Amid soaring temperatures, orders to stop outdoor work in Gurgaon during the day remain on paper

While filling a column with rods at the construction site, 26-year-old Baidul from Bihar’s Supaul says he got to know about the order from a fellow labourer. “He has a big cellphone and we saw it in the news, that we could rest from 12 pm to 4 pm, but it is yet to kick off here,” Baidul says.

They begin working at 8 am and continue till 7 pm, with an hour’s break for lunch at 1.30 pm. Baidul earns Rs 625 a day. During the lunch break, they come down to their room which has a stove and a bucket full of drinking water that their employers provided for them. The toilet for the labourers is across the road.

DC Yadav had ordered that employers and RWA provide facilities at the workplace including clean drinking water, arrangement of shade, ventilation and water coolers; provision of ORS/ glucose kits/ nimbu paani (lemonade), water bottles and ice packs; and covering medical costs of workers exposed to heatwave-related illnesses.

However, employees including Baidul and his brother Mohammad Siraj are apprehensive that if they are asked not to work four hours a day, their wages will also take a hit. “If they give us four hours to rest, they will deduct wages…,” he says.

Hamesh Mongia (53), the site supervisor, says they are unaware of the order. “We don’t have any information regarding this. We have given them drinking water and they have a fan in their rooms. If we are ordered to give them a four-hour break, we will give them that,” Mongia says.

At another construction site, workers sleep on charpoys outside their temporary shacks. As the clock strikes 3 pm, Sanjay gets up and goes to get bricks lying outside. The 21-year-old and other workers at the site had decided to pause work from 11 am to 3 pm, and the employers agreed. “It is impossible to work at noon and now, we work from 7 am to 11 am, and then from 3 pm to 7 pm. We have fans, but even that doesn’t help most days, so we sleep outside under the tree. It is impossible to stand outside in the sun for more than two minutes,” he says.
His mother Bitai sits a few feet away from their brick house. She winces after touching her head. She developed a heat rash on her scalp five days ago, with pus and blood oozing out onto her hair. “I carry bricks from outside on my head and pass them over to the workers inside. After the rash, I have not been able to work. I have to get medicine as it is not getting better,” she says.

A few metres away, 35-year-old Surjeet, a wireman with a telecom company, goes to fill his bottle at the water cooler inside the residential complex. However, the guard tells him to drink water directly, without filling his bottle. “If it is installed for the public, it is for us to use too,” he says. Surjeet, who attends to complaints from the telecom users in the area and rests at the park in the block at noon, says the DC order would not bring any difference to his work.

Mansoora, a 30-year-old domestic help from West Bengal’s Malda, works at three houses from 7 am to 2.30 pm.

Going home after her shift at 3 pm on Saturday, holding her red umbrella high, Mansoora says: “If we say we can’t come at noon, the employers will ask us to quit and look for another job. Forget the noon break, if we take a day off, they deduct money.”