Like most South Delhi colonies, Panchshila park where I live, is seeing rapid construction. The old leafy houses are being demolished and three, sometimes four storey buildings are being constructed. Every morning, I walk past these houses, watching young men (and a few women) lifting the stone and gravel, knocking in bricks, carrying the sand. It’s frightfully cold — temperatures have plummeted in Delhi with Sunday being the coldest December in decades — but the work hasn’t stopped. For construction workers, there are no seasons, no periods of rest: you get paid only if you work.
This morning, I stopped to talk to them, my curiosity leading me to ask them which part of the country they came from. I met six construction workers, two were from Jharkhand, the rest from Bihar. They were wearing old sweaters, hardly enough to protect their bodies from the biting cold. They have been coming to Delhi for work for the last five years. ‘Gaon mein to kuch hai nahin,’ they told me. All were landless labourers. How much were they paid, I asked? ‘ we get Rs 250 per day plus chai and bread,’ one of them told me. They work almost every day in the month. When they collect enough, they go back to spend a few months in the village. And then return. I asked the main supervisor why the Rs 400 minimum wage wasn’t being paid here: he simply shrugged his shoulders and didn’t give me a clear answer. I asked the workers why they didn’t stay back in the village and avail of MNREGA wages. “My brother is in the village, I am in the city, he works there, I work in Delhi,” the youngest of the workers told me.
The conversation left several questions swimming in the mind: is there quite simply an east west divide in this country, where the poorer states of eastern India like Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bengal and Assam are simply providers of cheap labour to other parts of the country today? Has MNREGA been able to only partially stop the in migration into the city? Is there not greater supervision to ensure minimum wages are paid? And really, when will ‘ache din’ really come for those at the bottom of the pyramid? While we snuggle under warm blankets, think about these questions. And maybe seek answers from our decision makers who get paid in parliament even when they don’t work.
