Exploitation in the Stone Quarries of Assam

[To be published in Himal South Asian in June 2008]

The idyllic and verdant hills of Nagaon district in Middle Assam mask a veritable web of labour exploitation in the various stone quarries across the region. Of vital use for road and other construction projects, the stones are derived through hard labour in extremely harsh conditions. The quarries mainly consist of manual crushers with some having machine crushers and Nagaon is the main centre for stone quarries in the state of Assam, providing stones for construction to many major cities, towns and road-building projects in the state.

The exploitation is harsh with extremely hazardous working conditions comprised of the most informal and unorganised labour. Furthermore a dangerous network of owners and managers including Surrendered ULFA (SULFA) folk, relatives of ruling-class political parties like the Congress and AGP, as well as members of the mercantilist class ensure that the oppressive web remains firmly in place with any attempts at unionising viciously thwarted down.

Unending Exploitation: Visits to quarries reveal the harshness of the working conditions on sight. In the blazing mid-day heat workers clear the ground of trees and bushes for digging, dig out boulders, manually crush them into smaller stones, and fill large boxes with them. The quarries don’t have any shady areas for rest or shelter, and even the natural shade of trees is gone because the foliage has been cleared away to dig for stones. Infants and toddlers, due to lack of facilities for crèches, are left on the ground or on the rocks without any care, while slightly older children work along with the adults. With no facilities for drinking water or a canteen, workers bring their own lunch and water, walking anywhere between 2-5 km early in the morning up rather steep hills in order to reach the quarries so that they might have enough time to fill boxes with stones.

The box is the unit of measurement for their daily wages, and workers receive around Rs 40 to 45 per box. Usually a single adult fills about one box a day on average, which results in workers receiving daily wages far lesser than the prescribed daily minimum wage of around Rs. 75. The wage payment is not only dangerously low in amount but also illegal in method. When workers spend their time clearing the area of foliage and digging for boulders, they get even lesser pay since they don’t have filled boxes to show. The boxes themselves are large, with a length of 6 feet, breadth of 3 feet and depth of 1 foot and with no real government standard for this industry, managers can exert further surplus labour value by trying to enlarge boxes. Payment is not given for half-filled boxes, so workers often end up working much longer than the prescribed 8-hour working day, often 11-12 hours or more, in order to fill up as many boxes as they can in a week.

A particular sign of criminality in the sector is the expansive usage of child-labour that one can witness in every quarry visited. Children as young as 8 end up crushing stones and filling boxes. Since it’s a matter of survival for families, quarry work ends up being a family-affair, as the more hands there are filling the boxes with rocks, the more income the family derives from the paltry piece-rate wages. The extraction of enormous surplus labour by managers and owners through the harsh piece-rate system, the complete lack of workers benefits, and extremely informal, unorganised nature of work has all members of the family working simply in order to survive.

The workers mainly hail from the Adivasi, Tiwa, Muslim and Karbi communities who reside in the various villages around the quarries. Labour is brought in through an abusive contractual network, each village having a contractor that the managers hire in order to recruit labour. Harsh material conditions and lack of choice, apart from a failure on the part of the state in properly implementing schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) result in workers being forced to work in the quarries.

Dangerous Nexus and Exploitative Tactics used: The workers showcased a genuine fear in trying to resist or demand higher wages, due to the presence of SULFA folk as managers, and who essentially function as a set of lumpen thugs in maintaining this exploitative environment. While being interviewed, they didn’t even want to reveal their names or the names of the quarries they worked in for this reason. In case a worker gets critically injured or dies, owners give Rs 2000 or 3000 for a small, traditional funeral and no compensation for the victim’s family. One of the quarries had a startling case of such criminality, where a worker had to have his legs amputated after a boulder fell on him. Soon after the operation, due to continued medical complications and lack of any medical aid or insurance, the worker died. The manager of the quarry paid Rs 2000 to the family and the rest of the medical expenses as well as costs relating to reclaiming the body and arranging for the funeral had to be borne by the family, a bill which ran up to Rs. 20,000. Such a disaster can be completely devastating for poor, rural family.

Discussions with progressive union activists and labour department officials also reveal the oppressive network of SULFA, ruling-class party folk and traders who run the quarries. On the other side of this dangerous situation are the various insurgent groups who extract “taxes” from the quarry owners. Indeed, while research was being done for this article along with a local labour activist, I was told to leave my backpack behind lest the two of us be confused as insurgents coming on an extortion spree since we were travelling by motorbike to the quarries.

A senior labour department official in Assam, who has witnessed numerous violations during his many inspections (and who would like to remain anonymous until his retirement) believes that what is happening in the quarries consists of the grossest and most criminal labour violations. He revealed that in reality workers are supposed to get around Rs. 75 per day, and that one of the main reasons owners feel emboldened to neglect labour welfare as per law is that even if prosecuted a case can drag on for years in courts, hardly easy for the working poor to deal with. And in the off chance that a verdict favouring labour is given, the punishment meted out for violations of the act is far too mild, usually a nominal fine that is hardly a financial hit for the owners.

Arup Mahanto, leader of the Grameen Shramik Sanstha, a progressive rural workers union in Assam which has been trying to organise the workers in the quarries as well, said that the maximum labour violations occurred in the stone quarries, even more than the oppressive tea industry. With no water, crèches, first-aid facilities, sanitation facilities for women (who form the majority of the workforce), and a complete lack of protective equipment, the owners find every means to extract the maximum amount of profit from the labourers. In striking similarity to the tea industry in Assam, Mahanto further added that managers prefer women workers primarily because they can be exploited more, noting that any events of verbal, physical or sexual abuse are completely buried because of the oppressive environment and tight hold that the owners have over the quarries.

Buddheswar Timung, a local rural activist in Bamuni Karbi village, which is close to many quarries, said that the lack of unionisation was a huge problem. Any attempts at organising the workers have met with either violence or threats of dismissal. Help is not derived from any of the identity-based insurgent movements in the area as they were only interested in extorting money from the owners, rather than fighting for labour rights. He also pointed to the corrupt network that owners and businesses have with political parties as well as bureaucrats as another critical reason for the continuing exploitation.

The corrupt nexus between state officials and business owners was mentioned by numerous people as one of the critical issues. The same labour department official I interview mentioned numerous cases of high ranking bureaucrats, including former Assistant Labour Commissioners, as well as many judges completely in the pockets of the business owners. He said that some of the maximum corruption occurs with respect to the Workman’s Compensation Act that guarantees compensation for workers in case of injury or death. The owner, in what is nothing short of cold criminality, just figures out that it’s cheaper to bribe both, the labour department official and the judge rather than pay the worker his due compensation. And in case there are honest men at the bureaucracy or judiciary, like the labour official I interviewed, then there is always the fallback option for the business owners of going to the biggest bastion of corruption to solve their problems and that’s the political bigwigs whose campaigns are funded by these very big businesses.

Finding a way out: The key problems contributing to this labour exploitation are not altogether impossible to solve. The wilful dereliction on the part of the state needs to be corrected. Serious measures need to be taken by cracking down on businesses that are guilty of these labour abuses as well as corrupt state officials, and more power needs to be given to the labour department to seriously bring these businesses to book.

Another critical gap that needs to be filled by the state is the proper implementation of the NREGA, which guarantees work to one member of all rural families at prescribed minimum wage rates. One of the main reasons that families end up in the exploitative quarry industry is lack of a viable alternative. If rural families had a viable option of being employed under NREGA, then not only would they be guaranteed minimum wage and certain workers benefits, but there would not be a glut of labour enabling quarry owners to exploit and extract surplus labour value. Furthermore, proper implementation of the NREGA would result in an increase of the crude market rate for wages, as unless workers get better wages than what they get under NREGA they would have no incentive to work in the quarries or any other informal sector for that matter. This was amply evident in Tamil Nadu, which was fairly successful in implementing the NREGA scheme in many districts in 2006, which then resulted in an increase of wage rates across the board in the informal sector in certain districts with employers competing with the well-regulated NREGA for labour. It also becomes easier for workers under NREGA to organise themselves into unions and other formations, thereby building class-alliances with workers in the informal sector as well.

There is always the hope that things can change. One of the foremost needs of the hour is in unionising the workers into a progressive, fighting labour formation that can not only struggle for better working conditions and higher wages but also launch campaigns that can break the corrupt nexus between state officials and business owners. This is where groups like the Grameen Shramik Sanstha as well as activists like Mahanto and Timung play a particularly important role. Indeed, even as workers were being interviewed for this article, Mahanto and Timung, who accompanied me to one of the quarries spoke to workers and set up a meeting with them to start a local union in the quarry. While displaying some hesitancy initially, the workers soon enthusiastically agreed to the meeting upon realising the possibilities of bettering their situation through unionising. It of course, remains to be seen whether it will go forward and how. Unionising the workers in the stone quarries of Assam is not going to be any easy task, and would require grit and courage. It is a hopeful sign that groups like the Grameen Shramik Sanstha display both in what is going to be a long road towards struggling against labour exploitation in this sector.