Susheela, Rukmini, Sarla, and Ganga are friends, who share a common past and perhaps even a similar future. Belonging to the OBC (Other Backward Classes) community, they are domestic workers in Lucknow. Even five years ago, none of them had ever thought of being left without any option in neighbouring Chhattisgarh to build a new life in the city.
Migration from this predominantly tribal, insurgency-hit State is not a new phenomenon. In the book In Search of Livelihood: Labour Migration from Chhattisgarh , published by Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar National Institute of Social Sciences, authors Y.G. Joshi and D.K. Verma have noted: “Seasonal labour out-migration is today a regional characteristic of the area, involving nearly a million population which, barring few southern States, moves nearly to all parts of the country. The labour migration from this area...is a part of household survival strategy of the marginal farmers and landless workers who are unable to find work locally...Nevertheless migrating out for work has become an essential component of household economy for a large section of the poor population...”
Susheela's household could well be one of the marginalised ones that the authors have written about. It was a failed harvest that brought her to Lucknow, over 700 km from her home in Bilaspur, nearly a decade ago. She says, “I came with my husband’s parents to work as a labourer on a flyover. Due to a bad crop, there was a huge loan to be repaid. Around three dozen families from my village got work on that flyover.”
Later, while Susheela's father-in-law went back to tend to their small farm, she and her mother-in-law Rajbala stayed on to find work either as construction workers or domestic workers, simply because “there was no way our small field in Bilaspur could feed a large family of 13”.
Statistics of the Uttar Pradesh Labour Department reveal that there are around 22,000 migrant domestic workers from other States in Lucknow alone and of these, around 3,000 are from Chhattisgarh. They come in search of better prospects but the transition is hard on them — physically and emotionally. “I had to leave my one-year-old daughter in Bilaspur in the care of my father-in-law and husband, who is a mason,” says Susheela.
Saving money in a big city, however, is easier said than done. Susheela's friend Rukmini says, “Initially, the biggest problem we all faced was of language. The Hindi dialect spoken in Lucknow is different from that of our native place.” Negotiating unfamiliar city routes, living in one-room tenements in squalid slums and surviving on subsistence wages, arbitrarily fixed, are some of the other problems.
What kept Susheela going were the biannual visits back home. “We used to save money and then, twice a year, went back to hand it over to my father-in-law. While returning, we brought back foodgrain so that we didn't have to buy it from the shop," she recalls.
In this way, it took Susheela and Rajbala eight years to repay the loan and then acquire an additional small piece of land in Bilaspur. Rajbala says, “My husband thought that buying a little more land would help us settle back home. But it never happened. Lucknow is our home now.”
Two years ago, Susheela’s husband and three daughters joined her in her Patel Nagar home in Lucknow. Life in the city has worn her out. She wakes up early every morning, hurriedly completes a few household chores and is out for work by 7.30 am. As a domestic worker, she toils in a dozen households in the Indira Nagar and Nishatganj localities before heading back home in the evening. Her monthly earning is anywhere between Rs. 8,000 and Rs. 10,000. But it’s not enough to survive in such expensive times since her daily commute alone generally involves a bus and rickshaw ride.
It is well established that domestic workers are among the most exploited and under-represented members of the workforce in India. Although there is the Domestic Workers (Registration, Social Security and Welfare) Bill 2008, which seeks to regulate and improve their conditions of work, it has remained at the drafting stage. Implementing even minimal protection has been difficult given that the work is conducted in the private space of the home and that there is a singular lack of will on the part of the upper and middle classes, as well as governments, to address the specific concerns of this section of society. (Women's Feature Service)
