Lost In Transit

Since March 4, Dilip has been asked his name — and his father’s — countless times by numerous adults in various locations, with none caring to explain to him the point of the interrogation.

This latest round, by a bevy of labour officials in the GRP verandah of the Sitamarhi railway station, is equally incomprehensible. At the back of his mind a fear refuses to go away: ‘‘Am I to be sent to jail?’’

The worry is multiplied over and over again on the faces of the 49 kids sitting silently on the floor around.

‘‘Will they really release us?’’ they whisper to each other as no adult cares to explain. And they wait uncertainly, as they have been doing for the last 60 days.

UNOFFICIAL estimates — the state hasn’t documented this industry’s ‘growth’ — suggest that about 8,000-10,000 children, mostly from Bihar, slave 12-16 hours every day in countless zari embroidery units in the slums of Mumbai.

On March 4, a coalition of NGOs got a police station in Dharavi to raid two such units to discover several of the above children sweating it out. Their roots lay in the poorest districts of northern Bihar, mostly Sitamarhi. Some had arrived in India’s wealthiest city just a fortnight ago, others had been in the sweatshop long enough to feel that the ‘room’ was their life.

A couple of days later, only Kamrul was still hanging around the unit. Since his appearance suggested he was over 18, the police had given him the miss while sending his younger co-workers to a state-run Children’s Home.

In the decade since Kamrul left Sitamarhi for a karkhana, the price of pav had increased from char anna to a rupee, and he still struggled to send part of his Rs 2000 monthly earnings back home.

But, he said, ‘‘izzat hai’’, pointing out that countless children lived on the streets, forced to scrounge, even steal.

For Kamrul, there was also the seemingly banal detail of a single, working tap in the far end of the room — unthinkable in his village home. ‘‘This room,’’ he declared, glancing around the frowsy unit, ‘‘is no less than a mahal for me. Go to Bihar, you will understand.’’

TWO months later, Dilip and his co-workers silently file into the general compartment of a train for Darbhanga, Sitamarhi’s neighbouring district. The intervening time has been spent in a Children’s Home — an underfunded overcrowded place from hell — while the quasi-magisterial Child Welfare Committee (CWC) passed an order that they be repatriated to their villages.

Now they huddle in groups near the compartment windows under the watchful eyes of their escorts, constables of Mumbai’s Juvenile Aid Police Unit (JAPU). Contrary to the name — and law — none of these men and women has received any special training for their work. Indeed, some openly resent the assignment.

‘‘Somebody in Bihar gives birth to them, and they become our headache!’’ complains one, face wrinkling in disgust.

But others, like a religious woman constable, sees in each escort trip an opportunity to accumulate punya. ‘‘I am sure God keeps count every time I return a stranger’s child back to his home,’’ she says cheerily.

Another has packed extra chapattis from home for ‘his’ children: Each constable has to manage on the clearly inadequate allowance of Rs 40 per child.

And each night, post-dinner, a gregarious constable rounds up a few of the smaller kids to march them up and down the slim compartment passage, declaring: ‘‘A little exercise is good for your health.’’

SALAUDDIN, one of the older boys, looks disgusted through it all. Sullen and silent, he clearly resents the upheaval of the past weeks.

After five years in various zari units in the city, he is profoundly insecure out of one. Days after the raid, he was imploring authorities in the children’s home to be sent back to the karkhana. In the train he makes no such demand. But the bitterness is evident as he heads back to an uncertain future under the police gaze.

Shoaib, 12, also stands out, remarkably blithe, astute beyond his years. Sitting on a wooden bench in the baking compartment, dignified despite his holey grey T-shirt, he brings down his faded gunny bag every now and then and sorts through his possessions.

In a pink plastic pencil box lies his collection of needles. And a squeezed out minuscule tube of ‘Fungdid-B’ cream, given by a visiting NGO member. And a square of embroidered cerise chiffon, the product of his toil.

Can he slough off his past so easily? ‘‘Yes, I will study. At the madrasa,’’ says Shoaib, aware this is the right answer. But then the zari karigar inside the four-feet high person takes over: ‘‘If I don’t earn,’’ he says matter-of-factly, ‘‘what do my parents eat? They are very old.’’

After 18 months as a shagird (apprentice), hunched over lace and chiffon in the cramped karkhana, Shoaib had built himself up to send back home a priceless Rs 900 each month.

Because his fingers move fast, six months ago his elder brother had negotiated a raise of Rs 200 with the seth, Mushtaq Mohammed. If Shoaib has been exploited in the process, it is not a thought he has the luxury of entertaining.

In the final evening on the train, at the urging of some constables, Shoaib comes forward and sings Tere Naam. The children listen, smiling at recollections of the film watched on a grainy VCD in the karkhana’s TV. On Sunday evenings, their weekly off, recalls Mansoor, 12, there were innocent moments of snatched pleasure when ‘‘we would put on music. And dance’’.

There are no TV sets and cinemas where the train is taking them.

WE crowd into Salauddin’s tiny mud hovel, perched on the border of two fields. The dwelling has no lines to supply light or water. A young papaya tree grows cramped by a cane fence marking where the family’s whit of space ends.

The previous day, in the village square of Hasanpur-Barharwa, a final round of list-making and thumb-printing (this time of parents and relatives) had unfolded. In a theatrical spectacle watched silently by villagers, labour officials had turned over each of the 16 child labourers of Hasanpur to his family, ordering, ‘‘Don’t send your boy back again.’’

‘‘We heard news of the kids arriving in Sitamarhi on yesterday’s 3:05 radio bulletin,’’ one had said. The telly, he guessed, was there in 20-odd houses in the village of a few hundred families.

Now, a day later, sitting amidst his family on a fraying charpoy, Salauddin looks distinctly uncomfortable. Abrar, a lean, emotionless man, sums up the reasons for sending his son away to become a zari karigar in a single word: majboori.

All around, as far as the eyes could see, are open fields and green expanses, a landscape of immense beauty, as removed as possible from Dharavi’s teeming squalor.

But, says Abrar, ‘‘Salauddin’s life in the village is a dead end. Even his younger brother is away in Delhi, doing similar work.’’

Abrar does not own any land, even the cattle he uses to work on others’ fields are not his. Reforms and investments are unheard of in his hardscrabble world.

Shoaib’s home is similarly spare, his parents considerably older. His mother Saira can’t tell her age, it does not matter. What does, she says self-deprecatingly, is that they are not ‘‘rich like the big people in the city.’’

She has seen India Shining, with miserable eyes. And that recent trip to Mumbai added yet another layer to her sense of otherness, shoved further back a place where birth registrations and school certificates already seem worthless.

A LITTLE distance away is the sprawling house of Chand Mohammed, the mukhiya, surrounded by well-tended gardens, electric lines, a row of sheds housing an Ambassador and cattle. In the crowd outside, children — at least 10 to each adult — watch with hungry eyes as chairs are pulled out in Chand’s long verandah.

‘‘They leave, it is impossible to survive here,’’ is the consensus. We ask a well-dressed boy joining the conversation whether the prospect of a Mumbai zari unit is appealing. ‘‘Main kyon jaoon,’’ he sneers, ‘‘garib ke bachhe jaye! (Why should I go! That is for the poor’s children).’’

Hasanpur has its own economic divide, Kamrul’s sense of izzat has its darker side.

Chand, a dhani in the words of one fearful father, is away in Mumbai. A rakishly handsome man with an imperious manner, he would drop in at the Children’s Home when the kids were there, making menacing attempts ‘‘to get the karigars released’’.

Over a month he used every possible pressure tactic — from getting the local Shiv Sena MLA to meet the CWC, to hiring an advocate to challenge its decision, to finally presenting ‘electoral rolls’ showing the kids to be over 18 (none of his child labourers had been registered at birth, UNICEF estimates 46 per cent of India’s children aren’t).

Bunching his fingers together and gesticulating at his mouth, Chand had spat, ‘‘If they don’t work, what do they eat? They are poor’’.

What he would not admit is that as elder brother of the seth who owns the units, it serves his interests to see that they remain that way — in deadening poverty, a pliant source of cheap labour for his business.

‘‘IT ADDS income to their families.’’ A B Prasad, Sitamarhi’s Collector, toes a familiar line.

Unlike the dusty, jerky two hours that it took to cover the 20-odd kms to Salauddin’s village, the roads leading to Prasad’s office are smooth, pleasantly lined with the red and yellow of gulmohar and amaltas.

Over the last week, his cool callous office did not respond to the Mumbai police’s plea for help with transporting the children from Darbhanga to Sitamarhi. Nor did Prasad look up the children once they had arrived in Sitamarhi; a local Lions Club provided the kids and constables with meals and a place for the night.

Now we ask him about rehabilitation for the children. It turns out that there will be none until Prasad received ‘‘appropriate documentation’’. Without ‘Rescue Certificates’ for the children from the Mumbai Collector, Prasad’s administration cannot ‘‘view them as child labourers’’.

But a month ago, Mumbai Labour Commissioner M Gajre had declared that his labour inspector had not been present when the unit was raided ‘‘to pass inspection remarks’’. Without Gajre’s input, the Collector will not issue certificates.

The state response to child labour — already a study in half-measures — slows down even further with children like Shoaib and uninterested, distant state jurisdictions.

‘‘Government funds cannot just be given away to anyone,’’ Prasad now reiterates. ‘‘Proper documentation is most important.’’

As this latest bureaucratic apologia flows out, it seems increasingly evident that various factors, not in the least the miasma of procedures of a supine state, will coalesce to banish the kids right back to a Dickensian fate. The prospect does not perturb the district’s highest official in the least.

Four days later, after an electoral victory, the state’s chief minister Rabri Devi makes it a point to thank Bihar’s ‘‘garib janta’’. Ironically, the ostensible subjects of her gratitude, Salauddin and Shoaib’s passively poor families, say they have given up expecting anything from the state. Thraldom in a Mumbai sweatshop promises more.

So they look back to a tortuous road that extends all the way to the sprawling slum of Dharavi. Here, in an odious ‘room’, their meagre desires will get fulfilled. It is a price the children, the little zari karigars, are resigned to paying.