SANTULAN- hail determination!!
The small child raises his tiny dusty fist and shouts “Zindabad”!
This is the determined salute of some 60,000 stone quarry workers and their families in Pune, Maharashtra state. It means “hail determination” and is the rallying cry of SANTULAN, an Oxfam partner working in this area since 1997. The simple act of raising a fist affirms the identity of a people that spends its days bent double breaking rocks with pick axes.
There are over 3000 stone quarries in the Pune district providing the means to survive for over 4 million stone crushers. These people range from Vadars (a caste traditionally linked with stone breaking) to homeless scheduled castes, nomadic tribes and landless peasants. Many have been displaced from their land as a result of unjust development policies or have fled famine and natural disasters.
They migrate from state to state in search of work, surviving on hand to mouth earnings and rarely manage to return to their home state. Consequently they are seen as “unorganized labour” with minimal legal provisions and entitlements. They have no birth or death records, ration cards, voting cards, health insurance or social security. They are not included in population surveys and so essentially are a hidden and unrecognised group despite the valuable and dangerous work they carry out.
Bastu Rege and his wife Pallavi had been working in civil society organisations in the area and were aware of the plight of the quarry workers but it was the death of a child crushed by a dumper in the quarry that lead them to establish SANTULAN in 1997. Their overall goal is to fight the marginalization and poverty suffered by these people through “education, organisation, struggle and empowerment”.
Their “Pashan Shala” (quarry school) is the starting point for their work. In a collection of 125 small brick and tin roofed classrooms dotted throughout the quarries, over 20,000 children have found a haven away from the back-breaking work and a chance to conceive of a different life. The younger children (6-14) remain with their families whilst attending school. The older ones (15-18) are encouraged to attend a residential school at the SANTULAN office where they can concentrate on their studies and are less likely to get called into working in the quarry full-time. After many years of lobbying for recognition of their schools (including 10 days of agitation at the office of the Education Minister in Mumbai), in 2008 the government finally conceded that the SANTULAN model was particularly effective in keeping “hard to reach” kids in school. This recognition means that they can now access subsidies (INR2,266 per child) which contributes to school materials, uniforms, supplementary nutrition and teachers’ fees.
In the evening, I sat and listened to the older kids introduce themselves in English and tell me how they wanted to become police officers, pilots and teachers. Who knows if they will achieve this, but at the very least these schools have given them a sense of pride and self-worth which is palpable in the confident way they ask me questions and cajole me to sing them a song.
It is hard to comprehend the difficulty of the task faced by SANTULAN and this community in achieving any kind of political change. Although the number of workers is growing- and revenue from the construction activities their work enables has increased seven fold in Maharashtra over the last eight years- they are largely ignored by authorities due to their lack of voting power and high rates of illiteracy. Much of SANTULAN’s work to date has focused on gaining basic recognition of the workers’ existence through the procurement of identity cards, ration cards and voting registration. They have also obtained insurance for workers under the Government’s Insurance policy for informal sectors as well as basic amenities including drinking water, electricity and shelter. Obtaining these rights involved no less than 17 public demonstrations, one public interest litigation case in the Mumbai High Court and five times attendance at the Legislative Assembly Questioning.
In 2005, with the support of Oxfam, SANTULAN started a process to unionise the workers. Through the organisation of committees from colony to district level, over 60,000 workers are being trained to be aware of and demand their rights. One of their key objectives is the creation of a Stone Quarry Workers Welfare Board in Maharashtra to ensure greater access to the Mining Development Fund.
Women workers are encouraged to become active members of committees and unions as well as participating in self-help groups to combat domestic violence and discrimination. I met a group of women working near Wagholi village. Impossibly skinny, clad in bright saris, the women break rocks for over twelve hours a day. They get paid according to how much the quarry owner sells. They asked me to try breaking a rock and smiled wryly at my pathetic attempt. I am unable to even begin to understand the hardship of their lives.
They took me to visit “houses” provided by the quarry owner. At first I didn’t actually realise that the tiny stone structures covered with loose sheets of galvanize were actually houses. Bending down to enter, I was greeted with a broad smile by a woman making chapattis over a fire. In the adjoining cave- like room, her pots and pans were stacked gleaming clean. Outside a group of kids gathered singing nursery rhymes for me and crowding round to see their images on my digital camera. Quarry machines churned in the background covering everyone in a shroud of dust. With no protective clothing, injury and respiratory illness is common. The average life expectancy is 40 to 50.
A proud Muslim man asked me to take a photo of him and his beautiful baby granddaughter. In this community struggling to survive, religion and caste bear no significance. I learn that the quarry owner had himself come from this colony. This makes it all the harder for me to stomach that this stark shelter is what he deems suitable for his workers. A year back, bulldozers appeared out of the blue to raze their homes to the ground. The quarry owner had realised that they might acquire right of tenure if the houses were allowed to exist for too long. Frantic calls brought Bastu and Pallavi running to the site. Together with the workers, they stood in front of the bulldozers and demanded that their homes be saved. They managed to salvage one small section. But fear remains that this could happen again at any moment.
Washing the quarry dust off my feet that night, I thought of the tiny kids singing the SANTULAN song and giving me hand-made paper roses. I thought of their teacher who has educated herself against all odds. I thought of the SANTULAN staff who have gone as far as hunger strike to gain some basic recognition of the rights of these people. And I thought how in this city of high tech companies, expensive foreign department stores and slick billboard advertising, no man woman or child should have to live and work in the conditions these people live in.
SOME SANTULAN SUCCESSES
- Over 20,854 children educated in the quarry schools
- 148 children received educational scholarship of 1,78,800 rupees from the Government
- Over 5000 children receive supplementary nutrition each year
- Every year over 5000 children and 20,000 workers are reached by the health programme
- Over 10,000 women are engaged in self-empowerment activities through the self-help groups
- 13,894 workers have been insured
- Over 10,000 people have access to drinking water
- 200 families have access to electricity
- Over 7,000 workers have become union members
(Shared by Stephanie Casey, a volunteer with Oxfam India, who recently spent an afternoon with SANTULAN, one of Oxfam’s partners in Pune)