Sunday, January 02, 2011

Suicide City

The knitwear capital of India is getting suicidal by the day. More than 400 people in the booming town of Tirupur and other parts of the district in Tamil Nadu have taken their lives in the first eight months of 2010. Around 215 suicides were reported between June and August. The town has been on the suicide radar after posting figures higher than the state average for the past three years. Every household is a potential suicide ticking bomb. Tirupur will soon be known as the suicide capital rather than the textile capital of the country.

“Anything between 5-10 cases of suicide attempts are registered every day in this hospital,” says Dr ASM Samy, who was on duty in the casualty ward. “The victims, both men and women, usually consume rat poison, bleaching powder or a chemical commonly known as cowdung powder, which are cheap and easily available.”

Goutam, 33, who started earning his bread at the age of 17, has worked in all sections of the garment industry: stitching, pressing, printing and dyeing. He worked from 8 am to 10 pm and earned Rs. 200 a day. Goutam struggled to meet the financial needs of his family as the cost of living is high in this industrial town. “Goutam took a loan from a local moneylender at a high interest rate,” says his mother, Ponnamma. “After his son’s birth, he again went through a serious financial crisis and wanted to take another loan. Goutam and his wife quarrelled over the issue a lot. On 13 September, both of them took their lives, abandoning their 18-month-old child.”

In a similar tale, Laxmi, 32, had been working in the industry for 10 years. After migrating from Rameswaram 15 years ago, Laxmi found a co-worker as her life partner. They lived in a rented room with their three kids. Laxmi worked for one- and- a-half shifts, while her husband did two. “However, when Laxmi got a tumour in her stomach, they didn’t have enough money for the surgery. She hanged herself two years ago,” says her father Manova, who also works in the industry. Now, he looks after his three grandkids.

Tirupur is one of the fastest growing industrial centres in the state. Most of the town’s population consists of uneducated migrant labourers who work in 6,000 garment units scattered all over the district. Girls and boys from impoverished families of southern districts and other states come here in search of jobs. At a time when the textile export industry in Tirupur is growing phenomenally why aren’t the workers enjoying the fruits of the industrial revolution, and instead wallowing in despair?

“The majority of suicides in Tirupur are reported among the factory workers,” says C Murthi, general secretary of the Banian and General Workers Union. He says the poor living conditions and low wages are the underlying causes for the problems. “Many commit suicide because of debts and high-interest loans taken from moneylenders,” he adds.

Most of the workers and their families live in single rooms or huts that are rented out at exorbitant rates. At the slum in Tirupur’s KVR Nagar, where there are more than 2,000 huts, most of the residents are industry workers. The workers get a pittance despite doing overtime. The textile units in Tirupur and neighbouring districts are infamous for exploiting the workers, especially girls, through a scheme called Sumangali Thittam. Under this scheme, unmarried girls from poor families are brought to the factories through agents, who promise them a lumpsum — in most cases Rs. 30,000 — for a fixed duration of work. It is three years in most cases.
"The scheme is nothing but bonded labour,” says Gunasekharan, a research scholar at the Centre for Education and Communication in New Delhi, who has studied the workers’ exploitation in Tamil Nadu’s textile industry. Most of the girls are forced to work overtime, face sexual abuse, and live in ghetto-like conditions. “The number of Sumangali scheme victims are increasing in this region as many companies are adopting this system,” says Gunasekharan.

Tirupur Exporters Association president A Saktivel has a different story to tell. “The workers are happy and well-paid. If they are not happy with one company, they are free to work for another as in Tirupur, we have no shortage of textile companies,” he says.

The answer of all capitalists - "take it or leave it."

1 comment:

ajohnstone said...

Nearly 200,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the past decade. A third of them choose pesticide to do it: an agonising, drawn-out death with vomiting and convulsions.

"Poverty has assaulted rural India," Sainath, an award-winning expert, said. "Farmers who used to be able to send their children to college now can't send them to school. For all that India has more dollar billionaires than the UK, we have 600 million poor. The wealth has not trickled down." Almost all the bereaved families report that debts and land loss because of unsuccessful crops were among their biggest problems.

"Every suicide can be linked to Monsanto," says Ms Shiva, a scientist-turned-campaigner, claiming that the biotech firm's modified Bt Cotton caused crop failure and poverty because it needed to be used with pesticide and fertilisers.

Dr Singh of the Rajasthan's Institute of Development Studies is in no doubt, that the changes in weather have increased poverty in rural India – and that there lies a huge injustice. "Climate change puts the onus on the poor to adapt – but that's wrong. Who is using the planes, the cars and the plastic bottles? Not the poor man with no drinking water."

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/indias-hidden-climate-change-catastrophe-2173995.html