Salary buried in a tactor graveyard

There are half-a-dozen officially designated chowkidars too — the sundry bedraggled souls who live on the premises under tin sheds pulled on loose brick walls and roast wild berries for meals — but there is a certain democracy about death.

When the Tractor Project shut down, everybody became just a chowkidar. ‘‘There was nothing else to do; one day we were assembling HMT tractors, the next day trying to keep the cattle out,’’ says Prasad. And since nobody has bothered paying him for the job for the past 10 years, Prasad has stopped doing that now.

The Tractor Project grounds, lush in the prime of monsoons, have become a cattle-grazer’s paradise. ‘‘I manage somehow because I have a little ancestral house and I get odd jobs in private factories, but look at these chowkidars, living in this wilderness year after year and not getting a paisa. If the government even allowed them to sell the grass that grows on the campus, they would earn some, but that will amount to theft of official property.’’

As it is, Prasad has earned a bad name in the Fatuha marketplace. He owes nearly every shop and now they don’t give him goods on credit anymore. ‘‘I used to tell them I have lakhs pending with the government in salary and it will come but now nobody believes me.’’

Fatuha is no more than 30 km on the road running east from Patna but come to its industrial area and you will be among the ghouls. This is a junkyard populated by phantoms. Factory upon abandoned factory, collapsed steel, rusted iron, mangled wires, underbrush running savage.

And in this devastation live these frazzled, forgotten faces: Bangali Rai, chowkidar of the forsaken Bihar Scooters’ Limited factory.

He has not been paid a wage for 13 years. He barely has anything to wear and he boils discarded cobs of corn on firewood for dinner. Surajdeo Singh, chowkidar of the same factory, fellow-sufferer of Bangali Rai. Hasn’t been paid for 10 years. Shivji Singh, chowkidar. Has not been paid for 10 years. Kaleshwar Singh, factory hand. Has not been paid for 10 years.

Parashuram Singh, tractor operator. He hasn’t been paid for 11 years. His fellow-operator, Chandradeo Yadav, died in penury last year, leaving behind his wife and three children. They are hand to mouth. ‘‘Do something,’’ they plead in unison, ‘‘do something, nobody does anything. At least get us permission to sell the grass and the scrap till the government decides our fate once and for all, at least get us permission to survive. Why don’t they just sell off the land and all this metal and settle our dues?’’

The Bihar Agro Industries Development Corporation has gone the way of most state government undertakings: it is officially under liquidation. It has close to 400 unpaid, unwanted employees languishing in factories such as these and at its headquarters in Patna. They are all clamouring for a settlement.

The government, although it officially does not take responsibility for their pay cheques, has dilly-dallied for years. Says Avadh Kumar Sharma, general secretary of the employees union: ‘‘Politicians and officials made merry with corporation funds for years and then declared them loss-making.

Our Fatuha factory was shut down, our agricultural implements unit in Patna was sold off for a song and people made money, our Rs 2-crore fixed depost was broken because politicians wanted us to distribute pumpsets to farmers on loan. They got their votes in return, we did not get our money back. Now they say there is no money to give us.’’

Sharma has three sons and two daughters, none of whom earns. His daughters are getting close to the age when they will have to be married. His kitchen runs on debts and the little money that he gets from a small portion of ancestral land. ‘‘We have been looted,’’ says his colleague, Madan Jha. ‘‘I have given my life to the corporation, the corporation is taking my life and my family’s.’’

The headquarters of the corporation in central Patna is as much a junkyard as the Fatuha factory. The rooms in the double-storey building are all padlocked, furniture is rotting, spiders have laid permanent claim to the pane-less windows.

In the front yard stand two Ambassador cars, wooden planks pushed under their tyres so they don’t sink into the earth. They were roadworthy once. Now they are mere metaphors for the corporation they served. ‘‘We still have huge assets in terms of land and property,’’ says Avadh Sharma, ‘‘these cars too can fetch a price, if only as scrap. We can decide to sell it all and settle the dues of employees, but does someone in this government have the will or the intention? Does anybody care?’’

Nobody, it would appear, other than these unpaid employees themselves. At the centre of the front yard where the cars lie is an earthen platform for the hoisting of the national flag on Republic Day and Independence Day.

On the 15th of August just gone by, employees sent a bowl around and collected enough money to give the platform a coat of lime. And they hoisted the Tricolour and stood silently beneath it.