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The Hindu
May 30, 2005
On the trail of the Rozgar Adhikar Yatra
Meena Menon
Participants confront injustice in backward areas
HARDA (MADHYA PRADESH): Shankar Singh of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti
Sanghatan (MKSS) has a way with children in his popular puppet show,
which has attracted crowds in the course of the Rozgar Adhikar Yatra.
He always gets a huge response every time he pulls out his talking
puppet. But it is not always fun and games.
Last Thursday night, below the clock tower at the marketplace in
Harda, when Shankar selected a child as he usually does from the
crowd, he did not know it would touch on the acute problem of child
labour. It was the turn of 13-year-old Raju, who told the puppet that
he worked in a hotel for Rs. 20 a day and supported his parents and
three younger siblings. Harda is one of the districts chosen for the
Food for Work programme due to its poverty. It is also a region where
bonded labour is rampant under the traditional "barsudiya" system.
The reasons for young Raju working all day are not far to find.
While the Rozgar Adhikar Yatra is campaigning for the right to work
as well as a strong law with adequate safeguards guaranteeing work to
the rural poor, it is also coming across the gross injustice that
prevails in many backward districts. For instance, in Shobhapur
village in Harda district, which is located near a tributary of the
Narmada and could face the backwater effect of the Indira Sagar dam,
children complained that their teacher rarely came to school. A
largely unknown fact is that about half the village migrates every
year for economic reasons. Women get daily wages as low as Rs. 15 for
agricultural labour, prompting a yatra participant to remark that the
highest wages for women they came across was Rs. 70 being paid for
the demolition of houses in Harsud town, which will be submerged by
the Indira Sagar dam.
Control over resources
If child labour is at one end of the spectrum, issues such as
increasing job losses, displacement and evictions too threaten
people. Anurag Modi of Shramik Adivasi Sanghatan, which works in
Harda and Beitul districts, says the question of diminishing jobs has
to be linked to the entire globalisation process. The basic issue is
control over resources. Annie Raja, national secretary of the
National Federation of Indian Women, says areas where there is a lot
of displacement either due to migration or projects need employment
guarantee for the poor. In Patti block of Badwani district, tribal
people once had control over resources, which has reduced to nothing
over the years.
Reasons for migration
Madhuri Krishnaswamy, who works with the Jagrut Adivasi Dalit
Sanghatan in Patti, said earlier people fought for control over
resources but now with no water, depleted forests and a six-year
drought, the land has become unproductive, leading to migration.
People have become bonded labourers or construction and daily wage
labourers in the rest of the State. Since 1999, the Sanghatana has
been campaigning for the right to work and resolutions were passed by
22 gram sabhas in the block demanding work for creating assets in the
form of regenerating land and forests. In the end, people started
building their own check dams and small water harvesting projects as
the Government failed to deliver. Ms. Krishnaswamy says people are
keen on guaranteed work because they are being denied minimum wages.
They cannot demand minimum wages because if they do, they are denied
work. "It is expensive to protest for these people as it is a near
starvation scene," she adds.
In Patti, people get work for only four to five days in a year. The
number of children and pregnant women who are working has increased
manifold, Ms. Krishnaswamy says.
Several years of drought, submergence and eviction from forests have
led to the displacement of many people in Madhya Pradesh.
Key to accountability
Everywhere in Harda, Khandwa and Khargone districts, livelihoods are
under threat. The MKSS, which has been linking the issue of the right
to work to the right to information, believes that the recently
passed Central act on the right to information is the key to
enforcing accountability and that the Yatra is devoting some time
spreading awareness on this issue.
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