With no sign of resumption of paper production at the Sirpur Paper Mills Ltd (SPM), the industrial town of Kagaznagar in Adilabad district, has come to be haunted by the nightmarish memories of the locked out Sirsilk factory, which used to be considered a twin of the former.
Nearly 4,000 families of workers and other employees of Sirsilk had their world coming down shattering upon them when the lockout was declared in 1985.
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A 1990 M. Phil-level study done by K. Shankar Kumar, at present Special Deputy Collector, Karimnagar, details the plight of the Sirsilk worker families in the aftermath of the lockout. Among the most important changes which wrought the life of the worker families were the splitting of the nuclear families into micro-nuclear families and some women members resorting to flesh trade.
“This could be our fate too if production is not resumed immediately,” observes a trade union leader at SPM though he did not want to go on record as it could demoralise his colleagues. “We are already neck-deep in debts,” he shudders.
The SPM with a work force of 3,200 comprising 1,550 permanent and 1,150 contract workers besides 500 office staff, and a production of 300 tonnes per day, has stopped production since October-end. The management quotes losses accrued by the mill as the main reason for production becoming unsustainable.
Not many have accepted this contention as the paper industry in India is on an upswing. According to a research paper published by researcher Jay Ganesh Tripathi in the May 2014 issue of the prestigious Indian Journal of Applied Research, the sector is expected to grow by 7 per cent per annum and as per the India Ratings report in 2014-15, paper companies would achieve higher profitability in the coming years.
“Our hopes of resumption of production are also dashed as the president of the recognised trade union here, Home Minister Nayani Narasimha Reddy, has not visited us even once since we started agitation demanding resumption of production or done anything to stop the management from selling land given by the government for development of the factory. Ironically, at the time of his election to the trade union, he had promised to get us a salary raise of at least Rs. 10,000 per month,” recalls a worker on relay fast at the factory.
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