The Beautiful and the Damned (30 page)

‘Pradip’s a big man,’ he said to me, and slapped the tongsman on his back. ‘Are you going to treat me to tea or what?’

Pradip laughed and said, ‘No, you’re the big man.’

Nevertheless, he had to pay for Sarkar’s tea. The amount was small, 2 rupees, and I would have expected the contractor to pay, if only to show me how generous he was towards the workers. Yet he had insisted on the opposite, which meant that he was either very stingy or that he didn’t care what I thought and was interested in demonstrating his power over Pradip.

In his own way, Sarkar was a migrant worker too, but at a different level. He was a middleman, a contractor, the person who hired workers for the factory and relieved the management of any responsibility of dealing with them. He too had worked in steel factories around India – in Orissa, Kerala, Maharashtra and Goa. ‘That’s where I met Pradip, in Goa, and where I got to see that he was a good worker.’ Then he added something strange, holding my gaze and speaking in Bengali, perhaps so that Pradip wouldn’t understand what he was saying. ‘There are many bad things I’ve done in my life, and which I won’t tell you about – even though I can see you want to know about them. What I will say is that I walked a crooked path for all these years but it made my life no better. I’m no wealthier now than when I started out and so I’ve decided to go straight.’

I was puzzled by this sudden declaration, but Sarkar wouldn’t elaborate. When I asked him about the factory, his answers seemed concocted. I wanted to know what made Pradip such a good worker that Sarkar had called him to Kothur from Calcutta.

‘He’s a tongsman,’ Sarkar replied. ‘Have you seen him working? It’s skilled work and he makes a lot of money. Anything between twelve to thirteen thousand rupees with overtime.’

Pradip, who had fallen silent, had earlier told me that he earned around 9,000 rupees a month.

‘How long can a person work as a tongsman?’ I asked Sarkar. ‘The work looks difficult.’

‘Oh, these people can go on for ever. There’s one man at the factory who’s nearly seventy. What’s the name of that fellow, Pradip, you know the one I’m talking about?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pradip said.

I had not seen a single worker over forty, and I wondered how many years Pradip had left as a tongsman. The work available at the steel factory was for the young and so the workers were migrants in another sense – wanderers in the land of youth, from which they would disappear when they got older, to be replaced by another person from India’s unceasing stream of labour.

I asked Sarkar if I could meet the legendary seventy-year-old worker, but he evaded the question. Instead, he wandered into a series of non sequiturs. First, he told me about a vacation he was planning to take with his family. He would go to the north-east, he said, and wanted to know of places to visit. Then he abruptly declared that having decided to go straight, he was also hoping to improve his situation in life by going abroad. ‘If things go right,’ he said, ‘I’ll be in South Africa by the end of this year. It’ll be work at a steel factory there too. I’m still working on the details involved in getting a job like this. But if it comes through, you understand, I’ll start making some real money for the first time in my life.’ Sarkar finished his tea and walked unhurriedly towards his bike. ‘Are you going to the market? I’ll give you a lift,’ he said.

I wasn’t, but I decided to take a ride with the middleman, wondering if he would reveal anything more of himself if it was just the two of us. We rode down the highway, speeding towards the market, and it struck me how class in Kothur was directly related to the transportation one used. For the owners and managers, there were the air-conditioned Scorpio SUVs and Toyota Innova minivans. I had seen such vehicles one afternoon when a group of buyers visited the factory, businessmen wearing sunglasses and leaning back against the white covers of their seats, reminding me of Rajkumar and the rich
farmer in Armoor in whose company I had gone to visit Mahipal. For middlemen contractors like Sarkar, there were motorcycles. As for the tongsmen and other workers, they walked or perhaps rode a bicycle, like the battered one Mohan and his friends had found in a garbage heap and put to use for their trips to the market.

When Sarkar stopped his motorcycle, I asked him if he wanted to sit somewhere and talk.

‘Some other time,’ he said, and his smile was a little menacing as he drove off.

I realized that he had just wanted me away from the factory. He had removed me from the site neatly, without any fuss.

Neither Pradip nor the security guards had a sense of the steel factory as a whole. Perhaps Sarkar did, but he had been keen to get rid of me rather than show me around. For the overview I wanted of the factory, I had to visit the management. I had met Rao, the managing director, at the very beginning, but I didn’t see him again until at the very end, by which time I felt I had come as close as I could to viewing the factory through the eyes of the workers. And yet, from the tongsman to the guards, each worker had only a fragmentary, partial picture of the factory, a cog’s perspective of a large wheel. When I put these different fragments together, I got not a whole but a bewildering, cubist image. For Pradip, the factory was the weight of the metal tongs, the heat of the furnace, the repetitive motion of shovelling ingots and the induction furnace. For him, it didn’t matter that ingots came out as TMT bars, or that the TMT bars were then used to construct buildings. The end product mattered to Pradip only if the orders tapered off and he got fired, in which case he would pick up his belongings, shove them into his shoulder bag, put his battered purse into the back pocket of his jeans and take a train to the village or to some other city.

As for Mohan and his friends, they occupied the edges of the factory, not only in the sense that they sat at guard posts on the
perimeter of the factory where they looked out for sneak thieves or trouble among the workers, but also in that they had nothing to do with producing the TMT bars. Also, they were not only an ethnic minority, slightly vague to the other workers, but they had to keep themselves deliberately apart in order to maintain their authority. The factory’s actual functioning was a mystery to them, although all three of them thought the work to be dangerous. They found the surroundings of Kothur a mystery too. With time, they might adapt to the place, but all three had said they were unlikely to stay long.

Towards the end of my stay, I went to see Rao in his office on the second floor of the administrative building. He wasn’t in, but the secretary led me into the chamber and asked me to wait. The room felt institutional, with metal cabinets, a couple of desks and chairs, an old desktop computer and an inkjet printer. There was a calendar on the wall with a picture of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and a garlanded photograph of an elderly couple who, I was told, were the deceased parents of the owner of the factory. There was a coconut sitting on one of the filing cabinets, with six dried palm leaves spread out on top of it, a mutant hybrid of palm and coconut.

Rao was a handsome man, with a generous head of hair. He was also surprisingly frank. I would have expected him to be tougher, to have a little more TMT in him, capable of being hard with the workers and eager to keep nosy outsiders away. But perhaps he had people like Sarkar to do that for him, and above him was the invisible owner, who must have been tough too. Rao had a degree in industrial chemistry and had worked at other factories – in Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra – before moving to Vinayak steel nearly two decades ago. He had started here as a chemist, analysing the final products for their quality, and had worked his way up to the managing director’s position. He said he was paid very well, with perks like a large house and a chauffeured car, but he had to put in long hours in return, often working through the weekends.

In Rao’s mind the story of the factory was analogous to the story of contemporary India, a narrative of vast improvements and modernization leading to ever greater profits. He pointed to a plaque on his desk from the state pollution control board to emphasize that
pollution had been cut down considerably at his factory, in contrast to rival operations. The production method had been vastly improved as well, he said. They had imported a new, efficient technology from a German company, which was paid a royalty per tonne of steel produced at the factory. The factory had been doing excellent business until the end of 2007. There had been a construction boom in the country, Rao said, and he had been supplying TMT bars to a number of construction companies in and around Hyderabad, including a very large one called Maytas Infra.

But things weren’t going quite as well since January 2008. Although he didn’t say so, I thought that perhaps this too ran parallel to the story of contemporary India, showing how the rise of the new India had, in recent years, become something of a fall. A nationwide downturn had led to a slowing down of construction projects and a consequent cancellation of orders for Rao’s products. He had been especially affected by problems in Hyderabad around Satyam, the fourth-largest software and outsourcing company in India at one time, which had links to the construction company Maytas Infra. Rao had received large orders from Maytas Infra, which had won the contract for building a subway system in Hyderabad. But Maytas Infra had run out of money and stopped working on the metro project. Since it owed Rao’s factory 3.5 crore rupees and was unable to pay this amount, it had instead offered four ‘villas’ in a development owned by a sister company called Maytas Properties. Rao had taken the villas, he said, but their property values had declined and he was concerned that the government would seize all assets owned by Maytas Properties.

Rao faced other problems too. I asked him if transportation of material had become easier for him since the construction of the new highway.

‘It’s become a headache,’ he said, laughing.

He wouldn’t say more, but one of his managers later explained to me that the new highway had made it easier for government officials to show up at the factory and ask for bribes. ‘Before, the roads were so bad that they wouldn’t bother coming this way. These days, they’re driving along the highway when they see the factory and think they
should make a stop, check for ways in which the factory’s breaking rules, and ask for money.’ But the manager admitted that there were indeed many ways in which the company broke existing laws, including evasion of taxes, although he insisted that other factories were even worse.

The worst of the violations had to do with the conditions of the workers, which, the manager said, was made easy by the fact that the workers were migrants and did not have a union. The owner of the steel factory had at one time considered buying a nearby sponge iron plant run by the government, but he had backed off after learning that there was a workers’ union there.

In fact, the factory employed none of the people I had spoken to. It had only 250 direct employees, almost all of whom were in management. The top five people among these white-collar workers made more than a lakh of rupees a month, ten people more than 50,000 rupees, and fifty engineers made about 25,000 rupees each. Below them were roughly 1,000 workers, of whom 70 per cent were from other states, mostly Bihar and Orissa. The factory was not their employer, however. Instead, it had an arrangement with four middlemen contractors, of whom Sarkar was one, to provide the factory with labourers who earned 20,000 rupees at the very top of the hierarchy and 4,000 at the bottom. The contractors were paid on a commission basis by the factory, receiving 220 rupees per tonne of TMT produced, and it was therefore in their interest to see that workers weren’t sitting idle or that there weren’t more workers than necessary at the factory.

Of the 1,000 workers employed through the contractors, government regulations required payments into a health insurance and disability scheme called the Employees’ State Insurance and into a provident fund that provided pensions. But the contractors, with the approval of the management, saved on these costs by keeping 40 per cent of the workers off the books. These men received no provident funds and no ESI payments. They wouldn’t get any compensation or health care if they suffered a serious injury, or a pension when they stopped working. They had no future beyond the immediate labour they carried out, and Pradip was one of these men. He was, in effect, a kind of ghost.

When government officials showed up at the factory and discovered these violations, they did not enforce the rules. Instead, they took a cash bribe, got back into their vehicles, and drove back down the highway, so that the lack of a future for many of the workers was converted into the present enrichment of officials and factory owners. It was the shadow transmutation that ran in parallel to the alchemy of converting iron ore into TMT bars.

A few days after I returned to Hyderabad from Kothur, I went to see the Maytas Hill County development. I had been thinking of Rao’s story about being paid in villas for the amount owed his factory by Maytas Infra, and I began to recall scenes from my last visit to Hyderabad. I thought of the bus I had seen a year before, when driving back with Vijay from the chemical village of Qazipally. It had been empty save for the driver, with the logo ‘Maytas Hill County SEZ’ emblazoned on its side. There had been billboards all over Hyderabad for the same development, saying ‘Less concrete, more chlorophyll’.

According to Rao, the downturn had begun by then, but the effects had not been apparent to those outside the industries. Now the cracks were visible everywhere. In January, an Enron-like accounting fraud was exposed in Satyam, until then a flagship of Cyberabad’s global ambitions. Its chairman, Ramalinga Raju, admitted to exaggerating the company’s assets. He had also, in a reversal of the practice at factories like Vinayak steel, said that the account books had shown many more IT workers employed than was actually the case. Raju had resigned and been sent to prison while the Indian government took over Satyam and eventually sold it to a group of other companies.