Download The Urban Turn Transcript
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Transcript of symposium held in December 2002 with historians and sociologists Gyan Prakash, Jairus Banaji, Sujata Patel and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar organised by PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) at the Bombay Paperie, Mumbai.
The collapse of the Bowling Company in Lower Parel after the storm which lashed the city in the past several days perhaps pales in comparison to the larger human tragedies that took place in other parts of the metropolis this week. However, the potential for a tragedy like the landslide which occurred at Azad Nagar in Ghatkopar should not be overlooked. Luckily the entertainment outlet remained closed on Thursday, but had the bowling alleys and the cafe inside been filled to their normal capacity, hundreds of people could have perished, when the rusted stilts and columns which grounded the century-old structure gave way.
Questions have already been raised as to the integrity of the surveys undertaken barely two months ago — by both the Bombay Municipal Corporation engineers and the so-called ‘independent’ engineers hired by the proprietors of the Bowling Company — which certified the structural integrity and safety of the restaurants, clubs, and discos in the compound. These assurances were made public shortly after the Phoenix Mills was shut by the BMC, following the collapse of a building wall under renovation in late April. Both A D Singh, the owner of the Bowling Company, and the Ruias, the managers of Phoenix Mills, had stated that the constructions were sound, and that the public need not fear another such disaster — one precisely of the type which occurred two days ago. The Bowling Company and the other outlets in the Phoenix Mills re-opened several weeks after this tragedy, in which five labourers were killed and twelve others injured. The offences registered against the Ruias by the Mumbai Police for violating municipal building regulations and stop-work notices were quietly forgotten, and partying at the newly christened ‘Phoenix Garden City’ continued.
These two incidents at Phoenix Mills, raise other pressing questions about our city and its development, questions which are rarely posed in the media. Newspaper accounts stoke our anxieties about encroachments and illegal constructions on public lands, exposing the nefarious links between slumlords, bureaucrats, and corrupt urban officials for whom, it seems, the only answer is the municipal bulldozer. However, the Bowling Company, which opened just over a year ago, is itself an instance of the type of shoddy, unauthorised construction that we see spilling out onto public spaces and footpaths all over the city.
All of the lands of textile mills of central Bombay are reserved for industrial use, and governed by the Development Control Rules of the city, which were amended in 1991 to allow for the lease of portions of mill land. The funds accrued from the lease of these surplus lands were earmarked in Government schemes for reinvestment in the textile mills, to restart production and provide jobs to thousands of workers who were being retrenched by mill-owners-turned-real estate barons. While propagating a myth of ‘industrial sickness’ which served as a ruse to exploit accelerating real estate value in the city in the early nineties, thousands of workers were harassed by mill managements, and thrown onto the streets. In order that mill-owners, their political patrons and underworld sponsors, could profit from the sale of the lands in these once-productive industrial areas.
Availing of relief schemes sanctioned by the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) in Delhi, which granted tax relief and gave amnesties on loans for the sick mills, the owners claimed to revive textile production. Siphoning off the money from these revival and modernisation schemes, they sold or scrapped their machinery, withheld the wages and legal dues of workers, subcontracted production to the powerlooms of Bhiwandi, and harassed the workers into leaving their jobs. Phoenix Mills and its owners, Bharat and Ashok Ruia, who had availed of several such schemes from 1977 onwards, in 1995 approached the BIFR to sanction a relief scheme which stipulated new purchases and upgradation of machinery, and reinstatement of its workers. However, from April 1998 onwards, the management arbitrarily shut the gates of the mill, vacated and demolished the departments earmarked for modernisation, and suspended and charge-sheeted workers who had been demanding regular work. All the while the future of the mill-workers was being spelled out in the high-rises, dance clubs, corporate and bank offices which were sprouting in the mill compound — while textile production was stopped, public money pocketed, and the scheme for industrial revival buried. Phoenix Mills was released from the purvey of the BIFR in 1999, by which time all its permanent staff of up to 800 workers was retrenched.
In a letter to the BMC in early 1998, the Ruias sought permission to expand the canteen and recreation facilities of the mill for, they claimed, ‘over 1000 workers’, whom they claim had been demanding such amenities. This fraudulent application, made at a time when the workers were being denied entry into their own workplace, was the guise for the Bowling Company, which opened in May 1999 on the site of the processing department of the mill, which was to be revived under the BIFR scheme. One former worker of Phoenix Mills remarked that the entry fee for the Bowling Company is four times the daily salary of a worker in the small-scale sweatshops of Bhiwandi — where textile production has been shifted in the past three decades, to dodge protective labour legislation and public scrutiny.
Since the collapse of the Bowling Company on Thursday, the BMC has asked the mill-owners to submit the building plan of the mill compound for further scrutiny. If such a plan exists, which is doubtful, it would show clearly that more than two-thirds of the land of the mill has been questionably redeveloped, from which the owners are making quick profits, in violation of the DC Rules and the sanctioned revival schemes. While textiles remain one of the country’s largest industries and foreign exchange earners, bowling alleys are, like real estate, speculative, fly-by-night operations. The scandalous and false statements of both municipal authorities and the proprietors of Phoenix Mills — which was made obvious in the collapse of the Bowling Company this week — should make us wonder whether our city isn’t also being leased out to those just interested in making a quick profit.
Originally published in Lawyer’s Collective Magazine, 13 July 2000
Jan Breman, Karin Kapadia, Jonathan Parry, eds., The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (Contributions to Indian Sociology, Occassional Studies 9). New Delhi and London: Sage Publications, 1999
Marking both a renewal of interest in labour studies and an important disciplinary shift, the publication of this anthology is a significant event. Introduced by Jonathan Parry, the fourteen essays by sociologists, anthropologists and historians in the volume include two “book-ends†— introductory and concluding reviews of the respective literatures on the “organised†and “informal†sectors of the industrial economy in India, both by Jan Breman. These chart the shifts in labour studies from the narrow emphasis on the tiny formal sector of the economy — about workers’ “commitment†to the industrial setting, measures of productivity, the social profile of formal sector workers, and trade union strategies — to the much larger and unwieldy “informal†sector of the economy, incredibly neglected by research scholars. While questioning this dualism in the study of economic activity in India, Breman raises questions about the formation and coherence of the working-class or proletariat as an identity and analytical category, the diversity of forms of wage labour and industrial production — from home-based to small workshops to large factories — and the multiplicity of workers’ identities in both formal and informal occupations.
The essays are as follows. Dilip Simeon offers a history of the coal industry in Jharia, South Bihar, and the changing relations of capital, labour and state in the context of working class and tribal movements. Chistropher Pinney locates a pessimistic discourse on industrial modernity as “Kaliyug†for the managers of a large plant in Nagda, Madhya Pradesh, while for the local workers — the subject of these constructions of rural rusticity and traditionalism — there is a less nostalgic feeling towards the exploitation from which the factory has liberated them. Jonathan Parry examines the Bhilai Steel Plant and takes issue with E.P. Thompson’s thesis on the transformation brought about by industrial work discipline, arguing this effaces the variability of rhythms of industrial production.
Two pieces explore memory and the construction of the past. Douglas Haynes, in a piece on the textile industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, discusses the idioms of industrial relations and their inflection by languages of morality, caste and kinship, in different ways deployed by both employers and workers to articulate contemporary concerns. Chitra Joshi, writing on the crisis-striken textile mills of Kanpur — today mostly closed — explores the narratives of industrial decline of a decimated workforce with a memory of the labour militancy in the 1930s.
Raj Chandavarkar, in a rich meditation on labour historiography — with material on the Bombay textile strikes of 1928–9 — offers a critique of mechantistic narratives of industrialisation and proletarian consciousness, and their insufficient treatment of the contingencies in the formation of class identity. Samita Sen, in a history of the Calcutta jute mill industry, foregrounds the position of women in the urban industrial workforce, documenting how their labour and lives were marginalised and domesticated by colonial capitalism and patriarchy.
Several pieces directly address the “informal†sector. One of the weaker contributions is Arjan de Haan’s piece on evolution of the badli, or substitute, labour system in the Calcutta jute industry, in which he unconvincingly argues that the badli system, labour recruitment, and migration patterns need to be seen as an aspect of workers’ agency, their “choices†and “valuesâ€, rather than as a business strategy to retain a flexible and exploited labour force. Peter Knorriga maps the unstable industrial relations in the small-scale, mostly home-based production units in the Agra footwear industry.
Karin Kapadia contests traditional arguments about class formation in her study of the synthetic diamond industry in rural Tamilnadu, arguing that workers’ identities are mediated, and the “flexibility†of the globalising labour market maintained, through gender discourses and practices. Miranda Engelshoven analyses the formation of the urban Saurashtra Patel community through the the production relations of the diamond industry in Surat, and discusses obstacles to workers’ organisation. Geert de Neve analyses the practice of tying labour to maintain a stable workforce in powerloom industry in Tamil Nadu, and how what was once an employers’ strategy of bondage has become a reciprocal relation for workers in search of a better livelihood.
The revival of interest in labour studies in India — distinct from the post-Independence intellectual and policy interest in labour — comes both at a time when the foundational categories of the disciplines concerned with the study of labour are being contested, as well as in a political conjuncture when working-class radicalism is at a low ebb and capital at its most expansive. The contributions to this exceptional volume confront the conceptual challenges faced in the study of the historical and contemporary working landscape in India, and offer exciting new possibilities for research by all social scientists.
Originally published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, Fall 2001.
The fate of Bombay’s textile mill industry, its working class, and the valuable swathes of land its mills occupy in the centre of the city, is a fin-de-siècle echo of a familiar urban theme. Claims on land and space have been the narrative thread of the most celebrated and most notorious chapters in the urban history of Bombay. These range from the legendary reclamations that linked up several marshy outposts and settlements to compose the island city in the eighteenth century, to the extension of the railways which promoted suburban development, to the land-grabbing and builders’ mafias of contemporary Mumbai.
The historic mills of the city are industrial dinosaurs dotted around the city landscape, whose textile production has been eclipsed in efficiency and profitability by the sweatshop labour employed in powerloom towns like Bhiwandi and Malegaon. The uncompromising militancy of the great textile strike in the early eighties convinced the city millowners that dealing with unions was unnecessary when production could be maintained in powerloom units in the urban hinterland — small-scale workshops that prevent the organisation of workers, which evade protective labour legislation, and which run on black money, stolen electricity and powerful political patronage.
By the late eighties, the lands of the mill compounds became more valuable for the millowners than the cloth these mills produce, and the workers whose livelihoods they have sustained for several generations. Thus In 1991, the fate of the mills began to be spelled out with the new Development Control (DC) Rules for the city, framed by Sharad Pawar’s Government, permitting the sale of a portion of the mill lands, ostensibly to channel the funds into the revival of the industry. This reinvestment never in fact occurred, the money earned from the lease and sale of the lands was instead siphoned off by the millowners, and the mills closed and their premises redeveloped into high-rises, office spaces, discotheques, restaurants and bowling alleys. Parallel to this ruthless gentrification, mill workers saw their wages withheld, the gates of their mills arbitrarily shut, and the signing away of their rights by the sole recognised union for the textile industry, the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS), whose underworld patronage is well-known.
Since 1991, cases filed in the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) in New Delhi, requesting permission to sell surplus mill lands have swelled. Management cited the “sickness” of the mills, when the real reason lay in the skyrocketing real estate values and the chance to relocate production, profiteer from land scams and tax breaks granted by the BIFR, while they closed the units, and sold the machinery and workers for scrap. At the peak of the property boom several years ago, the value of the mill lands reached somewhere around Rs 5000 crores. And though the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance which came to power in 1995 promised to halt the sale of mill lands, restart production and provide jobs, they proved even more enthusiastic partners to the millowners’ profiteering.
With a further revision of the DC Rules on the cards, the new Congress-NCP Government has shown a determination to solve this festering issue and expedite the sale of mill and other reserved industrial lands, 23% of the land of the island city. The mills and working-class chawls of central Mumbai, crushed between the congested business district and the expanding suburbs, have in the past decade come under the combined pressure of the spiralling real estate market, the powerful lobby of builders and politicians, and the burgeoning middle-classes, starved of space. In the past decade, a battery of chattering economists, architects, society journalists and corporate promoters have advanced plans for the redevelopment of the “dead†mills into movie and design studios, five-star hotels, office spaces for multinational and corporate firms, and posh restaurants.
The casualty of these blinkered developments — satisfying the consumption of the few, not production for the many — has been Mumbai’s once-proud working-class, the mill-workers who spearheaded the trade union movement in India, and who today continue to hold out for their salaries and jobs. Historically, they have lent their strength to the calls for swadeshi and azadi, and their culture nestles in the heart of Bombay’s growth into a vibrant industrial city, stretching back to the nineteenth century. Barely twenty years ago, the working population of “Girangaon” — the “village of mills”, a web of industrial units, chawls, markets and maidans which spreads across central Bombay — numbered 2.5 lakhs.
This has now dwindled to less than 50 thousand, and the displaced numbers have not been reabsorbed into the city’s organised workforce. Banished into a life of casual and insecure employment, some have died of trauma or starvation, others have taken to selling vegetables or working as security guards in the gleaming skyscrapers and offices coming up in the old mills. Most notably, it is estimated that much of the underworld’s ranks are composed of former mill-workers and their unemployed sons. Though unrecognised unions like the non-party Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti (GKSS) have made significant gains in reopening seven mills since 1989, since Independence the Bombay mill workers have been straitjacketed to the representation of the recognised union. The current president of the RMMS, Sachin Aher, is the nephew of the notorious gangster-politician Arun Gawli.
In these days when the prevailing orthodoxy tells us that state intervention in economic processes is to be avoided, one should think for a moment what this surrender to “market forces” means for our social fabric and overall urban design. With the removal of restrictions on land use that accompanied the 1991 DC Rules, land-grabbing has proliferated, the nexus between corrupt civic and state authorities, builders, and gangsters increased, as has the unregulated expansion horizontally and skywards of new hutments and high-rises.
This privatised city presents a strangely postmodern vista. Advertising agencies, restaurants and bowling alleys, software companies and art galleries are sprouting in the former stronghold of working-class culture and the birthplace of India’s industrial modernity. While these new offices shelter beneath the towering mill chimneys that now jostle with skyscrapers for command of Bombay’s skyline, there is a dark irony not lost on many Mumbaikars. Least of all to the security guard who now tends to the gates of this newly discovered elite paradise.
Originally published in the People’s Reporter, Mumbai, July 2000
The history of Mumbai is a narrative of the struggle over space. The fate of the mill lands of central Mumbai, and its industries and workers, is the latest chapter in this story.
The life of any city is not simply tied to its flows of goods, services and capital, but also to its patterns of work, leisure and movement — all of which revolve on the use of space. Throughout Mumbai’s history, claims on land and space have been the narrative thread of the most celebrated and most notorious chapters in our urban history. These range from the legendary reclamations that linked up several marshy outposts and settlements to compose the island city in the eighteenth century, to the disastrous Back Bay Reclamation Scheme in the 1920s. This scheme to fill in the Back Bay earned the name ‘Lloyd’s Folly’, after the bungling of the then Governor, whose plan ended in failure and infamy because of engineering mistakes, corruption, and the crash in land values during the Great Depression.
The story of the mill lands is a fin-de-sicle echo of this familiar urban theme. The historic textile mills of the city are industrial dinosaurs dotted around the city landscape, whose textile production has been eclipsed in efficiency and profitability by the sweatshop labour employed in powerlooms towns like Bhiwandi. The millowners realised long ago that the lands of the city mill compounds are more valuable than the textiles they produce, and the workers whose livelihoods they have sustained for several generations.
The fate of the mills began to be spelled out with the new Development Control Rules for the city, framed in 1991 by Sharad Pawar’s Government, permitting the sale of a portion of the mill lands, to channel the funds into the revival of the industry. This reinvestment never in fact occurred, the money earned from the lease and sale of the lands was instead siphoned off by the millowners, and the mills closed. In the past several years, the workers saw their wages withheld, the gates of their mills arbitrarily shut, and the intimidation of union activists with underworld support.
Since 1991, cases filed in the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction, requesting permission to sell surplus mill lands swelled. Managements cited the ‘sickness’ of the mills, when the real reason lay in the skyrocketing real estate values and the chance to siphon off the money earned from revival schemes, profiting from the land deals, while they closed the units, and sold the machinery and workers for scrap. At the peak of the property boom several years ago, the value of the surplus mill lands reached somewhere around Rs 5000 crores.
With the further revision of the DC Rules proposed by the three-member committee of the BMC, the Chief Minister has shown a determination to solve this festering issue and expedite the sale of mill and other reserved industrial lands, 23% of the land of the island city. The mills and working-class chawls of central Mumbai, crushed between the congested business district and the suburbs, have in the past decade come under the combined pressure of the spiralling real estate market, the powerful lobby of builders and politicians, and the burgeoning middle-classes, starved of space.
The real casualty of this development has been Mumbai’s once-proud working-class, the mill-workers who spearheaded the trade union movement in India, and who today continue to hold out for their salaries and jobs. Historically, they have lent their strength to the calls for swadeshi and azadi, and their culture nestles in the heart of Mumbai’s growth into a vibrant industrial city, stretching back to the nineteenth century. Barely twenty years ago, the working population of ‘Girangaon’ — the ‘village of mills’, a web of industrial units, chawls, markets and maidans which spreads across central Mumbai — numbered 2.5 lakhs.
This has now dwindled to less than 50 thousand, and the displaced numbers have not been reabsorbed into the city’s organised workforce. Banished into a life of casual and insecure employment, some have died of trauma or starvation, others have taken to selling vegetables or working as security guards in the gleaming skyscrapers and offices coming up in the old mills. Most notably, it is estimated that 60–70% of the underworld’s ranks are composed of former mill-workers and their children.
Recently I met a group of young entrepreneurs, just returned from New York, who are soon to launch a online literary journal, supported by venture capital. When I asked them where they proposed to set up their office, they suggested the Raghuvanshi Mills Compound in Parel, ‘to get that industrial look.’ A statement of postmodern chic, they were perhaps unaware that late last year, the workers of Raghuvanshi Mills took over the unit in the hope of restarting production, which had been halted for the previous three months. The owner of the mill, Hemal Thakkar, had not paid them for several months, and had not complied with a BIFR scheme to restart production to capacity. Instead he continued to sell the land. Two years earlier, Thakkar’s father Vallabbhai was shot in broad daylight by one of Arun Gawli’s lieutenants, in what many have claimed was an attempt by builders to extort money from the millowners.
The murder of the mills and the forcible eviction of their workers is, however, not an isolated instance of rapacious profiteering at the expense of our urban community. The aggrieved residents of Worli Seaface, who are opposing the Bandra-Worli bridge; the unfortunate neighbourhoods where new flyovers promise obstruction and pollution; and even the dying mangroves in Mahim Creek, choked by new roads and reclamations — all can all testify to this. The mills are symbolic of issues facing every resident of Mumbai, rich or poor, big or small. In these days when the prevailing orthodoxy tells us that state intervention in economic processes is to be avoided, one should think for a moment what this surrender to ‘market forces’ means for our social fabric and overall urban design. With the removal of restrictions on land use that accompanied the 1991 DC Rules, land-grabbing has proliferated, the nexus between corrupt civic authorities, builders, and gangsters increased, as did the expansion horizontally and skywards of new hutments and highrises.
Originally published as Mill on the Loss in the Indian Express Mumbai Newsline, 5 April 2000
Download The Murder of the Mills
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This pamphlet was a case study of the redevelopment of the Phoenix Mills in Lower Parel, Mumbai conducted from November 1999 to March 2000 and published by the Lokshahi Hakk Sanghatana and Girangaon Bachao Andolan in Mumbai in April 2000.
Download Workers Rights and Labour Law Resource Book
http://www.heptanesia.net/documents/labourlaws.pdf
Workers Rights and Labour Law: A Backgrounder for the Workshop on Labour was compiled and edited with the help of Jairus Banaji and the Trade Union Solidarity Committee (TUSC) in Mumbai in 1999. It was published forthe National Conference on Human Rights, Social Movements, Globalisation and the Law held at Panchagani, Maharashtra in December 1999 by the India Centre for Human Rights and Law, Mumbai.
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