Skip to main content

Rajasthan stone quarry workers "adversely impacted" by demonetization, GST, aadhaar: Azim Premji Univ paper

 
Goods and Services Tax (GST), introduced by the Government of India in July 2017, was supposed to be a measure to simplify taxation by replacing by all indirect taxes with a single tax. But a new working paper, “Bijolia’s Harvest of Stone: Conditions of Work among Quarrying Labour in Rajasthan”, published by the Azim Premji University, has said, it has badly impacted stone mining business and, subsequently, the daily wage work in sandstone quarries.
Authored by scholar-journalist Anumeha Yadav, and based on her field research between October 2017 and January 2018, the paper quotes Heera Lal Meena, standing at a labour market site waiting to be picked up as a daily wager, “Every year, at this time, over a thousand of us gather at Shakkargarh chowk daily, This year, only 200 of us are coming here, and even of that, 100 return home empty-handed.”
If till recently, the number of workers employed in the quarrying job in and around Bijolia was 25,000, the scholar suggests, it may have shrunk to about 12,000.
Ram Lal Gujjar, another worker, says that there has been “continuous trouble” starting with demonetization, when the Government of India withdrew high currency notes, triggering a cash crunch in November 2016. “First, notebandi wiped out all work for over three-four months. After GST, the cost of building material went up and small traders were struggling. Nearly 75 percent sandstone ‘stocks’ have shut down.”
Ranjit Banjara, a local stone supplier, explains, “Earlier, anyone could source stone from the quarries. They would open a ‘stock’ of sandstone, and hire 10 to 15 kaariga (artisanal miners) and hamaal (freight workers). But local purchasers and traders of sandstone stocks that operated only in cash were wiped out in the months after notebandi and are struggling still.” Adds Gujjar, “When the small entrepreneur has no work, then who will employ daily wagers?”
The paper quotes workers complaining how the official push for a switch to use of bank accounts and aadhaar, a biometrics ID has disrupted even the access to social support of meagre pensions of Rs 500 a month and subsidised grains.
Says a worker, “For every small thing, they say ‘Go to the banks’, but there is no taawar (network) at the banks. At banks as well as ration shops, they ask us give our fingerprints on point of sale machines over and over. If there is even a small cut on our fingers, the authentication fails. Then, they deny us even grains.”
Worse, says the paper, despite a Rajasthan government notification of January 2018, which said that minimum wage of a “stone dresser”, a skilled job, should be Rs 283 a day, workers complained of poor wages. According to Subhash Mehr, though he is in the “highly skilled” category, at Rs 3 for each foot, by the evening, he had cut 80 feet stone, earning Rs 240, much less than the minimum wage.
The paper underlines, “Nearly half, or 53 percent workers, earned a minimum wage in the quarries, mostly men workers, though the workers say the minimum wage set between Rs 213 to Rs 271 a day itself was too low to manage basic expenses of rent, electricity, school fees etc.” It adds, “Of those who did not get a minimum wages, a majority, or 64 percent, were women.”
Rated one of the best in the world, Rajasthan’s sandstone is chiseled easily, and has acid and alkali resistant properties which allow it to weather saline sea winds easily. Thousands of tonnes of sandstone excavated and processed here makes its way through Gujarat’s Kandla port to the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. Rajasthan contributes 10 percent of the world’s production of sandstone.
Yet, according to the scholar, “While it is not clear to what extent was demonetisation a cause for it, sandstone production slowed down in Bijolia in the past year. Production increased from 19,63,556 lakh tonnes in 2014-15 to 21,01,040 tonnes in 2015-16, and then it fell sharply by almost 50 percent to 11,42,989 tonnes, in 2016-17.”

Comments

TRENDING

Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.  

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members.  As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The most striking comment came from BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who stated : "When a train derailed in the 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned. On the same morality, I demand PM Modi, HM Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Naidu resign so that a free and fair inquiry can be held. All that Modi and his associates have been doing so far is gallivanting, which must stop." Amidst widespread mourning, some fringe elements sought to communalize the tragedy. One post ...

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.