The coffee is warm. The marble beneath it is cool. By the time we settle into the morning, someone else's work is already holding our day together. The floor is clean. The entrance is attended. The lift is running. Beyond the window, buildings rise above roads carrying people towards offices, factories, hospitals and schools. For a moment, everything feels effortless. It is easy to begin the day without thinking about how it became ready, or whose hands made the room possible.
Before this was an office, it was a place of unfinished work. Materials arrived and were unloaded. Steel was placed. Concrete was poured. Wires were drawn through walls. Stone was cut, carried and fitted. People measured, lifted, checked, corrected and returned the next day to do it again. Now a table stands where those people once worked.
Around it, decisions will be made about costs, growth, employment, policy and the future. The people who helped create the room may never hear those conversations. We may never know their names.
When we think of the Taj Mahal, many of us think first of the ruler associated with its creation. We admire its beauty. We speak of the story it holds. The thousands of hands that cut the marble, carried it, fitted it, polished it — we cannot name them. History gave us one name and let the rest disappear into the monument itself.
That was then. Is it different now?
A building today carries the name of an institution, a company, a developer, a family. We know who commissioned it. We know who owns it. We know who occupies it. Do we know who built it? Not the contractor's name on a signboard. The people. The ones who were on the scaffolding at 7 AM. The ones who mixed the concrete by hand because the machine broke down. The ones who went home with dust in their lungs and came back the next morning anyway.
Who built your residence? Who built your office? Who built your factory? Can you answer that? Can I?
A payment made to that workforce is recorded somewhere as a line item. Labour cost. Contractor payment. Site expenses. For the person receiving it, that same entry is rent. It is a child's school fee. It is the bus fare home. It is medicine for a parent who has been unwell for weeks and hasn't said so, because saying so costs money nobody has.
Here is where the record and the reality start to separate: in practice, a large share of this workforce is still paid in cash — not by cheque, not by bank transfer. No trail. No proof of employment beyond a verbal understanding. No payslip to show a bank when they need credit. And then illness arrives, or an accident on site, or a family emergency, and the very people who built the walls that keep others safe find they cannot walk into a bank and ask for a loan. No salary slip. No PF number. No documented employer. No history a lender will trust.
They built the roof. They cannot borrow against a life they cannot prove they've been living. Is that acceptable to you? I don't know. I'm asking.
EPF. ESI. Gratuity. We use these terms in meetings, in compliance reports, in audits, in policy documents. We treat them as settled: either the organisation is compliant or it isn't; either the box is ticked or it isn't. Now put a person in front of those three letters. Someone who has spent fifteen years lifting, carrying, fixing, cleaning, guarding. Ask them: do you know what EPF is? Do you know if you're enrolled? Do you know your ESI number, or that one exists? Do you know that gratuity might be owed to you after five years — do you know how to check, who to ask, where to go? Do they know how to withdraw what may already be theirs?
For most of them, sitting exactly where you and I are sitting right now, the honest answer is no. Not because they are incapable. Unfamiliar language. No one explained it in a way that made sense. No portal they know how to open. No one who stayed on the phone long enough to walk them through a claim form. A system that assumes literacy, internet access and confidence that many were never given the chance to build. We taught them the machine. We taught them the process, the safety protocol, the quality standard. Did we teach them this?
A building can be repaired. New tiles. New wiring. A fresh coat of paint, and it looks new again. The person who built it only ages. The back that carried the load for twenty years doesn't get repainted. The knees that climbed the scaffolding every day don't get a warranty replacement. A man or woman who gave their working years to a site, a factory floor, a corridor they mopped every night for a decade — what happens to them when the body says no more? Is there a provident fund with their name correctly recorded? Is there a gratuity that was calculated, or one that quietly never came? Is there anyone, anywhere in that person's working life, who sat with them and made sure they understood what they were owed and how to claim it? I don't know their names. You might know some of them.
You are in HR. You sign off on payroll compliance. You are in Admin. You manage vendors, contractors, site staff. You are on the leadership team — CEO, MD, Chairman — and this is, ultimately, your organisation's name on the building. You are a policymaker, a minister, a law enforcer, a member of the highest courts of this country, and this is, ultimately, the law you write, interpret and are meant to enforce. Every one of you is, right now, sitting in a place that someone else built. So I am not asking you a rhetorical question to move on from. I am asking you to actually sit with it, the way I am asking myself to sit with it.
Who built the place you are reading this from? Are they on record? Are they enrolled? Do they know what EPF, ESI and Gratuity actually mean for them — not as line items, but as money and medicine and dignity when they need it most? Are they paid in a way that lets them prove, to a bank or to themselves, that their work happened? Then and now, what has actually changed, besides the name on the signboard?
I return to the coffee cup on the marble table. Somewhere in the history of that surface is a person who handled its weight, worked its edges, helped put it in place. Somewhere in the present is a person who keeps it clean. I don't know their names. I don't know if they know theirs — the numbers, the forms, the entitlements that are supposedly already theirs. I don't have the answers. But you do.
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*Author, Writer, Social Commentator. Blog: saurabhthakore.blogspot.com
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