— Rahul Varman
Thirty workers were reported to have been killed on the afternoon of May 13, 2022, when an electronic goods assembly factory in the Mundka industrial area of Delhi caught fire. Most of those killed were young women, and almost all of them were migrant workers. They had come all the way to toil in the nation’s capital for a measly sum of Rs 6500 – 7500 per month. For a day or two, newspapers carried reports on the incident. Now the incident, like the young victims, has disappeared without a trace.
‘Collective Delhi’ has brought out a significant report on the Mundka factory fire. It shows that such ‘accidents’ in Delhi itself are a regular occurrence, and summarises information about 18 such incidents since the 1997 fire in Uphaar Cinema in New Delhi, when 59 members of a film audience were killed. The response of the administration seems to have a pattern – immediate tweets and statements by the likes of the Prime Minister and Chief Minister, expressing their ‘anguish’ and ‘shock’; a perfunctory arrest of the immediate owners of the property or those running the establishment; and some token amounts to the families, depending upon the visibility that the incident gains. For instance, as middle class lives were lost in the Uphaar Cinema fire, the compensation amount was way above whatever workers have got over the years for losing their lives. And once the issue fades away from media and memory, it is business as usual. That means no due diligence by the safety authorities, no systemic remedies from the concerned to prevent such accidents, no attempts to invest in a system that can hold anyone accountable for their (lack of) safety practices. Finally, such incidents are termed ‘accidents’, as if nothing could have been done to prevent such casualties.
: Ease of Doing Violations: Collective Delhi’s Report on the Mundka Factory Fire and the Pattern of Criminal Negligence in Delhi’s Industrial Areas
The report’s title highlights an important point: that in the name of ensuring the ‘ease of doing business’, there is a concerted attempt to further dilute significantly whatever worker rights and employer accountability exist on paper. It points out: “In India, the factory owners and corporations are usually not charged with severe clauses with the belief that it will harm the investment-friendly atmosphere.” The competition among countries, and within India among state governments, to attract private investment is a race to the bottom in labour standards and, if anything, through the new labour codes. While there is no accountability of the employer for such accidents in the new labour codes, they propose employee liability and new fangled tools like ‘web based inspection’!
As the report correctly notes, larger, established, corporations tend to outsource labour-intensive and hazardous activities to small companies, who operate outside the purview of the law. So even when industrial safety becomes a public issue, it is the smaller companies, on the lower tiers of value chains, who are made targets.
There appears to be complete consensus across the political and bureaucratic establishment that bringing in further ‘labour reforms’ is the only way to make India hurtle forward on the path of rapid economic growth and become the ‘new China’. A mere five days after the Mundka fire, India Inc. appealed to the government for a “fast-track rollout of the labour codes” for ‘ease of doing business’, and to enhance industry competiveness and employment generation (Economic Times, May 19, 2022). As should be obvious to any lay observer, finally this vast, mortgaged nation is to be redeemed on the emaciated shoulders of the working class – who, as peasants, are supposed to sacrifice their land and then work long hours in horrific conditions with half-filled bellies when they migrate to the cities. If some of them die as in Mundka, that is collateral damage and sacrifice for the greater good of private investment, which = good of the nation. This is the new India, which has no time to mourn for the young lives robbed in the process; a new India where the working people are meant to focus their attention on uprooting medieval mosques, mausoleums and minars.
In such times this report needs to be widely shared, read and discussed among the working classes and their friends. There is a dire need to think beyond what the establishment would like us to be busy with.
Download the report from:
rupeindia 
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