Karnataka - Bangalore

‘Homemakers’ without homes

Bangalore: If you enter the construction site of any big apartment complex and choose to stray slightly away from the posh dwellings being built (complete with club houses and swimming pools), you encounter dwellings of a completely different order.

Tucked away from immediate view, often behind the complexes, are rows of tin sheds that house those who build these dream homes brick by brick.

What passes off for living accommodation for lakhs of migrant construction labourers in Bangalore — who come from impoverished north Karnataka districts, Tamil Nadu Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Assam and Jharkhand — are shacks measuring about 8 feet-by-10 feet with tin sheets for roofs and walls.

While the best among labour sheds offer bunk cots, the worst have labourers sleep on cement bags or on the floor. Each small shed accommodates four to five people if they are bachelors and becomes “home” if a whole family is living on the site.

There are common bathing areas and toilets. But access to basic facilities is uneven, dependent more on the “goodness” of the builder and the lower-rung contractor rather than the “right” of the worker.

For example, while some camps have lighting, there are many who do not. Shabbeer Khan from Gulbarga, who works at a site on Bannerghatta Road, says: “Some are lucky to have lights because they have a good mestri”. He says that the builder gave free firewood when workers were fewer, but stopped when demand-supply ratio of labour tilted in his favour.

While Khan is among the more articulate among them, many workers express “gratitude” for having work and a place to stay. “I would have to starve back home,” says Premnath from Jharkhand, who works on a site in Banashankari II Stage and is reluctant is talk. “I don’t have to pay rent and bus fare.” He has been working here for six years in Bangalore, moving from one project to another.

Most of these workers are running away from poverty and social exploitation in their villages, but find themselves sucked into a system in the city characterised by exploitative labour conditions, hazardous working environments and crammed living spaces.

There have hardly been any instances of construction workers organising themselves to demand better and safer conditions of work. T.M. Ramakrishna, North Zone co-ordinator of Construction Workers Federation of India, sums up the reason for this: “The powerful builders and contractors do not let us go inside, let alone organise. Who is to say that the workers have the fundamental right to organise themselves?”

(Names of construction workers have been changed).

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