Rahul Maganti

Sharmila Joshi

Editor

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It’s been three months since Yarraguntla Nagaraju lost
his job of over 30 years in the Delta Sugars factory. He had worked there as an
electrician from the age of 18, ever since the factory was established in 1983.


In the last week of November 2017, he and 299
other employees, most of them from landless Dalit communities, were told to
stop coming to work from December. No notice period was given. “We have not
been paid our salaries since two months, and now the management is closing the
company under the pretext of losses,” Nagaraju said when I met him in November.
At the factory, he was the leader of the workers’ union,
affiliated to the All India Trade Union Congress. 

From November 26, the jobless workers sat on a relay
hunger strike in a makeshift tent in front of the factory. Their demands included
payment for the two months they had already worked and a severance sum
equivalent to 24 months of salary for each worker. Many of the workers are the
lone wage earners in their families, and they struggled to keep their
households running during the weeks of protest outside the factory’s closed
gates. Nagaraju, a permanent employee who was earning Rs. 14,000 a
month when he was fired, started to draw on his savings. His wife is an
agricultural labourer and his son drives an autorickshaw.

By the end of December, a compromise was
reached. PVS Subrahmanyam, the deputy commissioner of labour, Krishna district,
told me that according to the deal, the workers took back the
case they had filed against Delta Sugars in the labour court (under the Industrial
Disputes Act). In exchange, they got four months of salary from
the company, plus the two months of pending wages. That’s  20 months short of the compensation they had
demanded.  “We don&#39;t
have the resources to fight the case in the court. And a case will take years and
years to get resolved. So all of us together decided to compromise,&quot;
says Nagaraju. 

The workers allege that since 2014, the company has
not contributed to their Employee Provident Fund (EPF) or the Employees’ State
Insurance (ESI). Besides, their total accrued EPF and ESI dues have not been
paid after the factory’s recent closure, despite the compromise between the
workers and the owners. And the roughly 50 workers (of the 300), who were not
permanent employees, are not even deemed eligible for EPF or ESI payments. “I was
told every time [I asked] that I would become a permanent employee ‘next year’,”
says Mangalagiri Rangadasu, 32, who worked at the mill as a trolley
driver. “Fourteen years have come and gone and now they are removing us from
the factory altogether.” 

The  protest committee formed after the abrupt
closure of Delta Sugars disputed the owners’ claim that the factory was being
closed because of losses. “The factory has earned a profit of at least eight
crore rupees last year by crushing 1.6 lakh tonnes of sugarcane,” estimates
Kesava Rao,  a veteran farmers’ leader of
the All India Kisan Sabha.  Besides
sugar, crushing sugarcane also produces byproducts like bagasse, molasses (used
for making alcohol and ethanol) and filter cake. (All attempts to
get a response or clarification from the factory&#39;s management were unsuccessful. The security
guards refused to let me enter the premises, while the factory manager, Subba
Raju, refused to answer any questions on the phone).

The Delta Sugars’ factory is located on
Hanuman Junction in Andhra Pradesh’s Krishna district, around 40 kilometres
from Vijayawada. There were around 10 khandsari mills
– small-scale units crushing 100 tonnes a day – in the Hanuman Junction region
in the 1970s.  They
were replaced by the Hanuman Sugar Cooperative Mill in 1983 that
crushed 1,250 tonnes per day (the cane-crushing capacity of Delta Sugars was
2,500 tonnes). The cooperative’s share capital came from the sugarcane farmers in
the area (around 3 per cent of the total, which they allegedly didn’t get back
when the factory was privatised), as well as the state government. 

After the sugar industry was gradually deregulated
starting from the 1990s decade of economic liberalisation, the process
of privatising sugar cooperatives became easier. So Hanuman Sugar, spread across 116 acres, was sold
for a bargain Rs. 11.4 crores in 2001. Registration documents of revenue
transactions in the area during 2000-2002 show that the market value of the
unit was more than Rs. 400 crores at the time. The buyer was Gokaraju Ganga Raju, a Bharatiya Janata
Party member of Parliament and 
businessman-turned-politician, who was elected in 2014 from the Narasapuram constituency in
West Godavari that adjoins Krishna district.

The sudden closure of the factory has also
impacted farmers in the region, who supply 
sugarcane to this mill (but were paid a lower rate per tonne than what
sugarcane farmers get in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, says Kesava Rao). The
farmers will now have to find new sugar companies to sell to and find ways to send
their produce to far-off cane-crushing units owned by these companies. After
this issue came up in the state assembly, the Andhra Pradesh government
brokered a temporary solution for the harvest season in December-January. It
stated that farmers could unload their cane at the Delta Sugars unit for sale
to two other private companies, KCP Sugars at Vuyyuru in Krishna district and
Andhra Sugars at
Bhimadole mandal in West
Godavari district. The two companies would bear the
cost of transporting the produce to their factories.

However, there is no clarity about what will
happen with the next harvesting season. Farm leaders estimate that farmers will
have to spend an additional Rs. 20,000 for transporting every 40 tonnes of
sugarcane – the average yield per acre – from their fields to distant
cane-crushing units. 

The protocol which should have been followed to close
the factory, according to the Andhra Pradesh Industrial Disputes Rules, 1958, was
not implemented. “The factory was supposed to inform the sugarcane farmers at
least two years in advance so that they could diversify [their crop] instead of
sowing sugarcane in the following agricultural seasons. Without doing this, how
can the management close the factory all of a sudden?” asks Kesava Rao, who
played a central role in the movement started in 1972 that convinced the state
government to open the cooperative sugar mill in the area in 1983. 

















“With this mill  closed, we will have to bear the extra
transport costs. We should have our own mill. We led the movement for starting
the mill, which developed the economy around Hanuman Junction,” says Pamarthi
Venkata Reddiah, 59, from a nearby village. Like him, around 2,500 sugarcane farmers from the surrounding
six mandals – Bapulapadu, Unguturu, Gannavaram, Nuzvid, Musunuru and Vissannapet – relied on Delta Sugars for their livelihood.

“Our cows and buffaloes in the surrounding villages
also depend on the dry waste left after the sugarcane crushing. This will be a
serious problem for the people involved in cattle rearing in the vicinity,”
says Alla Gopala Krishna Rao, 58, from the Yadava caste, who rears cattle for
milk along with cultivating sugarcane on three acres of land. Most of the
people who rear cattle and sell milk, or who worked at the mill, are from backward castes like the Yadavas, or from Dalit sub-castes like the Malas. 

Right opposite the now-closed Delta Sugars is the
defunct Delta Agro Chemicals factory (for a while owned by the same company). In 2007,
it too shut shop when the owner did not repay a bank loan and the bank seized
the property. “Around 200 workers lost their livelihood. Most of them are now
working as auto drivers or agricultural labourers [in the Hanuman Junction
area],” says Srinivasa Rao, the security guard at the deserted factory. 

Chodagiri Reddy Gopala Rao, 36, once an
electrical operator at the defunct agro-chemicals factory, now has a small paan and tea shop right next to it.  “I hardly earn
5,000 rupees [a month] now. It is difficult to make ends meet. I used to earn
10,000 rupees back in 2007, when I worked in the factory,” he says.

And left with no job at age of 54 after
working for over 30 years at Delta Sugars, Nagaraju too is now plying an
autorickshaw.  He and other former
Delta Sugars workers expect the owner will eventually use the mill land for
other purposes like housing projects and office complexes, given the location’s
proximity to the new capital city of Amaravati and to Vijayawada,
and the consequent boom in land prices in the area.

Left high and dry at Hanuman Junction

கோபமும் வறட்சியும் நிறைந்திருக்கும் ஹனுமன் சந்திப்பு

हनुमान जंक्शनमध्ये भगवान भरोसे

ଚିନିକଳ କର୍ମଚାରୀଙ୍କ ଜୀବନରୁ ମିଠା ହଜେଇଛି ଡେଲ୍ଟା ସୁଗାର୍ସ

हनुमान जंक्शन में बेसहारा छोड़ दिये गए लोग

ہنوما جنکشن پر بے سہارا چھوڑ دیے گئے لوگ

হনুমান জংশানে বেহাল দশা

Hanuman Junction

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Left high and dry at Hanuman Junction

Workers at the Delta Sugars factory in AP's Krishna district were recently unlawfully retrenched. They believe the factory was closed to cash in on rising land values, given its proximity to the new capital of Amaravati

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