Rahul Maganti

Sharmila Joshi

Editor

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Every night, around 10 p.m., Setty Srikanth and
Setty Gopichand spread out an old vinyl banner on the traffic divider of the
Chennai-Kolkata National Highway that passes through Vijayawada. Then, using their towels as sheets,
they go to sleep right there.

In the morning, they walk to the nearby Benz
Circle, where daily wage labourers gather from 6 a.m., hoping to be hired. Sometimes,
the Setty brothers eat idlis bought from vendors on cycles at the labour
‘adda’.
Many times they go to work on an empty stomach.

“It has been a year since we came to
Vijayawada,” says 16-year-old Srikanth. He and Gopichand, 22, left Madupalle village in Khammam
district of Telangana soon after their family suffered huge agricultural losses
in 2016, though they had managed to break even until then. “Our father
cultivates five acres [on leased land] of chilli, cotton and turmeric. But we
ended up with a loss of five lakh rupees that year [and that amount has now
grown to seven lakhs due to the high interest rates charged by moneylenders],”
says Srikanth. The turmeric harvest did not fetch a good price, their cotton
crop got infested by the pink bollworm and the chilli crop failed because of
bad seeds. “We were forced to migrate to find work and repay our debts,” says
Srikanth, who dropped out of Class 10, while Gopichand left the polytechnic
course where he was training to be an automobile mechanic.  

Every morning, like the Setty brothers, around
1,000 people wait at Benz Circle hoping to be hired for daily wages at jobs
that require hard labour. While women commute from nearby villages and return
in the evenings, most of the men sleep on the pavements or dividers within a
three-mile radius of the Circle. They have migrated to the city from across the
state – from the northern Srikakulam
district of Andhra Pradesh to Nellore district in the state’s southern coastal
region.

Others have come here from Telangana’s Khammam and Nalgonda
districts. Banavath Kotaiah, 40, a Lambada tribal from Jamalapuram village in Khammam,
migrated after he could no longer cultivate on his half-acre podu  (forest) land. Without a patta (a government-issued ‘land
ownership’ document), he couldn’t apply for an agricultural bank loan. His land
has been lying empty for 15 years, ever since Kotaiah came to Vijayawada,
leaving behind his wife and two school-going sons. “I go back home [by train,
then by a bus] once a month and return after spending a day or two with my
family,” he says.  Kotaiah usually works
a gruelling 11 hours, from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., for Rs. 400. 

This wage rate varies, depending on the
job. It is decided by the employer since supply always outstrips demand at
these labour addas.
Employers – mainly contractors and construction mestris – come to Benz Circle to
pick up workers in two-wheelers, tractors and tempos, depending on the number
of labourers they need for the day. 

“We do all sorts of work – catering,
construction, working in houses – you tell us, we will do that,” says Kota
Veera Vasantha Rao, 52, a Dalit from Muppalla village in Krishna district, who came to Vijayawada in
2003. “These [labour] centres have been here since long and the number of
people looking for work has increased in the last few years.”

Vasantha Rao, a landless labourer, was
forced to leave his village after work on the farms dried up due to prolonged
water scarcity in the region. For two years, he paid Rs. 30 for a bed to sleep
on in a lodge near Vijayawada&#39;s railway station. When he could no longer afford
this small luxury, Vasantha Rao stared sleeping at the railway station itself.
Since 2014, he’s been sleeping at the city’s main bus station after it was
renovated, when Vijayawada became the state’s new capital. His homeless nights
in the city are punctuated by a trip back home every Sunday – around 58 kilometres away,
by a state transport bus. He returns on
Monday morning to Benz Circle, ready for work. 

There are more than 10 such labour clusters in Vijayawada, where approximately 6,000 men and women (estimates N.C.H. Srinivas,
general secretary of the Centre for Indian Trade Union, Krishna district)
gather every day looking for daily wage jobs. Besides Benz Circle, the most
prominent of these are at Satyanarayanapuram,
Vijaya Talkies and Chittinagar. 

Bhoolakshmi, 55, has been coming to Benz Circle for three
years. Along with 10-12 other women, she comes by a shared autorickshaw from
Kankipadu, 15 kilometres from
Vijayawada. She ends up spending nearly Rs. 100 every day on travel.

“We
don’t have work either in the fields or through MGNREGA [Mahatma Gandhi
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act]. So we come to the city,” she says.
“But we hardly get 2-3 days of work in a week and 400-500 rupees per day.” The
women are mainly hired for construction work and catering jobs, but are often
paid less than the men. 

At around 6 a.m. one Friday morning in February,
the crowd of hopefuls swells at Benz Circle, waiting patiently for someone to
hire them. At 10 a.m., at least half of the nearly 1,000 workers slowly start
dispersing and walk to a Sai Baba temple a kilometre away, where food is given
to poor people every day.

“Today’s earnings will be over by the end
of the day. If we don’t find work the next day, we have to stay hungry till we do,”
says Setty Srikanth. “Till then, we eat in the afternoon at the temple and fill
our stomachs with water from the municipal tap in the night.” Working for long on
an empty stomach sometimes makes young Srikanth dizzy. “I  drink water, rest for some time, and start
working again,” he says. 

Kotaiah recalls a hot
Vijayawada summer when he fainted after having eaten just once a day for weeks.
“I didn’t have any money to go to the hospital and my contractor gave me only
half my wage that day since I didn’t complete my shift. My co-workers pooled a little
money and took me to the government hospital that evening,” says Kotaiah, who
woke up the next day with a severe headache, nausea and high fever. He went
back to Jamalapuram for
two weeks, then returned to Vijayawada. “I had to go back to my village because
I don’t have a roof here and didn’t have the energy to work and make money,” he
says.

Many
workers at Vijayawada’s labour clusters also face a daily battle to protect
their hard-earned money from organised gangs who roam the streets at night.
“Just yesterday, I lost 1,500 rupees to the ‘blade batch’ [gang of] thieves.
Sometimes, we bury our money in mud to save it from those gangs,” says 25-year-old Kumar (who wanted only
his first name to be used). He is from Nidadavole town in West Godavari district, around 135 kilometres  from Vijayawada.
“When we don’t find any work, we buy
[country] liquor worth 50 rupees. We drink on the pavements and pass out.” 

Living on the streets also means facing
frequent police violence. “They come and drive us away and hit us with their lathis when some VIP is coming or when they want the city to look clean,” says
Kumar. 

There are only two NGO-run
night shelters in town, with a total capacity of 150 people. These were built by the Vijayawada Municipal
Corporation. Three more shelters have been ‘under construction’ for four years,
close to the bus station near Benz Circle and near another labour adda. The government says the additional shelters will be completed this
year.

“But they are not enough. The Supreme Court
guidelines [as per the court’s ruling in the 2016 ‘E.R. Kumar &amp; Others Vs
Union of India’ case, based on writ petitions concerning the right to shelter
of homeless persons in urban areas] state that for a population of every
100,000 people, a minimum of one shelter [each housing between 50-80 persons] should
be constructed. So Vijayawada [now with a population of around 15 lakhs] should have [at least] 15
shelters,” says Murali Krishna of Guide Foundation, a non-governmental
organisation which looks after the existing night shelters. 

“There are sufficient funds [for building
shelters] under the National Urban Livelihood Mission but there is a lack of
commitment. The government [through the NULM] should also give free dinner to people
in the shelters along with sessions about employment options [or skill
development] and help them find alternate housing in the city [as per
the Supreme Court ruling],” says Pragada Srinivasu, a Visakhapatnam-based activist with the
Association for Urban and Tribal Development. 

Such measures though remain a distant
dream, and the people who give the most to keep Vijayawada running with their
labour live in a state of constant flux. Their search for the next job, the
next meal, the next safe place to sleep continues.

Homeless, hungry and hoping for work

নিরাশ্রয়, ক্ষুধার্ত, কাজের খোঁজে হন্যে

بھوکے پیاسے اور بے گھر مزدوروں کو کام کی تلاش

பசியுடன் வேலைக்காக காத்திருக்கும் வீடற்றவர்கள்

পেটত ভোক লৈ কামৰ আশাত গৃহহীন শ্ৰমিক

ବାସହୀନ, ଭୋକିଲା ଏବଂ କାମ  ଆଶାରେ ଥିବା ଲୋକେ

Vijayawada

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Homeless, hungry and hoping for work

At labour clusters in Vijayawada – 'markets' where employers 'shop' for labourers – migrants wait every morning to be hired for hard daily wage jobs – driven from their villages by drought, debt and desperation

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