Life in a BOX

The verdant hills of Nagaon District, the main centre of stone quarrying in Assam, mask a web of labour exploitation. Visits to the quarries reveal workers clearing the ground of trees and bushes, digging out boulders, manually crushing them into smaller stones and loading them into large boxes. All of this takes place under the blazing midday sun. Meanwhile, the quarries have no shade for rest or shelter. Infants and toddlers are left to care for themselves on the ground due to a lack of crèches, while slightly older children work alongside the adults. With no canteen or even drinking water provided for, workers bring their own lunch and water, walking anywhere from two to five kilometres up steep hills in the early morning so that they can fill as many boxes as possible – boxes of stones being the unit of measurement for the disbursement of daily wages in these areas.

While specific statistics are difficult to come by, Nagaon supplies more than a quarter of the stones being used in construction projects across Assam. These stones are extracted through hard labour, under extremely hazardous work conditions, by a largely informal and non-unionised workforce. A powerful network of owners and managers, including former members of the separatist United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), as well as relatives of the ruling Congress and Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) parties, and members of the mercantilist class with a stake in the quarries, have been able to regularly thwart efforts at unionisation, and ensure that the exploitative system remains in place.   The lives of workers in Nagaon are, quite literally, boxed in. Workers receive an average of INR 40-45 per box, and a single adult can fill roughly a box a day. This leaves labourers to receive wages significantly less than the prescribed daily minimum wage of around INR 75. In addition, the method by which wages in Nagaon are calculated is also illegal, as per both central and state legislation. "When workers spend their time clearing the area of foliage and digging for boulders, they get paid still less, because they do not have filled boxes to show for their work," explains Arup Mahanto, general-secretary of Grameen Shramik Sanstha, which has been trying to organise the quarry workers. "This is illegal, as the managers are extracting work for free, like slave labour."