Trapped in debt, Tamil Nadu's Irula community slipping into bonded labour again
CHENNAI: Nine-year-old Sandhya boils rice and reheats the previous night’s Kaarakuzhambu, as her six-year-old brother Kamesh wakes up.
The school bell is half an hour away from ringing, and she must quickly dress her brother and herself up after breakfast. Sandhya prides of her basic culinary skills, because she, like many of her classmates, would turn up hungry to school, if she could not cook.
Her parents leave home before sunrise. Fathers to brick kilns, rice mills or construction sites they once escaped from. Mothers trod to the nearby jasmine fields, to whose owners they owe money. Kids are left to fend for themselves until they return from school.
Most parents in her village are former bonded labourers rescued from dangerous or hostile conditions and resettled in 2005, into government ear-marked land, by social workers and Sarpam Sangam, a union of freed labourers.
Almost all residents of this village belong to the Irula community (a Scheduled Tribe) and have no land to farm on, no education to seek better employment and no access to get either. With incomplete rehabilitation, slowly, but consistently, the population is slipping back into bonded labour.
Another Anna Nagar
About 40 kilometers from the heart of Chennai, is a less-known Anna Nagar in Thirukandalam Village, Thiruvallur district. Unlike the Anna Nagar in the city, the rural one does not boast of high-raised buildings, private schools, metro rails, malls, wide roads and a heterogeneous crowd.
The village is a small settlement of huts that hasn’t been touched by Swatchh Bharath Abhiyan. There are dirt roads, and the closest bus stop is at the end of a two-kilometer walk. The 200-odd families of Irulas that live here have homogeneous origins. By their village, runs the sprawling Kosathalaiyar River.
Almost 13 years after the tribes settled in Anna Nagar, very little has changed. The line of houses closest to the river lie in a dilapidated state. T Saroja (65), like many of her neighbours, decided to upgrade her hut, a few years after she was rescued from a rice mill. “I was rescued in 2005 and by 2015, my husband and I had saved some money to build a concrete house. Before we could complete the house, the flood washed away most of it,” she said.
Her house is only one among the many incomplete concrete houses in the village. In 2015, the historic flood wrecked all villages and slums lining Kosathalaiyar, Cooum and Adyar River. The semi-constructed houses stay abandoned at various stages of completion. She borrowed `50,000 from a jasmine field owner in hope to re-start construction. She has neither been able to construct the house with that money, nor has been able to repay her loan.
Baskar Ram (17) and H Ramesh (16), have dragged in a rope-bed into one such abandoned house, and re-purposed it into one of the meeting zones for boys in the village. With no roof over their head, the two school drop-outs, sleep on the bed at 3pm. They had just come back from daily-wage work. Their parents too, like Saroja had borrowed some money from the field owners after the floods.
Their parents decided that their teen wards would rather bring home daily-wages to pay back their loan, instead of getting education.
“I wasn’t good at studies. My mother asked why I should go to school. I quit and I work with my mother now,” said Baskar. He did not have any aspiration or long-term career plan. His friend Ramesh, whose mother is still at the jasmine fields in the sun, works at a small industrial unit that produces Yantra plates — a copper plate embeded with geometric patterns — that are used by Hindus for prayers. Both their employers have lent money to their parents, that the kids help repay.
“We don’t get weekly offs. We don’t have to go to work, if there are no flowers in the fields,” says 16-year-old Sharadha. She hides behind a tree and her answers are almost inaudible. Her hut is right by the jasmine field she works and she is scared someone might hear her. She dropped out of school after passing class VI. “My mother and aunt worked in this field after they got a loan in 2015. First, I started helping them once a week. When I earned almost as much as them, I quit school and joined them,” she said.
Saroja, Baskar, Sharadha and all others who work at the jasmine field, start their work before 6 am and go on for at least eight hours until noon. They have to work until the field they work on, is stripped of all flowers that can be sold. Irrespective of the quantity they pluck, they get paid `100 a day. Even if Saroja worked for 30 days a month, she would earn less than `3,000 as she also have to repay the advance she got.
“Bonded labour, is a person’s pledge of labour or services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation, where there is no hope of actually repaying the debt. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services’ duration may be undefined,” said Kural Amudhan, assistant director of International Justice Mission (IJM), speaking to Express. In most cases, the labourers, like villagers of Anna Nagar, are paid below minimum wages and don’t have job security or benefits.
Labour activists R Geetha and E Sidhamma, who rescued the labourers in 2005, are working to revive the Srapam Sangam to re-instate awareness on labour rights and invite government to set up Small and Middle Scale Enterprises near the village. “We are also training village women to sow and graze and primarily make them skilled labourers,” said R Geetha.
While women of the village, bonded by cycles of debt, leave home before sunrise, and fathers leave to industries for shift-work, children wake up alone and leave hungry to school. Only one girl in the village goes to college and she is the most educated person in the village. Students drop out, even before reaching higher secondary school, as the schools are too far away. With nothing else to do, children too are trapped into their parents’ debt.