THE OTHER& HALF
Narmada’s vote
KALPANA SHARMA
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The voice of women in the informal sector who have been hit by the current and other on-going, silent recessions is rarely heard in the media…
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Photo: Kalpana Sharma
Hard day’s work: Narmada at the spinning wheel.
Who would Narmada Devi have voted for in this election? I met her on a cool afternoon in the town of Madhubani in Bihar, much before the election dates had been announced. She sat with four other women on a sun-drenched verandah spinning cotton yarn on one of those instruments rarely seen these days, the ambar charkha. The women are paid Rs. 50 for every kilo of yarn they spin. And it takes them eight days of spin that amount.
Narmada Devi walks one kilometre to and from her house to Madhubani’s once-famous Khadi Gramudyog established in 1919. Today, its sprawling 17 acres consists of a collection of crumbling and dilapidated buildings and a handful of old men and women like Narmada Devi. From an institution that supplied Khadi fabric and products to all of India, and employed 22,000 people including 1,100 weavers in the surrounding villages, the Khadi Gramudyog today has barely 100 weavers, a handful of spinners and around 46 other workers. The latter are tasked with protecting the extensive properties belonging to the Gramudyog — a total of 65 acres in the district.
Avadh Narain Jha, who is in-charge of the Khadi Gramudyog, showed me dozens of ambar charkhas lying unused in the room adjoining the verandah where Narmada Devi sat. In another part of the campus, he pointed to the special charkhas that this institution once manufactured that could spin yarn fine enough to make muslin. Today, hardly anyone orders these charkhas, this elderly man who is waiting to retire told me.
Like most women her age, Narmada Devi could not tell me how old she was. But she did tell me the problems she faced sitting on her haunches for many hours spinning the charkha. Her right hand was stiff she said, her chest hurt and she had problems with her eyesight. But she had no option but to walk each day to the Khadi Gramudyog and spin for a few hours.
Steady decline
The decline of Khadi has been steady. But the story of how this has impacted the lives of thousands of workers in India’s villages has perhaps never been adequately recorded or acknowledged. Today, people in these villages would be more than happy to get the kind of work Khadi offered them in the past. But neither Jha, nor those who make policy for the development of Khadi in distant Delhi have the imagination or the determination, to revive this village industry.
The fate of Madhubani’s Khadi Gramudyog takes on a new relevance in present times. Recession is a word that brings to mind the loss of jobs in banking, BPOs, the IT sector, industry and even the media. But thousands of workers like Narmada Devi, including many women who are part of the growing informal sector, have been facing recession for much longer. Their loss of employment is a silent, creeping one, not a sudden termination. And unlike people in the formal sector who have some fall-back, some savings, some compensation paid out to them, some asset such as a house, women like Narmada Devi have nothing. If they lose even the little paid work available, they have no alternative.
The situation is not very different in places where employment is easier to find. The global recession has certainly hit the export sector in India. You see it played out in the lives of those who work in the smaller enterprises that feed into the larger export sector. Thus, in Dharavi in Mumbai, thousands of men and women work in small units producing garments for export. According to one such exporter, who has around eight units employing 700 workers, his orders have come down by one third. This means that the women in particular, who come in to work on a piece-rate basis as and when there is work, get much less work today than they did when the economy was growing.
Unknown faces of recession
Yet the concerns of these workers have not figured in the discussions around the elections to the 15th Lok Sabha. There has been some talk of the economy, predictions about future growth, whether India is badly hit by the global recession or not. But the face of that problem has never been women like Narmada Devi or the women from Dharavi’s koliwada who work in its garment factories.
I asked one of them, who was afraid to give her name or talk too much for fear of being reprimanded by her supervisor, what was the main issue that politicians should address? “Mehengayee,” (rising prices), she said without a moment’s hesitation. How can we manage when everything costs so much these days, she asked. It is more than likely that her earnings have been reduced by at least a third as her employer has lost a third of his orders. Such a cut for families that pool together everything they can earn to survive in a city like Mumbai is much steeper than the salary cuts that people in the formal sector are being asked to take.
Interestingly, when I asked this woman how she would decide whom to vote for, and whether it would be on the basis of who she felt addressed her concern about rising prices, she gave an unambiguous response. “We decide as a family who we will support,” she said. “What if you disagree?” I asked. “Why should I?” she countered. “We have to decide these things together in the family”, she said.
That brief exchange reveals another dimension about the way choices are made in these elections. In this case, it is more than likely that the head of the family, the man, decides, and the rest follow. Thus, even if this woman makes a substantial contribution to the total income of her family through her work in the garment factory, she will not be central to the decision about voting. Gender dynamics in families do not change that easily, it is evident, even in cities like Mumbai where most women are in some form of paid employment.
This election story has been only partially reported by the media. Much of the coverage has centred on political personalities and their sound bytes. Instant polls have demanded people express an opinion on who they would like as the next Prime Minister. Yet, this was a time when we should have heard much more from the women of Dharavi, from women like Narmada Devi, about what they expect from those they elect. If such voices had successfully penetrated the din of election campaigning — although one has to admit that this has been one of the quietest elections in Mumbai — then perhaps we would not have thought of this as an election without issues. There are issues, there are concerns, but few were listening.
Email the writer: sharma.kalpana@yahoo.com
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