Primitive Accumulation Proceeding Apace

 The Paschim Bharat Majdur Adhikar Manch reports -

This year Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan, a people’s organization active in South Western (Nimad) region of Madhya Pradesh has received several complaints from Bhil Adivasi workers of Barwani and Khargone districts who have gone to harvest sugarcane in Maharashtra and Karnataka. The workers were recruited by contractors of Beed district in Maharashtra, whose modus operandi is as follows: A sum of Rs 30,000 – 40,000 is advanced to an Adivasi family in the lean summer months and in return for this loan, the couple is required to work in harvesting and loading sugarcane from October for an unspecified period. Children also accompany their parents. With the worsening economic situation due to inflation, agricultural crisis and near collapse of the MNREGS, more and more Adivasi families are falling into this debt trap. Such cases have also been reported by other grass roots people’s organizations based in the area – Veer Khaja Nayak Manav Vikas Pratishthan in Sendhwa in Madhya Pradesh and Vichardhara Sansthan in Nandurbar, Maharashtra. All the three organizations are part of the Paschim Bharat Majdur Adhikar Manch, a network of trade unions and grass roots organizations that seeks to ensure labour and human rights for migrant Adivasi workers of Central India. The Adivasis now constitute the main agricultural work force in the black cotton soil region of peninsular India. 

The workers have now spent more than three months harvesting and loading sugarcane in conditions of practically slave labour. They do harvesting work for more than 10 hours from dawn to dusk and then they loadthe cane onto the transport vehicles till late at night, often working till 1 to 2 am at night, and are sometimes not even allowed enough time to eat their food properly. They thus work for 16-20 hours a day! They stay in tents of plastic sheets in the open fields. They have not been paid any wages and have been only given very inadequate sums of money or some grain for food and all workers are complaining of hunger. When the workers are asking for accounts of how much they are to be paid after the reconciliation of the loan advance they had taken, they are simply told that the advance amount has not been adjusted yet and they will have to work for many more months. When workers insist on “hisaab” (wage calculations) and say they want to go back, they are threatened and abused, and are told they can only return if they pay a few lakhs of Rupees to the contractor. On 16^th January, 2022, upon asking for “hisaab”, three members of a group in Belagavi in Karnataka had been held as “hostages” and locked up in the Nirani Sugar factory in Mudhol Bagalkot district for 6 days and were only released after the informal intervention of the Barwani district administration.

Pregnant women, women who have delivered a baby only a few days ago, those with injuries and children are also being made to work. Last month a group from district Khargone that escaped from Belagavi came back and reported that 3 women and 3 minor girls were repeatedly sexually assaulted by the contractors in the sugarcane fields. It was with great difficulty that an FIR was finally registered by Khargone police, but no action has been taken yet.

The situation of these workers is that of bonded labour according to the provisions of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976 and there is also blatant violation of the provisions of the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act (which requires licensing of contractors, registration of workers in both states, payment of minimum wages, provision of basic amenities and a passbook recording work and wages). This is also a case of trafficking as defined by section 370 and 374 of the Indian Penal Code, an atrocity under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, violation of the Contract Labour Act, Prohibition of Child Labour Act, Minimum Wages Act, Payment of Wages Act and many other labour laws. However, the authorities in both the source districts as well as the destination area are reluctant to take action.

While the Sangathan and other civil society activists in Karnataka have been demanding legal action, this is not being done, even in cases such as when the Barwani administration rescued workers from Vijayapura. In none of these cases has the proper procedure prescribed by the National Human Rights Commission for release of bonded laborers been followed. The released workers have to be provided a Release Certificate that entitles them to rehabilitation from the Government. The administration needs to provide an immediate relief amount and arrange for their return journey. In the latest case, the Belagavi district administration dumped a group of Adivasi families comprising 57 persons on the train to Solapur with the same contractor who was forcing them to work in bondage!! The workers had no money to even buy their food. They had to be rescued by civil society organisations and sent back to their homes from Solapur. The three organizations have currently received many complaints from groups of workers in Pune, Baramati, Kolhapur and Satara in Maharashtra and Bagalkot, Belagavi, and Kalburgi in Karnataka seeking release and return. Three of these groups for which data is available, comprise of 200 persons including women and children.

Sugar industry in peninsular India is organized very differently from North India. Majority of the sugar factories are owned by sugarcane farmers cooperatives. The leaders of sugar cooperatives control the politics of a state like Maharashtra and wield considerable influence in other states like Gujarat and Karnataka where the same pattern is prevalent. One major way in which sugar industry is organized differently is in the method of harvesting sugarcane. In North India, the farmers harvest the sugarcane in their fields and bring it to the factory gate. In cooperative factories of peninsular India, the factory takes responsibility of getting the sugarcane cut and transported to the factory. This requires humanpower on a large scale. Sugarcane harvesting is highly labour intensive. The sugarcane cooperatives have set up elaborate mechanisms to recruit cheap labour for harvesting work from remote areas. Workers are given advances that tie them up to work for the whole harvesting season at very low piece rates. The workers live in temporary hutments, often made of polythene and move from field to field harvesting sugarcane. The unit of work is a couple so children also migrate with their families. Camps of harvesting workers give the appearance of temporary villages from pre historic times. There are no facilities like electricity, drinking water and sanitation.

Bondage like work conditions for sugarcane harvesting work have made the news repeatedly over the last decade. Couple of years back, Beed district, the major source of sugarcane harvesting workers in Maharashtra was in the news with female workers being enticed to undergo the hysterectomy operation. The operation ensured that they continued to work uninterrupted in sugarcane harvesting, without pregnancy leading to work breaks (https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/07/31/a-slaughterhouse-for-wombs-district-beed-maharashtra). Centre for Labor Research and Action (CLRA), a labor rights NGO working in the state of Gujarat for more than a decade, wrote about bondage conditions prevalent amongst sugarcane harvesting workers of South Gujarat, where the workers are recruited against advances at usurious interest rates. One and a half times advance has to be paid back at the end of the season that works out to an almost five percent monthly interest rate (https://www.newsclick.in/sugarcane-harvesters-south-gujarat-are-trapped-bondage-one-generation-after-another).

The roots of the bondage lie in extremely low piece rates. To establish the energy consumed and time taken in harvesting one ton of sugarcane, CLRA sponsored a Time Motion study by Industrial Design Centre (IDC) of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The study report was submitted in the year 2019 (http://clra.in/files/documents/9f1d468e-b3e3-4a4b-8c88-ecaf295c2a2c.pdf). After intensive field studies, the study estimated the time taken to cut, bundle, and transport to the truck, one ton of sugarcane as 13.7 hours. Per day production for an eight-hour day for one person works out to be 0.58 ton. The minimum wage for sugarcane harvesting work was Rs. 238 per ton. Thus, per day wage for sugarcane harvesting workers turns out to be Rs. 138. This is 40 percent of the statutory minimum wage rate for agriculture workers in Gujarat that is Rs. 340. Similar situation prevails in states like Maharashtra and Karnataka. The workers’ union Majur Adhikar Manch has now filed a petition in the High Court of Gujarat demanding that the minimum piece rate wages be hiked to Rs. 586 per ton.

In the case of the Adivasi workers now stranded in Maharashtra and Karnataka, even the piece rate is not being invoked, they are simply informed that their debt has not been repaid yet! While debt bondage has been passed down since generations amongst the dalit and Adivasi workers of Central India engaged in sugarcane harvesting work, it is the first time that a large number of workers have raised their voice against this stark exploitation. Adivasis from several villages have started campaigning against this bondage in support of the victims. They are demanding strict legal action.  It is now the bounden duty of the state and civil society to ensure that one of the most vulnerable sections of the working class gets its due.

Nitin Varghese (7869090287), Jayshree (8889289196), Tatyaji Pawar (9421470711), Sudhir Katiyar (94141296542)

 

 

 

A Great Victory

The sad plight of workers in the vast unorganised sector where there is little enforcement of labour laws is well known. Even worse is the situation of the migrant workers who are increasingly constituting a higher and higher proportion of the unorganised labour force. One such set of migrant labourers are the seasonal workers engaged by the Sugar factories in South Gujarat for cutting sugar cane. Adivasi labourers from Maharashtra and Gujarat come in their lakhs at the end of the monsoons to cut sugarcane for the sugar factories. This has been going on for close to half a century now. There are labour contractors called Mukaddams engaged by the sugar factories who bring the labourers to the sugar cane fields to cut the sugar cane. Thus, the labourers do not have any direct contract with the sugar factories. Consequently, there is tremendous exploitation in terms of both low wages and inhospitable working and living conditions.

There have been several attempts over the years at organising this huge workforce numbering in lakhs of labourers but given the clout of the sugar mill owners nothing much has been achieved. Five years ago the Majur Adhikar Manch (MAM), head quartered in Ahmedabad, opened an office in Surat which is the main city in South Gujarat and the epicentre of the Sugar Mills. The MAM has been working to organise the unorganised and especially the migrant workers in Gujarat for over a decade and a half in the brick kilns, construction industry and agriculture. So five years ago they began organising the sugar cane workers also. However, due to the Mukaddam system, it is not possible to directly organise the workers and so the contractors also have to be involved in the process of making demands of the sugar mills. Since it is difficult to organise the workers at the place of work, MAM began extensive campaigning in the source areas well in advance of the start of the sugar cane cutting season which begins in October.

Here is what Sudhir Katyar, senior activist of the MAM, has to say about the initial mobilisation process started in 2015 - "In modern Indian history, Bardoli is famous as the site of a Gandhian agitation led by the redoubtable ‘Sardar’ Patel. Researchers of Marxist hues later wrote that while this famous satyagraha was being staged, the farm servants of the Patels, the halpatis, continued to eke out a precarious bonded existence on the very farms whose revenue was being disputed by the agitating farmers. In neo modern India, Bardoli is known as the largest market for second hand cars. The reason being the large number of NRI Patels who visit every year buying a new car and then leaving it behind. A large part of this prosperity owes to sugar cultivation. Bardoli has the larget sugar factory in South Gujarat. Denis, the Union team leader, remarked that the prosperity of Patels around Bardoli beats even the Kheda Patels. So to be able to have held a meeting in Bardoli town itself was a major achievement. The sugar factory management was ready. It was difficult to get a suitable venue for the meeting. The municipality kept postponing permission for the public ground till the last moment. The temple where an earlier meeting was held, gave a flimsy pretext for not giving their premises. Luckily the Union was able to get a hall nearby owned by a Medical Foundation. The factory supervisors kept a strict watch on the movement of workers and many workers who wanted to come were sent back by them. In the end some 250 workers and contractors (locally known as mukaddams) came for the meeting. While this was much below expectations, it still marked a significant movement forward. The meeting got good media coverage. Supporters also came from Surat city. The meeting deliberated the next action. However it was clear that there is need for much more mobilization before a decisive step like work stoppage can be contemplated. The biggest road block to work stoppage is the fact that the contractors who control the workers have lent huge amounts to workers and are fearful of losing this amount if there is work stoppage and workers go back". 

There were various ups and downs over the next four years till finally last year the MAM was able to get sufficient mobilisation work done in the source areas for it to be able to negotiate from there with the factory owners to tell them that they would not go for cutting sugar cane unless the piece rates were hiked. Since the factory managements did not accede to the demands the MAM called a strike. The strike went on for about 10 days but then the administration stepped in to assist the factory owners in breaking the strike. The Mukaddams could not sustain for long given the fact that they had leant huge sums to the workers and feared they would lose the money if work did not start. So the factory owners began sending trucks to bring those workers and Mukaddams who were weakening. The MAM tried to stop this by blocking the trucks but the police intervened and released the trucks. Thus, the strike had to be called off without getting an increase in piece rates for sugar cutting.

This year the mobilisation process began well in advance and received very good response from both the Mukaddams and workers. Meetings in the source areas were well attended and a charter of demands was drawn up and submitted to the factory owners and the administration asserting that unless these demands were met, the workers would boycott sugar cane cutting this year. Such was the strength of this mobilisation that the factory owners fearing a major disruption in the sugar cutting have decided to hike rates. Sudhir Katyar reports on this great victory - "Five years of struggle have paid fruit. Today cooperative factories of South Gujarat announced an increase in wage rate of Rs. 25 per ton for sugarcane harvesting workers and Rs. 5 per ton for their contractors. The impact means that nearly 2.5 lakhs tribal workers of Dang and Tapi districts of Gujarat and Dhule and Nandurbar districts of Maharashtra will receive an additional Rs. 60 crores in wages. The workers have been agitating for last five years under the banner of Majur Adhikar Manch. Last year, workers from Dang imposed a moratorium on migration in the beginning of the season, refusing to migrate for 10 days unless wages were hiked. The Union also gave a call for work stoppage in the middle of the season. The struggle shows that even in these difficult times, if workers unite they can win."

The most important thing in organising migrant workers is perseverence and the use of innovative strategy. The hard work put in over five years and the strategy of organising the workers in the source areas and negotiating with the factory owners from there has paid off in the end for a great victory. The field level organisers Denis Macwan and Shantilal Meena deserve special mention for sticking to their guns over such a long period of time. 

Invisible Labour

The passing of ordinances by a few states suspending the operation of labour laws in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic has led to a hue and cry. However, except for permanent employees in Government enterprises and departments and in a few private establishments, labour laws are only there on paper for 98% of the industrial and service sector workforce in this country who are contractually employed. This is because these workers are invisible. They are not there on the official rolls of either the principal employers or the contractors and sub-contractors. The moment workers are registered officially, even if they are contract workers, they become eligible for various benefits under the labour laws which pushes up the cost of labour for the employers substantially. Beginning with having to pay statutory minimum wages, the employers have to provide provident fund contributions, health insurance, transport and housing allowances. They also have to ensure proper working conditions as per the provisions of the Factories Act which too have a cost.
The Prayas Centre for Labour Research and Action, in Ahmedabad, which along with its sister organisation, Majoor Adhikar Manch, works for the rights of workers in Gujarat, conducted a survey of workers in the industrial areas in Kadi and Kalol talukas near Ahmedabad. The results of the survey reveal that -
i. The firms in which the respondents of the survey work are mostly doing fairly well as far as growth in income, profit after tax and balance sheet is concerned but they are not giving the benefit of this growth to their workers in the form of fair wages and other facilities.
ii. Most of the workers are not being paid minimum wages, given statutory benefits.
iii. Most of the workers are employed on contract either by the company itself or by contractors without any formal agreement.
iv. Union formation is actively discouraged by the employers and the administration and police side with the management in cases of strikes. So, there is considerable fear among the respondents that their jobs will be taken away if they organise. This is despite the fact that they are aware that they are being exploited by being given almost half the wages as compared to what they need to lead a dignified life.
v. Women are mostly in packaging jobs and are paid less than men. They do not get maternity leave and other statutory gender benefits.
Thus, Arvind Mills, which is an internationally renowned large textile company with its plant in Santej in the Kalol industrial area in Gujarat near Ahmedabad with annual income in 2019 of Rs 6645 crores and a profit after tax of Rs 199 crores, officially reported that it has 7486 employees but in reality it employs more than 15000. A substantial number of those on the official rolls are mostly managerial and accounts staff who are crucial to the running of the factory and the company. The workers on the shop floor are on its unofficial rolls without any official agreement even though they have worked for more than a decade and so are not officially declared as its employees. There was a strike in 2015 at the Santej factory against the heavy work load for the employees and the low wages they were being paid in violation of the statutory minimum wage norms. The strike was resolved with an agreement to reduce the workload and increase wages. However, once work started again, the workers who led the strike were dismissed and the agreement dishonoured. These workers are fighting cases against their dismissal in the labour court while the workers who are still employed are labouring as before under adverse working conditions and being paid low wages.  This is the case with many other big companies like Hitachi, Torrent, Adani etc which have their plants in this area. This is the situation throughout the country.
This invisibility increases even more with the migrant labourers. They are kept in colonies within the factory premises and they are not allowed to mingle with the local population. Thus, the CLRA and MAM activists found it near impossible to talk to these workers. The migrant labourers have been brought in, not because there is a shortage of local labourers, but because they are prepared to work for lower wages and are unlikely to unionise given their lack of local roots. Thus, the huge migrant labour work force which according to some estimates is around 100 million across India is strategically used by the employers to keep wages depressed. A right to information application filed with the government labour department for data on the workers employed in the area drew a blank response as the department said that they do not have any records since the industrial establishments were not filing the reports that they are mandated to do under various laws. Even though the laws empower the government to regulate the employers so as to ensure that the rights of workers are not compromised yet such is the power of the employers that the labour department does not carry out its responsibilities. 

This is what Marx had described as primitive accumulation. The blatant exploitation of labour in the early phase of capitalist development when not much skills were required to run the machines and there were a huge number of serfs being displaced from agriculture. While later the advance in technology required skilled labour and they were able to unionise to get many labour rights, further advancement in technology has meant that the number of skilled workers required has gone down drastically and the workers required for other ancillary activities can be employed on contract. This has resulted in the bottom falling out of worker's unions and they have become powerless. So only a very few workers are in official employment in accordance with labour laws and a huge number are on contract and invisible. 

The imposition of the lockdown immediately jeopardised the livelihoods of all these contract workers. The employers could easily see that their cash flows would be stopped while even in lockdown many expenses would continue and so they not only stopped paying this vast contract work force but also did not pay their pending wages to conserve their resources. They do not give a fig for the workers in normal course so it is only to be expected that they will care even less for their plight in a situation of lockdown. Neither are Governments, either at the Centre or the States concerned because they too have been colluding with the employers to promote primitive accumulation. The Governments' cash flows too have been adversely affected as a consequence of the lockdown and so they too are least interested in providing for the workers. 

The migrant workers have become visible because they have started going back to their homes but the much larger local work force still remains invisible and in dire straits. They too are hungry and penniless but since they are at home they are not visible to the world at large nobody is bothered about them. So even though Governments have now begun to do a little bit for the migrant labour because they have become visible, they are still mum about the rest of the work force. 

In the wake of the suffering of the migrants trying to return,  many people have asked why they were not better provided for? But no one is asking why the much larger local labour force is not being better provided for. The answer is that neither the employers nor the government are bothered to provide for labour whether migrant or local as any show of sympathy will hike up labour costs in future and hinder primitive accumulation. There is no shortage of labour and so if some of them suffer and die it wont affect the labour supply as others, who are impoverished will replace them. 

This government, like earlier governments since independence has shown scant regard for the poor whether in rural areas or in urban areas. Even the MGNREGS which is hailed as the world's largest employment programme has from the beginning been under funded. It just provides the minimum required to keep people above starvation. That has been the bottom line for governments in this country - keep people from starving but don't give them too much that the cost of labour goes up. Therefore, the lockdown has not been badly managed as the bleeding hearts are saying, it has on the contrary been perfectly managed to ensure that favourable conditions for primitive accumulation continue to prevail. 

The End of A Dream

One of the last bastions of Adivasi anarchism in Alirajpur has finally fallen!! Khodamba village which had been isolated in its hilly terrain without road and electricity connectivity is now on the road map of India thanks to the Prime Minister's Rural Roads Programme. Even though the last few kilometers to the village from Vakner village still require to be topped with macadam it is possible to drive to the village on the base of the road that has already been built. Last week I drove to the village in our Tata Safari to find that grid electricity had also finally reached the village. With this has come to an end the dreams that we in the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath had once had in the late 1980s of developing Khodamba as a liberated anarchist zone standing defiantly against the ravages of centralised capitalist development.
Three decades ago both we the activists, who had renounced modern development and the people of Khodamba village, who had not seen much of it and were instead sufferers of its negativities, pledged to develop the village as a bulwark against this development based on a mixture of Adivasi and theoretical anarchism!! Those were the days when we walked on foot, had no bank accounts, had no computers and rarely visited the towns and cities unless it was to hold some protest or rally. Once we walked seventy kilometers from the banks of the Narmada River to Alirajpur to organise a sit in.
Fighting the state as we were against its unjust forest laws and the forced displacement of people for the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River it was not long before we faced the hard hand of the state's repression and were summarily dumped into prisons time and again. This by itself was not very disconcerting but what followed was. We had to fight numerous cases, sometimes all the way up to the High and Supreme Court and this cost money. Also this continuous fight against repression distracted us from our efforts to build up an alternative anarchist economy based on sustainable agriculture and village industry.
So by the mid 1990s while the villagers of Khodamba began to migrate to Gujarat seasonally to work as agricultural and construction labourers to earn more money, we activists had to use computers to do consultancies for the very capitalist system that we so loathed to get funds to defray the increasing expenses of the organisation and in the process we got bank accounts, motorised vehicles and also began living in cities. All the utopian fervour of the early years of KMCS went up in the smoke of the capitalist onslaught what with the economy being opened up for neo-liberal development from the early 1990s.
Yet, I continued to harbour the dream that one day we would be able to develop our anarchist utopia in Khodamba and the villages nearby because they continued to be cut off from the mainstream due to lack of roads and electricity. However, over the years this dream was there only in my heart as the people of Khodamba slowly became enthusiastic votaries of the fruits of modern development. Possibly if I had stayed in Alirajpur we might still have swung it in a modified way. But residing as I did in Indore all of 250 kilometers away it was not possible to initiate decentralised rural development in Khodamba.
When I drove my car to the village the other day I found the people there very kicked that the road and electricity had reached Khodamba. They were enthusiastically making plans for irrigating their lands. Like many other villages in the area, the shallow aquifer does not have much water but the deep aquifer is abundant. Now that the road had reached their village they would be able to bring in a boring machine to sink deep tubewells and then draw water from them with submersible pumps run by electricity. Mobile connectivity is still not there but one can climb up on one of the many hills surrounding the village to get that also. There were not many people around in the village except the elder ones like the old war horse Inder Singh who had grown up along with me from youth to old age. All the young people had gone off to Gujarat to labour and earn money.
Coming back from the village all the memories of those heady years of the late 1980s crowded my mind. Many young people who would come to the KMCS as interns were sent to this village to teach the children there and we used to land up from time to time to see if everything was going alright or not. The walk through the hills from Vakner used to be very picturesque. The village itself was an idyllic heaven as shown in the picture below.

 All that is now gone with the wind of modern development. It is not long before the ugly box like modern brick and concrete architecture will come to dominate this idyllic scenario now that the road has reached the village. I had ofcourse left Alirajpur two decades back and become immersed in modern living in Indore despite my dreams but the people of Khodamba had perforce remained cut off from the mainstream and so fed my utopian dreams. Now justice has been done and they too are enjoying the benefits of modern connectivity!! 

Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

The Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath has fought many a battle for justice for the Adivasis of Alirajpur but possibly the most worthwhile and arduous one has been that it has fought for the victims of silicosis contracted as labourers in stone crushing factories in Gujarat. 90 per cent of the Adivasis of Alirajpur migrate to Gujarat to labour in factories, construction sites and agricultural fields as their agricultural income from their small farms is not sufficient to make ends meet. In the early 2000s the new millennium instead of ushering in a new dawn for the Adivasis brought on them a new pestilence of a fatal nature. The Adivasis working as daily wage labourers in stone crushing factories in Godhra and Balasinor in Gujarat, which were being run without proper equipment to ensure that the labourers did not inhale the dust generated from the stone crushing machines, began to fall fatally ill from silicosis due to the deposition of the fine stone particles in their lungs. Soon hundreds of labourers began falling ill and dying. Below is the picture of one such emaciated victim who has since died.

The KMCS took up the issue first with the Government of Madhya Pradesh and then with the Government of Gujarat. There was a furore and some regulation began of these killer factories but both the Governments were silent about compensation for those maimed and killed by silicosis.
The KMCS then took the battle further afield and contacted other organisations who were active in fighting to end the scourge of silicosis among stone crusher workers across India as this is a rampant phenomenon. It turned out that the Government of India and the state and central pollution control boards too were apathetic to the plight of the labourers affected by Silicosis. After five long years of campaigning it was decided to seek legal redress and a writ petition was filed in the Supreme Court of India in which KMCS was a petitioner along with other organisations seeking justice for the victims of silicosis across the country. The Supreme Court made this case W.P. (Civil) 110 of 2006 a test case for ensuring justice in the area of occupational health and especially the virulent neglect by the Government of the plight of victims of Silicosis. Many human rights lawyers of repute like Prashant Bhushan and Colin Gonsalves appeared for the petitioners. The Supreme Court after hearing all parties ordered the National Human Rights Commission to conduct a detailed enquiry into the situation of the victims of silicosis in Alirajpur and Jhabua districts. The KMCS as a petitioner played an active role in facilitating this enquiry on the ground.
The NHRC, after conducting the study, issued a recommendation in November 2010 that the Gujarat Government should pay a compensation of Rs 3,00,000 to the kin of each of the 238 Bhil tribals from Jhabua and Alirajpur districts who had died due to silicosis contracted while working in stone crusher units in Gujarat. However, the Gujarat Government after initial dilly dallying sent notices to the kin of the deceased that their complaints had been registered under the ESI Act and that they should come with all documents to the designated court to fight the case for compensation. This was in gross violation of the original basis of the Supreme Court order to the NHRC. The Supreme Court had reasoned that it was a gross dereliction of duty on the part of the Gujarat Government not to have regulated the stone crusher units, as it should have under the law and so it had a moral responsibility to compensate the kin of the illiterate and poor tribals who had died due to this governmental negligence. The NHRC then went back to the Supreme Court saying that the Gujarat Government was refusing to comply with its recommendations. A delegation from the KMCS also visited the Labour Secretary in Ahmedabad requesting him to comply with the NHRC recommendations but they too were fobbed off with the plea that the government had registered cases in the courts and that the victims should seek redressal there.
The NHRC had also recommended that the Madhya Pradesh Government should design and implement a rehabilitation package for the 304 tribals who are affected with silicosis but are still alive. The MP Government too did not comply in spirit with this recommendation by giving the affected Adivasis a special rehabilitation package and instead listed the benefits given to some of these Adivasis under ongoing social welfare schemes as its rehabilitation package.
Finally, on 3.5.2016, the Supreme Court passed an order directing the Government of Gujarat to pay Rs 3 lakhs to the kin of each of the victims identified by the NHRC without delay and report to it about action taken within a month.
Thus, after a decade long battle, finally the Adivasis will get some relief but it is a pyrrhic victory. If it was not for the mediation of the KMCS and other organisations across the country and pleading by noted human rights lawyers even this would not have been possible. Coming as it does after such a long delay primarily due to the fact that the Supreme Court is burdened with innumerable cases and given the intransigence of the Government of Gujarat, this relief has more symbolic than material value. Certainly something is very rotten in the State of India.

The Crisis of Modern Agriculture in Historical Perspective and the Way Ahead

Understanding the current crisis of agriculture, requires a study of the history of global development since the second world war. Initially, immediately after the war, the USA was faced with the problem of reorienting the production of its massive war oriented industry and agriculture. This was done on the one hand by making civilian cars, trucks, tractors, planes and cargo ships instead of armoured vehicles and on the other by transforming the explosive manufacturing units into fertiliser and pesticide producing units. Obviously so many cars, tractors, planes and ships and so much fertiliser and pesticide could not be consumed by the Americans alone and so the high flying consumerist lifestyle of cars and private jets and heavy eating of processed meat and cereals was spread all over the world and a market created for these products. Cattle can eat much more cereals than human beings and so the people of the developed world were encouraged to eat the meat of the former and the people of the poorer countries were fed the excess cereals resulting from increased use of fertilisers and pesticides along with the cattle.  A significant development was the worldwide adoption of soybean at the behest of the Americans who pushed its exports and cultivation through cheap aid to developing countries so as to provide cheap feed for beef production and also cheap edible oil for processing this food into ready to eat marketable forms. Thus an artificially highly productive and environmentally unsustainable agricultural system was established worldwide backed by massive state subsidies. A golden era of capitalist development, booming on the production and sale of the "world car" and the "world steer" by multinational corporations (MNCs), ensued in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.

The party came to an end in the nineteen seventies with a double whammy being delivered by nature. Firstly the biologist Rachel Carson sounded the first warning cry in 1962 about the way in which chemicals and especially pesticides were causing immense environmental and health hazards thus sparking off the modern environmental movement and seriously questioning the excessive gorging of the world steer. The tremendous groundswell of protests that followed led to the problem of environmental pollution resulting from modern development becoming a burning issue by the early nineteen seventies with the holding of the first United Nations Conference on Environment in Stockholm in 1972. Secondly the finiteness of the natural resources that were being so wantonly used up was driven home with the Arab crude oil producing countries increasing its price by a whopping four times in 1974 thus pushing the capitalist world economy into a deep recession by undermining the very basis of the world car. 

Faced with the serious economic and environmental crisis brought on in the nineteen seventies the MNCs which straddle global production, finance and trade put pressure on the US Government, the World Bank and the IMF to push a policy, known as the "Washington Consensus" that would further open up the economies of the developing countries to exploitation through free flows of finance and commodities, which has plunged most of these economies further into debt and stagnation.

All this has had a devastating effect on Indian agriculture and the millions of people who are dependent on it for their livelihoods. The vast majority of farmers in India cultivate small plots of land on terrain that is unsuitable for flood irrigation and they have traditionally been driven by the desire to produce for subsistence rather than for profit. They have over thousands of years developed a system of agriculture that makes the most of the locally available resources in terms of seeds, organic fertilisers, soil moisture and natural pest management. This led Sir Albert Howard, the pioneer of modern organic farming who did most of his work in Indore, to remark some seventy years ago, “What is happening today in the small fields of India ... took place many centuries ago. The agricultural practices of the orient have passed the supreme test, they are as permanent as those of the primeval forest, of the prairie, or of the ocean”. The clever use of rotation of a bewildering variety of crops ensured that despite flood and drought some part of the harvest was always saved. Famines occurred not because of the failure of agriculture but because of socio-economic factors such as excessive levies by kings and colonial rulers or due to usury and hoarding by moneylenders. Indeed the levying of excessive taxes and usury have been a severe constraining factor on the development of agriculture all over the world from ancient times and in India this intensified greatly during colonial rule because the moneylender doubled up as the tax-collector also, resulting in one Bhili proverb that goes - " I love the moneylender so much that I have given him a fat belly".

Thus, what was necessary after independence in India was to remove the obstacles in the path of development of this traditional agriculture and strengthen it with further research, extensive land reforms, support for in situ soil and water conservation, cheap institutionalised credit and market support. Studies have shown that the indigenous agricultural practices of India, which have been honed by farmers over the centuries, are as productive as the HYV seeds and artificial input based green revolution agriculture. But this was not to be because the Americans had in the meanwhile since the nineteen thirties devised a new model of industrial agriculture in which hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, big dam irrigation and machines were used to ramp up agricultural production with huge state subsidies which eventually went to the corporations which not only supplied these inputs but also owned most of the farms and traded in the outputs. So farm gate prices remained low leaving the actual small farmers who had always struggled against usury like elsewhere in the world no alternative but to gradually sell out and become unemployed, leading to tremendous destitution. Moreover, the post World War II urgency to sell the excess production of fertilisers, pesticides, tractors and trucks arising from the reorientation of production in plants from explosives and armoured vehicles necessitated the replication of the American agricultural system worldwide.

So at the behest of the research foundations set up by American MNCs and with financial support provided by the World Bank and the money from the exports of American wheat to India which were recycled for this purpose, the American agricultural pattern was promoted with the introduction of foreign hybrid varieties of wheat and rice as green revolution agriculture in the late nineteen sixties in a few pockets in the country leaving the other areas literally high and dry. The Americans forced the Indian government to forcibly sideline Indian agricultural scientists who had developed indigenous strains and opposed this introduction of foreign hybrids. This form of agriculture has now become problematical throughout the world because of reasons to be discussed a little later and can be continued only through the provision of massive state subsidies to the MNCs that produce its inputs and trade in its outputs. The direct government subsidy to agriculture in the USA peaked in the year 2000 to US$ 30 billion and constituted about 40% of the net cash income derived by it. The biggest 10% of the recipients of these state subsidies, which are big corporations, which included billionaires like the media mogul Ted Turner, cornered 65% of this huge amount. Somewhat in the same way as our own movie star Amitabh Bacchan has got himself recorded as a farmer to be able to own large tracts of agricultural land that he does not himself cultivate. A less dramatic but similar state of affairs prevails in Europe. In this way the comparative advantage that the third world countries have in the agricultural sector is not only neutralised but the excess production thus achieved is dumped in those countries devastating their agriculture. In fact the current Doha round of trade negotiations of the WTO has brought out as never before the hollowness and hypocrisy of the WTO’s claims of promoting “free trade” and it is deadlocked at the moment because the developed countries are refusing to reduce these subsidies.

According to an estimate the input subsidies in India’s case had reached the unsustainable level of 164.02% of the central government’s planned annual expenditure on agriculture by 1992 . When the subsidy that was being given in the form of free electricity and free water from dams and for the procurement of the produce of the farmers at artificially supported high prices is also taken into account the long-term economic un-sustainability of this agriculture was inevitable. Unlike in the USA, a greater proportion of the subsidies in India were going to the actual farmers big and small. The pursuit of economic liberalisation from the nineteen nineties and financial constraints, forced the Indian Government to drastically reduce the quantum of subsidies in agriculture, investment in irrigation, price support and budgetary support for cheap institutional credit to the farmers. This withdrawal of support came precisely at the time when green revolution agriculture was beginning to fail. The main problem with artificial input agriculture is that there is a natural limit to the artificial inputs that the soil can take and so the amount of fertilisers, pesticides and water to be applied goes on increasing while the yields go on falling and sometimes the crop fails altogether. Consequently the economic costs go on increasing while the realisation of the value of agricultural products in the market does not keep pace. Inevitably this leads to farmers falling into the clutches of moneylenders and spiralling debt. The crisis has now assumed serious proportions with thousands upon thousands of farmers having committed suicides, sold their lands, houses and even their kidneys . Things have come to such a sorry pass that forty percent of the respondent farmers expressed the desire to give up farming and take up other professions in a survey conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation of the Government of India in 2003.

This collapse of the agricultural sector, not only in India but also all over the developing world, has created a parallel problem of massive seasonal or permanent migration from the rural areas to the cities which offer comparatively better livelihood opportunities due to the greater investments taking place there. However, once there, these migrants occupy the base of the occupational pyramid earning only subsistence wages. So even after working for a considerable time, these people cannot afford to buy legal accommodation and other civic amenities and so have to live in illegal slums without proper drinking water and sanitation facilities continually under the threat of eviction. Given the severe lack of resources with governments for the provision of proper infrastructure in these slums and the pressures from private property developers to displace them and build high value buildings instead, urban sustainability has become the newest challenge for development planners. In the developed countries on the other hand there is the problem of inner city decay as regular manufacturing jobs are decreasing due to the shift of manufacture from these countries to the developing countries, leaving the once comfortable working class in dire straits doing casual menial jobs for a living and unable to maintain their homes any more. The affluent people are moving out of the cities to the suburbs thus reducing the tax base of urban governments and their capacity to renew the inner city areas.  So the movement of capital is creating problems in both the rural as well as the urban areas all over the world by changing the structure of the global economy in ways that harm the poor.

The tremendous economic and political power of MNCs like Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Dow and Bayer, which are directly or indirectly in control of the input industries, the agricultural processing industry and marketing entities that make up the agriculture cum food chain has meant that instead of turning to more sustainable agricultural practices the crisis in modern agriculture is being sought to be solved through the application of even higher and far more costly bio-technology. This involves further state subsidies given the higher levels of funding required for the expensive research and application techniques involved and also uncharted environmental dangers resulting from gene tampering. The American MNCs' maniacal obsession with promoting more and more beef eating worldwide as the panacea for the ills of the inevitable market slumps that hound capitalism has now manifested itself in the development of genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormones to push up beef production which has driven the cows also mad! The continuing loss of natural bio-diversity, the concentration of genes of landraces in the hands of MNCs and patenting of life forms by them have together created a serious danger of the future of the planet being permanently mortgaged to their greed for profits.

While the Americans have become obese from this over consumption of beef and are suffering from a number of physical and mental disorders as a result, the Bhil adivasis in Madhya Pradesh have become proportionately under nourished so as to be able to provide for this overeating of the former. With the reduction in the acreage under coarser cereals and pulses which have been replaced by soybean and the greater monetisation of the rural economy, the marginal adivasi farmers have had to buy their food from the market instead of getting it cheaply from their farms and this has reduced their nutritional levels well below healthy standards. Thus, they have become sufferers of the problem of chronic hunger that today engulfs the poor in much of the developing world and even in the developed countries because the shrinking of livelihood opportunities has meant that they are not able to earn enough to buy wholesome and adequate food. So the supply of cheap food to all, which is a basic requirement of running a capitalist economy is in jeopardy because nature has been ravaged beyond repair by the artificial input based agriculture for profit that has been intensively practised since the Second World War.

The biggest problem arising from the adoption of green revolution agriculture, however, has been that of the increasing scarcity of water. Most of the water needed for irrigation in India is being provided by groundwater extraction and this has led to a situation of "water mining" wherein water collected in the deep confined aquifers over hundreds of thousands of years were used up in the space of a decade and large parts of the country have been facing a ground water drought from the nineteen nineties onwards. Since then there has been less and less ground water available for not only irrigation but also for drinking and the cost of its extraction is continually going up. Big dams, however, are the environmentally and socially most harmful component of the green revolution package and have come in for serious criticism in recent years and dam construction has been totally halted in the developed countries with some dams even having been broken in the USA to limit environmental damage. The World Bank, which has been a major funder of dams worldwide, was forced by public criticism arising from the fiasco of its funding of the Sardar Sarovar Dam to constitute a World Commission on Dams (WCD) to review the performance of big dams, which has submitted a comprehensive report. The report brings out the fact that the benefits in terms of irrigation and power gained from big dam construction have been at an unacceptable and unnecessary higher cost in terms of environmental destruction and human displacement. There has been lack of equity in both the distribution of benefits and costs with the poor having lost out on both counts. Considering the increasing importance of conservation and harvesting of water resources, the WCD has recommended that in future, people’s participation in these processes should be made mandatory so that more effective and less harmful solutions to the problems in this sphere can be worked out.

Worldwide there is a burgeoning movement in ecological farming combined with local area watershed development that has come up as a reaction to the deleterious effects of modern agriculture. This movement is theoretically underpinned by the green ideology of development in harmony with nature and at its own leisurely pace. Many localised efforts have thrown up viable solutions to the intransigent problems created by unsustainable agricultural production and inequity in the distribution of benefits and costs of water resource development. In the western Madhya Pradesh region, too, there have been successful localised experiments in this sphere and a blueprint for the development of sustainable dry-land agriculture backed up by local area watershed development involving the poor in project formulation and implementation has been drawn up. Thus, the comprehensive decentralised solutions to the problems of agricultural sustainability and the resulting threat to food and livelihood security of the poor are there, waiting to be adopted on a large scale. However, the World Bank acting as a front for the interests of the MNCs, sees decentralised natural resource management only as a tool for the mitigation of the harmful effects of globalised industrial development and participatory group formation as a means of deflecting the discontent arising from this. Given its near total hegemony over development thinking it is not surprising that governments and institutions all over the world follow its lead in not questioning the centrality of capitalist industrial development and only pursue decentralisation and sustainable development as a safety valve to let off the steam that is continually boiling up as a result of the former and not as a mainstream holistic solution to the problems of unsustainable industrial development.

The net result of this massive propaganda and funding by the World Bank and the central and state governments of a revamped version of green revolution agriculture has been that the ordinary farmers in this country are unable to pursue more sustainable agricultural alternatives as the switch from the one to the other takes time and money. The ground reality in the western Madhya Pradesh region is that farmers are still trying to continue in the green revolution regime and diversifying into the farming of fruits, horticulture and other cash crops and then storing the produce in cold storages with the intention of trading through the national commodity exchange but as yet with uncertain incomes because increasingly the agricultural produce market is coming under the control of global MNCs and even financial institutions like Goldman Sachs.

To break this destructive march towards environmental and social collapse it is necessary to proceed towards an “economy of permanence” as suggested by the Gandhian economist Kumarappa, which respects both nature and the human being and prioritises leisurely decentralised communitarian living based on the collective local consumption and husbanding of renewable resources over the frenetic, non-renewable, resource guzzling pulls of globalised market led industrialisation. This can provide the rural poor with sustainable livelihood opportunities for wholesome living while at the same time reorienting centralised industrialisation to the fulfilling of the needs of the majority and so deciding the kind of science and technology to be pursued. This will in turn ensure a much more peaceful world than at present and obviate the heavy and wasteful expenditures being incurred worldwide on the military and the police. 

Dahelibai

Recently a Phd student did a preliminary study of the areas of influence of the Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath in Alirajpur to see what made small mass organisations like this tick. As an initial exercise she did some interviews with some of the veteran grassroots fighters of the KMCS. The foremost among these is Dahelibai of Attha village who is seen below leading a rally of the KMCS in Alirajpur even though now she is close to seventy years of age.

Dahelibai and her husband Lalia were landless in the late 1970s because they had been prevented from cultivating their ancestral land by the Forest Department after the area was declared to be a Reserved Forest under the provisions of the Indian Forest Act 1927 which had a colonial vintage having been carried over after independence instead of being abrogated. Since the Attha village was in the Mathwar princely state before independence, there were no land records and no demarcation of forests as elsewhere in British India where the Indian Forest Act and the Land Revenue Code used to prevail. However, after independence gradually all the princely state areas in Madhya Pradesh were assimilated into the modified British Indian system and in the process many tribals across India were dispossessed of the lands they were cultivating. Daheli and many other Bhil tribals in Alirajpur too suffered the same fate. Since they could not survive without cultivating land they did it by bribing the forest department officials and often had to bear severe beatings also.
By the early 1980s things got very difficult as the bribes and the beatings increased manifold and it became almost impossible to exist. On one occasion Daheli's husband Lalia was so severely beaten up that he bled from his anus for days on end and could not get up from bed. Then in 1983 Khemla Aujnaharia, a Bhil tribal activist who had fought many battles against the police and the forest department in Alirajpur was invited along with some non-tribal activists who were working with him to come and help the Mathwar tribals. Thus began the struggle against the forest department which later evolved into the KMCS.
Daheli led from the front in this struggle. She mobilised the women of Attha and they went and confronted the Forest Department staff when they came to beat their men. She led other women to come out of their homes and go to Alirajpur to participate in rallies and dharnas to highlight the oppression of the forest department. These struggles along with that of many other tribal people across the country finally resulted in the Forest Rights Act coming into force in 2007 and now the tribals in Alirajpur have legal title to their land.
Daheli has not only fought the State for her rights but has also mobilised the women of her village to protect the forests. They regularly go out on patrols to guard the forest as shown below. The forest is now lush green and since other villages in the watershed have also followed this practice, the stream running through the village has become perennial.

  Daheli is not content with just protecting the forest but has been a driving force behind soil and water conservation also. She has been instrumental in the revival of the traditional labour pooling custom of Dhas in which people get together and work on each others' fields to do agricultural work. Many stone bunds and gully plugs have been built to conserve soil and water and create more agricultural land as shown below.

Even though both KMCS and Dahelibai have lost a considerable amount of their militant dynamism of the early years, the fire continues to burn in both. Those initial struggles have ensured that the people these days lead much more secure lives and they are mostly in control of their village resources. Also by migrating to labour in Gujarat off and on they are able to earn extra income which results in cash in their hands and better food, clothing and housing. But this is not the only things we had in mind when we started fighting all those years ago. Daheli and all the rest of us had dreamed of tribal self rule. However, that has remained a distant dream due to the increasing power of capitalism. We need many more Dahelibais among the new generation now for that dream to be realised.

Celebration of Forests, Celebration of Life, Celebration of the Dignity of Labour

Now that the hurly burly of elections is over in Madhya Pradesh we can concentrate on what we do best at Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath in Alirajpur - celebrate nature and the indigenous identity. Every year the KMCS organises a big get together running into thousands of people to celebrate the beauty of nature and the greatness of the traditional nature loving culture of the Bhils. This year too the "Jungle Mela" will be held in Chilakda village on the banks of the River Narmada on the 13th of May 2014. There will be night long festivities in which the show piece is going to be the enactment of the "Savang" a musical comedy in which the life current life and times of the Bhils is portrayed through dance, song and drama.
The KMCS over the years has promoted the conservation of forests in the villages in which it is entrenched and some of the densest forests in Alirajpur are in these villages as shown in the picture below in which the women of Attha are seen out on a patrol through their protected forest -

The organisation has also promoted the conservation of soil and water through field bundings that have improved the productivity of the farms as shown below -

There is a very close link between the natural resource and agriculture based lifestyle of the Bhils and their cultural events. A major cultural event is the celebration of the Indal during which a family prays to the God Kansari who symbolises the staple cereal Jowar or Sorghum thanking her for her munificence and also hoping that her bounty will continue in future. The whole community congregates during these celebrations to sing and dance and feast and the whole cost is borne by the family. This was the traditional means of ensuring that surpluses were not accumulated leading to class differentiation within the society. The centrepiece of the Indal celebration is the night long singing of the Gayana in which the Gayan or bard along with his co-singers sing the story of Kansari as shown in the picture below.

The Bhils have traditionally lived away from the market economy and have had very little money. Consequently they have had to rely on community labour pooling systems to do all the work on their farms and their houses. This custom of labour pooling is called Dhas and it is from this that the sister organisation of the KMCS, the trust Dhas Gramin Vikas Kendra takes its name. The picture below shows a group of people taking part in a dhas to repair the tiles on the roof of one member of the community.

The market economy, however, is too strong and so it has now penetrated the lives of the Bhils in a big way as they have to migrate to far away places to labour and augment their meagre agricultural incomes. Thus, presently they are as much wage labourers as agriculturists as shown in the picture below.

They do not have much money even after such hard labour and so have to travel by the cheapest of means in overcrowded jeeps while going to labour seasonally as shown below.

Despite all these troubles the Bhils still retain their zest for life and take pleasure in promoting their unique culture. They have even developed new songs of protest and revival that they sing during special celebrations like the Jungle Mela as shown below -

Thus, the Jungle Mela is a celebration of a decentralised, communitarian, nature friendly lifestyle which gives importance to the dignity of labour as both nature and labour are intricately entwined in the collectively lived lives of the Bhils from which humanity has a lot to learn if it is to survive the present profit centred profligacy. 

More About Impunity

Sudhir Katyar of the Int Bhatta Mazdoor Union in Gujarat, which is fighting for justice for the mostly dalit migrant labourers who work under conditions of bondage in brick kilns there, has sent in a note which further underlines the impunity with which capitalists and their lackeys in the government and administration continue to oppress the poor and disempowered -

Price of freedom in Kakosi

Brick kiln owners in Kakosi area of Patan district have been protesting against police, their own workers, and the Int Bhatta Majdorr Union for last two days. This is a historic first. Normally in most workers’ struggle, the police is accused of oppressing workers. Here it is the employers who are complaining of police harassment. This strange happening can be understood if we look at the modus operandi of a single case of Durga Ram.

Durga Ram belongs to Bavri caste, one of the Scheduled Castes. He comes from Pailkal village in District Nagore. Durga Ram along with a group of 12 families, came to work in the SK brick kiln of Dinesh bhai Prajapati around Kakosi village. The agreement signed by the labor contractor (attached with this report) said that the workers will be paid the rate declared by Mahesana and Kakosi association. Normally the wage rate for the season is declared during the mid season around Uttarain in brick kiln industry. At around this time, workers often stop working asking the owners to declare the wage rate for the season. The system of payment is that the workers take an initial advance, get paid subsistence allowance every week, and final wages are settled at the end of the season. This year too, the Mahesana workers went on strike in first week of February. The Mahesana owners declared a wage rate of Rs. 390 per 1000 bricks after three days of strike.

The Kakosi workers also stopped working sporadically around this time. They demanded the Mahesana rate. However the Kakosi owners declared a rate of Rs. 330 per 1000 bricks. This was not accepted by the workers who intensified the strike. As owners refused to budge, the workers decided to leave the kilns. On 15^th February, two groups of workers filed application with SDO Patan under Bonded Labor Act. On 17^thFebruary, a group of 101 workers filed an application at the Kakosi PS seeking release from illegal confinement. Durga Ram and his group also decided to leave. By this time they had made 11. 5 lakh bricks. The owner resisted the move. He calculated the value of work done at Rs. 290 per 1000 bricks. This was the wage rate two years back i.e. in 2009. He calculated an outstanding amount of Rs. 51,950 after deducting advance and subsistence allowance. However if the wages are to be calculated at the wage rate of Rs. 390, the owner needs to pay the workers Rs. 1.09 lakhs.

Durga Ram finally approached another brick kiln owner in neighboring Mahesana district who agreed to give him advance against a wage rate of Rs. 420 per 1000 bricks. On 19^th January, he made arrangements to leave and got a truck to load his belongings that included even goats. He contacted the Union and informed of his plan. The Union asked him not to make any payment. By this time the truck was loaded. The owner did not allow the truck to leave the premises. The Union asked the Kakosi Police for help. The police reached the site but did not facilitate release of Durga Ram and his group. It merely took statements and came back. The Union in the meantime had a meeting with the District Superintendent Police Patan district. The DSP was convinced that these cases fall in the category of illegal confinement and asked the Kakosi police to help release workers who want to go home. By this time it was getting late. The brick kiln owner mobilized all the owners in the area. There was a crowd of 500 people surrounding the truck and threatening violence. The children and women started crying. So even as a police party was rushed again to the brick kiln, Durga Ram paid Rs. 51, 950 and made his escape. This was the price of his freedom.

The Kakosi police visited three more kilns the next day, SB, Ekta, and RBC from where complaints had come in. The owners put up a stiff resistance. Not a single worker was allowed to leave. Instead the owners are demonstrating at the Police Station in defense of their right to keep workers bonded and force them to work. They are being extended support by other brick manufacturers. Durga Ram and his group are not alone. Such sums amounting to lakhs of Rupees have been extracted from three more groups. In fact every year, a large number of groups of workers are forced with situations like this, and have to pay up money even after having sweated for six months or more.

The Bonded Labor Act was passed in 1976 for exactly situation like this. It promulgated that no worker can be forced to work against an advance. Such debt is null and void. Confinement of any person is illegal even under sections of IPC. The Union had approached the High Court of Gujarat last year. It too asked the administration to release the workers and send them home. However it seems that Kakosi is part of another world.

  

A Costly Lesson

The Prayas Centre for Labour Research and Action (PCLRA) has initiated a process of organising the migrant workers in brick kilns in and around Ahmedabad to fight for better working conditions including the payment of minimum wages. They recently undertook a strike in the month of January and here is an excerpt from a preliminary report by PCLRA about what happened -
"Nearly 50,000 workers of 300 brick kilns spread over Central and North Gujarat went on a strike on January 14, 2010, seeking enhanced wages, regularization of terms of employment and improvement in working conditions. The significance of the action can be estimated by the fact that workers are divided across categories of work (paatla workers preparing the bricks from the mud, kharkan workers, bharai workers who load the baked bricks onto the trucks for transportation, nikasi workers who take out the bricks from the kil and the jalaiya workers who arrange the bricks in the kiln for baking) and state of origin (Chhattisgargh, Rajasthan, UP, Gujarat, Maharashtra). While there exists a history of collective bargaining in the brick kilns of Gujarat, this has been confined to specific work types/brick kilns and has been mostly contractor led. For the first time, workers across all categories of work and all states struck work together. The massive strike did not last long. The employers adopted a hard line, preferring to sustain losses rather than negotiate with a new Union. The strike started losing momentum in the second week itself and by the end of the second week, most workers had resumed work. Employers announced wage hikes for some sections of workers. However there has been nothing for paatla workers who form up to 60% of the workforce."
As always it is primarily the non-functioning of the state agencies responsible for ensuring that labour laws are implemented that is to be blamed for the failure of the strike. From past experience this was to be expected. Thus from the outset the strike was to be a straight battle between the brick workers' union and the brick kiln owners' association. On top of this the brick kiln owners' association by virtue of its political connections with the ruling government whose election expenses it had funded was starting with an advantage. While the labourers were starting with a serious disadvantage in that they did not have economic staying power given the fact that they were dependent on the kiln owners giving them the weekly subsistence payment called "kharchi" to be able to survive. The clamping down of preventive provisions by the administration, use of the police and goons to repress workers and activists and the refusal to give kharchi together proved a fatal cocktail for the strike. Matters were compounded by the fact that the press coverage was scanty.
Not only were some of the demands unrealistic as stated by the PCLRA in its early analysis of the failure but so also was the strike itself. There was an inadequate assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the contending adversaries. Now the two main options being thought of by PCLRA too are fraught with problems. The option of bargaining at source areas itself by the workers before coming to the kilns in Gujarat will not yield much because various kinds of stratagems will be used by the brick kiln owners to buy off powerful sections in the source areas. After all it is much cheaper to buy off a political agent than to increase the daily wages of thousands of workers. The second option of legal cases in the higher courts also do not yield much in the end. The KMCS along with others has been fighting for compensation for those migrant workers who have died due to silicosis from working in stone crushing units in Gujarat but even after more than five years and a judgment in their favour from the Supreme Court nothing concrete has materialised.
Thus there is a need to devise realistic action programmes instead of getting carried away by emotions and the funding support of institutional donors. So even if the strike was a historic one in that fifty thousand workers took part in it spread over a large area and thus through it they showed a higher level of political consciousness than earlier, nevertheless more thought should have been given before undertaking it. The costly lesson learned is that the state is not going to tolerate unionism that can come in the way of capitalist economic growth. This lesson has already been given many times before to trade unions by the state and there was no need to take it again! The way forward is going to be more difficult now.

Timelessness of Childhood

The current obsession with earning money has robbed most of us of the leisure of biding our time. Even the Bhils of Alirajpur who were traditionally a very laid back set of people, these days have their calendars all tied up. They are either working on their own small farms or migrating to Gujarat to work on the farms of other big land holders or on construction sites. So much so that even their happy go lucky festivals these days have become short affairs to which they come in droves from work to relax rather than to extend their leisure as in the past. The biggest sufferers of course are the children. Children love to play and even when they are working they convert the work into play as in the picture below. These Bhil children have collected a weed that grows wild on the banks of streams in the monsoons to feed to their buffaloes which produce more milk as a result. But obviously they have enjoyed the work by converting into play.

The girls are in the school uniform of white shirts and blue skirts which means they study also. Unfortunately the education that they get in the government school which they attend is not at all as entertaining as their work. Whereas the work is not only entertaining but it also ensures that their household runs. Consequently their education is more holistic and they will grow up to be people who will still have some inclination for savouring time rather than measuring it.
In fact not only time but also all the resources are being measured today. There was a time when there was enough green fodder for there to be no need for collecting fodder from the stream. But now the fodder from the fields has become scarce and is a commodity that is sold on the market. So these poor children have to go searching for free fodder as their families cannot afford the expensive cotton oil cake fodder that is available in the market.
This is important because in the present brouhaha over restriction of greenhouse gas emissions it is being forgotten that it is not just pollution that is a threat but also consumption. Many feel that if clean energy can be produced then all our problems will end. However, the clean energy will still require immense amounts of resources to work on and that is leading to shortages of all kinds of resources and also shortage of time and human feelings. Anybody who idles his time or spends time in activities that do not produce monetary wealth is looked upon as a fool. This is in fact something that has struck at the very roots of the tribal world view by dubbing them as fools who are not fit to be part of human society.
Common property resources like common lands, forests and water courses and bodies are best protected and conserved through communitarian cooperation. Even agriculture is most productive when practised in a communitarian manner. Because agriculture is their lifeline the Bhils had developed a system of labour pooling that helped them to undertake the labour intensive work of weeding very easily. By turns the whole hamlet would weed in each other's farms and reduce the burden of work and ensure productivity. One of the major achievements of the KMCS has been to revive this system as seen in the picture below where such a line of communitarian weeders are at work.

In fact the Bhils had labour pooling customs for natural resource management and other activities like house building also. However, such cooperation is extremely difficult if there is a culture which measures time in monetary terms. Because communitarian cooperation requires that people give time to building up trust. That is why we have to become like children again if we are to save nature and prevent climate change. The tribal worldview was traditionally a childish one. Even after becoming adults they always saw themselves as being children of nature and they kept playing games throughout their lives. But now the situation is such that in urban areas children have to start preparing for a life of earning money right from the time they begin to walk and talk and this is the culture that is penetrating through to the whole of society through television where small children are having to perform like adult artistes in so called reality shows.
Climate Change is a peripheral symptom of a deeper malaise of valuing time in monetary terms. Unless this hankering after money and wealth which tries to put a price on time ceases, even if we manage to avert climate change through some technological invention there will be other virulent symptoms that will manifest themselves.