WUNRN
Women's Feature Service
By Tripti Nath
Not one woman worker here, perparing for the Commonwealth Games, can be seen wearing basic safety gear like gloves, boots or helmets. (WFS)
New Delhi (Women’s
Feature Service) - Rajni and Chidami, a couple from Mau Rampur in Jhansi, Uttar
Pradesh, take turns to attend to their two-month-old infant, Aashiq, at a
construction site near the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. This is the stadium that
will host the opening and closing ceremonies of the XIX Commonwealth Games to
be held in
As Rajni gets busy
digging, Chidami wipes his wet brow with cement smeared hands to check on the
baby lying on a bed of plastic bags. It is 1.45 pm but a meal is nowhere in
sight. The relentless pace of work carries on well past the lunch break.
Barring a handful of male labourers smoking ‘beedis’ (local cigarettes) and
haggling over the price of a packet of fresh coconut pieces with a pavement
vendor, there is no sign of any food. For water, the workers have to walk
almost half a kilometre to fill up their grimy plastic water bottles that may
last them for a couple of hours. There is no shelter, either from the sun or
the rain, in a season that has seen a great deal of thunderstorms in the Capital.
On this particular
site where at least a hundred men and women, including a few who are mere
teenagers, are toiling away day-and-night there is only one toilet run by the
Sulabh Shauchalaya. As far as creche facilities are concerned, they are nowhere
in sight. In fact, the contrast between the sordid conditions under which these
workers live and work, and the glitzy Games venues they are helping to build,
is incongruous and tragic.
Not a single worker
here can be spotted wearing basic safety gear like gloves, boots or helmets.
Venkatamma, 45, has come all the way from
These are workers,
many of them women with young children, who have travelled long distances to
work so that
Take the case of
Rajni and Chidami. All they get for a day’s work is Rs 110 each, although the
contractor claims that they earn Rs 300 to Rs 350 for an eight-hour shift.
There is, in fact, a lot of ambiguity about wages and number of working hours.
Some women from
For these workers,
many of whom are young women with small children, this is clearly a choice
between starvation in their villages and exploitation in the national Capital.
If they had stayed back at home, they would have got much less – even when jobs
were available – than even the measly wages they are given on such construction
sites in
Subhash Bhatnagar, a
member of the
Having personally
visited at least 15 of the over 25 CWG sites in Delhi, Bhatnagar is convinced
that the living and working conditions of these labourers, who come from over a
dozen states in the country, are simply abysmal. Apart from wages, he is
dismayed by the lack of safety and other social security provisions spelt out
under the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and
Conditions of Service Act, 1996).
As Bhatnagar puts it,
“The nature of the work is hazardous but the government is paying no attention
towards enforcing the safety norms. Failure of safety provisions has already
caused more than 60 deaths of construction workers working on different
sites. Despite repeated orders by the
Delhi High Court and deadline extensions, a large number of construction
workers at different Commonwealth Games sites have either not been registered
or not been issued identity cards. Until they are registered, they are not
entitled to any social security benefits provided by the Board. These include
children’s education support, medical care, maternity benefits, immediate
assistance in case of accident, and pension that can be claimed after the age
of 60.”
In their race against
time, contractors are resorting to anti-labour policies and taking all kinds of
liberties with the law. While corruption and lack of preparedness of those who
are organising the XIX Commonwealth Games have grabbed the headlines of late,
not enough attention has been paid to the pathetic working and living
conditions of the men and women who built the venues for the Games.
The question is why a
government that is spending close to $10 billion on hosting the world’s third
largest multinational sporting event is close fisted about paying the
indispensable workers their legally prescribed wages.