either born into the order like Barshad who says he was always a fakir, or are inducted like Islamuddin Khalifa who left his family in Delhi to become a wandering ascetic. When he was inducted in a ritual where his coffin was prepared symbolizing the death of his previous life, he was expected
to remain true to the fakirs, living a nomadic life, and sever all ties with the world.
As he sat in a corner watching the tricks of endurance performed by the fellow fakirs, he looked happy.
“I got peace here. I found God here,” he said.
While many doubt their beliefs and denounce their practices as being against Islam, the fakirs say they are too lost in their love for God to care. Justification isn’t the way of the true mystics, they said.
“Dervishes. Well, a lot of them might just be traditional and cultural. A true Sufi would call himself Fakir. But a lot of this is tradition and a way of earning. True qalandars are true Sufies lost to the world. I wouldn’t think they are true mystics,” Sadia Dehlvi, who authored a book on Sufism, said. “The true Qalandars are all gone.”
The Urs itself has transformed over the years. For the old-timers, the Urs has now become a tourist must-watch thing after the shrine was included in the Lonely Planet list, Dehlvi said.
Dehlvi has been going to the two Urs – of Nizamuddin Auliya and Khusro – for more than two decades and recalls the days when only the devoted came to the shrine. The qawallis too were different.
“Now it feels like a concert. The qawalls sit in a semi-circle but the middle path is supposed to be kept free so the djinns can come and listen to the music,” she said. “All that stands diluted now. So many things have changed.”
But even though many have dismissed them as petty mendicants who reduce to cheap magic tricks to beg for alms, the fakirs are as much part of the tradition of Urs as is the qawalli.
People made way for them as they came in. For at the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
“The world comes here on Urs. The fakirs come, too,” he said. “But these days it is not the real Qalandars who were the high masters. They have the knowledge. The fakirs are a show. They resort to cheap tricks.”
They can’t ask the saint to cure ills, to mediate and fulfill wishes. That’s forbidden, he said.
Khwaja Hasan Saani Nizami, the hereditary keeper of the shrine, said the fakirs are not real Sufis. They are mad men because in Sufism, the boundaries are defined. Fakirs are deviant, he said.
But then, the fakirs scoff at these notions. Sufism, they say, is a
tradition. Saints are venerated and even sinners have a chance at redemption, the self-styled mystics said.
“Maybe we are sinners. But I have left all to be with God,” Islamuddin said. “At the Urs, we come to see our saint. He doesn’t despise us.”
As for the endurance tricks, he said they did it to show their devotion, to show the powers of the venerated saints, and to add to the Urs festivities.
“We go where the Urs is,” he said. “We have come from Kolkata, Mumbai, Uttar Pradesh, everywhere. The power of Urs brings us here.”
Such endurance tricks are not unique to the the Muslim fakirs. Many other sects practice such piercings. In the 1960s in the West, circuses started getting fakirs to perform piercing tricks in front of the crowds.
In Shia branch of Islam, on Muharram many followers mourn and commemorate the death of Imam Husayn ibn Ali , a grandson of Prophet Muhammad , and other family members in the Battle of Karbala. Flagellation is part of the mourning rituals.
However, the Fakirs don’t do it as mourning but as celebration of the supernatural powers of their saints and believe that by piercing and flagellation, they prove they are so lost to the faith that pain ceases to exist. They also claim it has been part of the Urs tradition for many centuries. While the Rifai fakirs indulge in piercing and other tricks, the Jalalis shackle themselves in heavy iron chains, which sometimes weigh as much as 70 kgs, Islamuddin, who claims to be a fakir in the Qadiri- Rifai Sufi order, said. At the shrine, nobody is shunned. All are welcome, Syed Kabiruddin Nizami, who claims to be a Sufi scholar and a descendant of Nizamuddin Auliya.
On Saturday, the fakirs walked to the Dargah with a shrowd of flowers, and offered to the Saint. And then, they smoked once again, sang qawallis and boarded the buses to return to where they came from.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
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.
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.
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