ABSTRACT

In Chetram’s village, I came across a particularly harrowing example of the depredations the migrant workers in the area find themselves faced with. When I asked a group of villagers to tell me about their experiences of labour migration, Thakur Singh, a Gond peasant who had lost most of his land to submergence, told me that his son and some of his friends had gone all the way to Hyderabad to find work. He proceeded to tell me that a labour contractor from the neighbouring village had contacted his son and several others to offer them well-paid work. When they arrived in Jabalpur, they were packed into trains that took them to Hyderabad; once they arrived in Hyderabad they were crammed onto the loading planes of trucks and taken to a remote sugarcane-processing factory. At the factory they would work 12-hour shifts, earning around 18 rupees per day. Their wages, however, were not paid and the management kept them locked in behind the factory gates. When they got in touch with the police in order to have them force the management to let them go, the management told the police that the boys had taken an

advance payment on their wages and could not leave the factory. The police, the boys reckoned, had been bought off by their employers. Thakur Singh only came to know about these conditions when some of the boys managed to run away and return to the village. The villagers decided to take legal action to get the boys back home safely, but before the matter wound up in court, rains wreaked havoc on the sugarcane harvests, and they were fired. After five months of work they were left with hardly 1,000 rupees each (field notes, February 2003).