“Who will take care of our children?” Padma Damor asked, pointing to a gaggle of her toddler nephews and nieces playing with discarded pieces of plywood strewn outside her hut. “This way at least we can look after them during shifts too.”
Damor was 33 and on her lunch hour in the middle a 12-hour day. Her husband would be fed, she would have some food and rush back to the boiler-room of the plant where she worked for three years.
The factory, which also employs Damor’s husband and her four sisters and brothers-in-law, is one of over 2,000 small, medium and large textile and garment manufacturing plants in the Narol-Vatva industrial cluster in southeast Ahmedabad. It is a major node in India’s $152 billion textile and apparel industry, with production facilities for top foreign brands such as H&M, Ann Taylor, Wrangler, Chico’s, and Target.
Damor’s task is carrying basketfuls of coal to the factory’s boiler, which generates steam and hot water for pre-processing, printing, dying, and, in the final stage, removing wrinkles from fabric. The Narol-Vatva group has between 3,000 to 5, 000 boiler workers, the majority of whom are Adivasis. They come from Gujarat (Dahod and Panchamahal), Madhya Pradesh (Jhabua), and Rajasthan. Damor comes from Jhabua.
In order to reduce costs, the factories operate the boilers continuously, as it takes approximately 12 hours from the time of a cold starting to produce steam, and about the same amount of time to extinguish the fire. To save costs, factories run their boilers around the clock, since it takes 12 hours to generate steam from a cold start and nearly as long to douse the fire.
It is a backbreaking job. Scroll down to see the latest news. Visited several factories during February. Women unloaded the coal into baskets and carried them on their heads from the tractor to the boiler rooms, where men fed fuel to furnaces. Workers lacked any protective gear. The workers walked on the factory floor barefoot and manually fired boilers without goggles or helmets. The temperature inside the boiler rooms reached 45-50 degrees Celsius. There was no ventilation or safety sensors, and there wasn’t even any drinking water.
“It gets very uncomfortable, especially in the summer months. But this is the only work we know, so we continue doing it,” said Kirtiben Baria, 25, who has been working in a Narol garment factory for nearly five years. Her husband took her from Dahod to the Narol factory.
Baria explained that workers were usually brought into Narol or Vatva from a family member, friend, or neighbour who worked there. They are introduced to a factory staffer who doubles up as a contractor and pays them in cash to ensure they are not on the owner’s payroll.
An investigation carried out by the factory workers’ collective Karkhana Shramik Suraksha Sangh found that this arrangement allows the contractor to pay the workers less than Gujarat’s minimum wage. Most of the time, it is women who are exploited.
The investigation revealed that female boiler workers at eight textile factories located in Narol, Vatva, earn an average of Rs 8,785 per week, compared to the Rs 11,752 minimum wage in municipalities. Men earn Rs 11,075.
“Workers’ shifts go on for 12 hours and they work under hazardous and inhumane conditions. Even though they work for 12 hours, the overtime wages are denied,” the collective pointed out in a recent letter to the labour department’s Director of Boilers in Ahmedabad.
However, the directorate is not concerned with boiler operators. Its responsibility lies in ensuring that boilers are safe to use. An assistant director said that their responsibility ended with the hiring of boiler operators and attendants.
“In our dictionary, they are helpers, not workers,” the official, who would only speak on the condition of anonymity, said of boiler workers. “We see to it that boiler attendants are present at all registered boilers and that they are inspected at least once a year.”
He said that the Industrial Health and Safety Department or Labour Welfare Board would be responsible for the welfare of workers.
An assistant commissioner at the Labour Welfare Board said that his department has left the job to its field officers who organise camps to enumerate unorganised workers in Gujarat’s industrial estates.
These camps, which are located in areas where there are many unorganised workers, largely exclude boiler workers who live within the factory. They get a parcel of land and scrap material from factory owners and contractors to build temporary shanties, which families like Damor’s and Baria’s end up living in for years.
The owners of factories keep workers at their premises to ensure that they have a constant supply of labour. “There is no space in this factory but we have housed our workers on the premises of another of our factories nearby,” said the owner of a small garment factory in Narol. “We send for them whenever there is a need.”
For the workers themselves, the squalid housing on the site, while not ideal, is the best option. “We work 12 hours. We use this place only to cook food and rest,” explained Padma Damor’s brother-in-law Ganesh Damor, 35, who has been a boiler worker for nearly four years. “Moreover, reaching the factory early in the morning or late at night would be difficult if we stayed somewhere else.”
Ganesh Damor explained that a similar living arrangement made it easier for parents to take care of their kids. “We need to care for our younger children between shifts. Living here helps us do that,” he said.
Affordable Rental Housing under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana aims to offer decent housing with basic amenities for urban poor, migrants working in industrial sectors and non-formal economies. The scheme envisages private developers converting government-owned vacant housing into rental units. As of now, this scheme is not relevant to Ahmedabad boiler workers. “They do not have the paying capacity,” said Ashim Roy, co-founder of Asia Floor Wage Alliance. “They won’t be able to pay the rent even if a complex were to come up near their workplaces.”