A lull has set in Mumbai’s zari workshops, the one-room sweatshops that, for years, had young, out-of-school boys embroider fine fabric with silver and golden thread over 16 to 18-hour workdays, each unit churning out heavily embroidered dupattas, lehengas, and other dress material in bulk.
Over the last couple of years, most zari units – more than 5,000 by one count – have shut, the number of karigars (skilled workers) in the few workshops remaining has dropped, and work orders have dwindled.
But if there is ever an epitaph for Mumbai’s once-flourishing trade of zari – the craft of intricate hand embroidery using gold or silver thread – it wouldn’t be laced with grief.
The imminent end of Mumbai’s zari industry is rooted not as much in poor demand, as it is in the release of child workers who, for years, formed the exploited backbone of this industry of glittering glass beads and golden threads. Adult men now dominate the zari workforce, leading to an inevitable rise in labour cost and making the business unviable.
“Labour cost was low earlier, and unit owners made good money. Now, labour is expensive,” says Mohammed Qamrood Jamal, who owns one such workshop in Govandi, close to the infamous Deonar dumping ground. “The only expense on child workers earlier was food. Adult workers cost us Rs 400-500 a day.”
One-way journey
Ashfaq doesn’t remember how old he was when he moved to Mumbai to work in a zari workshop. The only thing he remembers was the promise to meet the stars he watched in films back home. “The boys in my village who worked in zari workshops told me that I could meet film stars in Bombay. I was completely taken in. My parents didn’t want me to leave the village, but I persisted,” he recalls, as he sits alone in a workshop, randomly sticking glitter on a fabric. “This is ‘harbour line’ work,” he laughs. In karigar slang, harbour line is not-so-fine work, a reference to the suburban train line which is not given priority as the Western or Central lines.
Ashfaq came to Mumbai a little over 15 years ago from Sitamarhi in Bihar, along the Nepal border. “My world came crashing down after I moved to Bombay,” he says. “I was made to fill water in barrels and lug it to the workshop. I regretted not listening to my parents, and leaving school. I was miserable. But I had no choice. I would cry when I was alone.”
He didn’t make the journey back home, though. He has grown from an unpaid child worker to a karigar and earns Rs 400 to Rs 500 for a day’s work. He is married, and has three children, all enrolled in a school in his hometown. “They will go far if they study,” he says.
The zari hub
The back alleys of Govandi are dotted with several zari workshops. Each narrow pathway has iron staircases snaking their way up, opening in to single rooms, where fabric in bright shades of bridal pinks and magentas is spread out on wooden planks surrounded by soot-layered walls.
It is an inescapable irony – the glitter of the golden zari in sharp contrast to the lives the workers lead. Most of them joined these units as children, who were hired because of their fingers were nimble enough to do intricate embroidery. They also came cheap.
“The concept of ‘hunar (skill)’ was strong then. For parents, sending their children here was like an apprenticeship,” says Neelima Mehta, who, as the then chairperson of the Child Welfare Committee, would receive cases of child workers rescued from zari units. She says each raid (they began in 2002) ended with 500 or more children being rescued. “In many cases,” Dr Mehta says, “they had been beaten up or even sexually abused. Some of them had burn injuries on hands as they were singed with electrical wires.”
Rescue operations were not the solution, though. A few months after each raid, the same children would return to the workshops.
Santosh Shinde, assistant police inspector with the Juvenile Aid Protection Unit (JAPU) of the Mumbai Police, says there is a negligible number of child labourers left in these units. “The zari industry itself has ended as it hinged on child labour,” he says. “Most zari workshops closed over the last year or so.”
Bihar’s best foot forward
Sitamarhi in Bihar is 2,000 km from Mumbai. It is one of the most backward districts in India, and according to the district administration’s data, an estimated 4.5 lakh families here live below the poverty line. The district’s literacy rate is about 50% (2011 Census) and around 94% of the Sitamarhi’s population lives in villages – a demography that has satiated Mumbai’s demand for child zari workers.
“Back home, almost everyone thinks of zari as a money-generating job,” says Junaid, 26. He came to Mumbai from Sitamarhi as a child, and worked for an average of 14 hours a day. The stories of long work hours and bad work conditions that rescued children took back with them to Sitamarhi were never a deterrent to the continued migration of young hands.
It was finally the fear of punishment that checked this trend. “Earlier, employing child workers came under the Child Labour Act and was a bailable offence. Now the more stringent Section 371 of the Indian Penal Code is applied,” says Kishore Bhamre, director of the Pratham Council for Vulnerable Children.
Pratham, a Mumbai-based NGO, made inroads into the zari units spread across Govandi, Dharavi, and parts of Navi Mumbai, with an education initiative for child workers more than a decade ago, and worked closely with Mumbai Police in their rescue raids. Later, it worked with the Bihar government to ensure the problem was checked at the source.
Mr Bhamre says close to 40,000 children would have gone back to their hometown over the last decade. He pegs the drop in the number of zari units from an estimated 6,000 to about 1,100 now.
The imminent demise of Mumbai’s zari industry also marks the first concrete step the Bihar government took to arrest migration of children as labourers. “We set up a state-level task force last year to address this issue. The taskforce comprises representatives from the social welfare department, education, health, rural development, minority affairs and SC/ST welfare among others. The idea is to give benefits of all the schemes under each of these departments to families that would typically send their children to work in Mumbai,” says Imamuddin Ahmad, director, social welfare, government of Bihar.
Measures include monitoring of railway stations and quick exchange of information on Whatsapp groups. District level task forces have been set up and clusters have been identified where children migrate from the most. The Bihar government held a meeting with other state governments and even put in place a standard operating procedure that rolls out the minute there is an alert. “2,000 children have come back so far,” says Mr Imamuddin.
But rehabilitation measures are still lacking. Mumbai’s success story of bringing down child worker numbers is marred by rise in child labour in other parts of the country. Those working on the issue of child labour point out that unless a robust rehabilitation programme is developed, the problem will continue to rear its head. “Children from Bihar are now being found in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Jaipur among other cities,” says Mr Bhamre, who spends considerable time in Bihar.
The Road Ahead
If the zari industry was catering to a huge demand, thus justifying the long work hours of children, the market isn’t exactly missing the craft. Made in China products have flooded various fabric stores. “China has emerged as a supplying country. The machine made zari is also beautiful with intricate designs,” says Mr Bhamare.
“Power loom machines are being imported from China and Korea and being installed to carry out this work,” says Tushar Reshamwala, managing director of Ratanshi Kheraj Sarees, which has been in the business of saris and zari for over a century. The cost of labour is too high in Mumbai and the good karigars have migrated to Lucknow and Kanpur,” Mr Reshamwala says.
Local demand for zari work from local units has also dried up. Karigars in Mumbai say they were working on orders from Nigeria, the Middle East, and Pakistan.
Karigars said this work was no longer lucrative and that they were the last from their village to get into it. They went on to claim that schools back home in Bihar were now strapped for space given the student rush.
Some say zari needs to be saved. Mr Reshamwala says he had made a suggestion to the government to hold zari lessons in school classrooms and also pay the children for it. “After all, only if the fingers are moulded for the craft early in life can a person take it up as a profession after 18,” he reasons. His suggestion went unheard, possibly indicative of what Bihar is trying to do right – protect every child’s right to a childhood.
In the meanwhile, the intricate work of zari continues to be done mostly by adult men. Perhaps it is just as well.
