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Deccan Herald » Sunday Spotlight » Detailed Story
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In Dandi, salt isn’t a lifeline
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Shruba Mukherjee
in Kutch (Gujarat)
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Salt mine workers lead a life of drudgery in the very place where Gandhi led the Dandi march.
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If 75 years ago Mahatma Gandhi launched a march to protest against the British imperialist forces for denying Indians their right to make salt, and for imposing a salt tax on the commoners, another march is now needed to ensure that salt workers get the remuneration that’s due to them and to live with dignity.
While there was much hype about the platinum jubilee celebrations of the Dandi march, not a single word has been spared for the hapless salt workers in coastal Gujarat, who add ‘taste’ to our lives, even as their world goes bland.
Meagre amount
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They slog for almost eight to 10 hours in the blazing sun. It’s a back-breaking job of cleaning salt pans, filling them with sea water, scraping away the layers of salt and collecting white crystals in tiny mounds for transportation to factories for iodisation. All this work fetches a salt worker a meagre sum of Rs 1,000-Rs1,300 per month.
The salt pan owners, disregarding the Minimum Wages Act, decide the wage. There is no medical allowance or relief for old and disabled workers.
When one adds salt to food, it hardly crosses one’s mind that a man, somewhere, in the country might be losing his eyesight to make the white crystals or that his wife might be breaking out in a rash, the result of spending long hours touching salty water, and, that his children might have missed out on education.
For hundreds of salt pan workers, who have migrated from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and the remote tribal areas of Gujarat, government schemes don’t mean a thing. The trade unions do not take up their cause as they are migrant workers without a permanent address. Political parties leave them out of their agendas as they are not a solid vote bank.
The salt workers have to battle it out alone. Their work scars their psyche. Sixty-year-old Thakarshi Prabhu of Naradiya village has lost his eyesight; he has an infection which cannot be treated. Bimabai Barariya, a salt pan worker in the Sanger village in Kutch district, says, “For at least eight to ten hours we have to work in the sun and the terrible glare causes eye problems. Our request for dark glasses has fallen on deaf ears.”
The workers are accustomed to the glare and have to strain their eyes to look at something even in normal light. Their pleas to the salt pan owners for boots too went unheeded. Amritben, who has been working in the salt pans for more than 15 years, made a pair of shoes of rubber tyre, as a last resort, to protect her feet. “But even these shoes are not comfortable; and lack the grip we need when we work in saline water and in the field scraping the salt,” she says.
Besides eye and skin problems, these people, usually from the scheduled caste, suffer from malaria, fever and malnutrition as basic health amenities are not in place here.
Living in a temporary shanty in the salt pan itself, which is not located in the main village, the workers have no access to sanitation, potable water and medical facilities. Even if they get a permanent structure as shelter, it is small and badly ventilated, 6 ft by 7 ft room, without any ventilation for sometimes, many persons.
Amritben says the water used for cleaning salt is also used for bathing and potable water is available only in the offices of salt pan owners. “The nearest primary health centre is 20 km away and I have to spend as much as Rs 200 on conveyance alone when my daughter had labour pains in the night,” says Godavariben.
Salt layers
Children from such families also miss out on school life as they are in the salt pan from September to May and can go back to their villages only in the monsoon months when there is no work.
Twelve-year-old Jagriti, who has migrated with her parents in Kutch, says carries little loads of salt and helps her mother in scraping the salt layers. The education of salt pan workers is left to voluntary organisations. The government health worker does not visit the salt pan area which is usually located in a far-flung area. The salt workers are also deprived of anganwadi facilities, including nutrition for pregnant and lactating mothers and immunisation of children, because of their nomadic way of life. However they are in one place for eight months in a year. “Even to get daily rations it is a drudgery because we can go to the market only after sun down and in the villages not many shops are open,” says Sabitaben. So their daily diet doesn’t include essential things like green vegetables, milk and fruit.
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Sunday, April 3, 2005
