Fabric of Hunger

With the economic slowdown hitting the once flourishing textile sector in prosperous Punjab the hardest, tens of thousands have been rendered jobless, trains are overflowing with ‘jobless refugees' returning to their villages, starvation and suffering stalk the landscape and factories are shutting down

Akash Bisht Ludhiana, Hardnews

Hundreds of migrant labourers, almost all of them from Bihar and eastern UP, inadequately dressed for a chilly evening, many of them shivering, stand in long, endless queues at the railway ticket counters of Ludhiana Junction. The queue gets longer every minute. The crowd spills all over the main lobby. No one is ready to budge from the allotted space, or else they miss the train. There is chaos. The cops find it difficult to manage them; they hurl abuses, hitting them with lathis. Clearly, even the police treats them as second class citizens.

Outside the railway station, large groups of men, women and children rest on their suitcases and handbags waiting for the next train home. Smoking bidis, playing cards, cracking jokes, they comfort themselves with make-shift fires. "We are going back to our villages since there is no work in Ludhiana. There are no jobs in the textile and bicycle industries and we can't afford to live in this expensive city without any income. I have children to feed back home, so I would rather be there with them and find some temporary work to cope with starvation," says Shambhu, a migrant labourer from Bihar. He is unaware of the reasons behind this mass job drought, but vaguely presumes that there is some kind of slowdown in the market. "The traders say that things will be fine soon and then I can return," he said, really, not believing his own words.  

The local market is brimming with restless salesmen trying to sell woolen garments at throwaway prices; but there are hardly any buyers. But this doesn't deter them - they keep coming up with funny one-liners to woo customers, persuading and cajoling them. Mostly, they don't succeed. "Business has never been so bad during winter. Just six months back this market was bustling with buyers and even 10 salesmen weren't enough. Now I have only two. I had to let the rest of them go as we have no business and I was forced to cut my expenses," says Ramanjeet Singh of Ludhiana Woolens. Several other small traders in the market narrate similar stories and predict that if things don't change for the better they will have to look for other options to support their families.

The textile industry's share in the country's GDP in 2007-2008 was 4 per cent and accounted for 13.5 per cent of Indian exports. The textile sector is the second largest employer after agriculture. The crisis is sharp and of devastating proportions. Its magnitude is huge and runs deep. This despair in the working class is unprecedented.

As many as 3,50,00,000 workers were employed directly or indirectly in 2007 in the sector. More than 7,00,000 people have been axed since 2007 and the textile ministry expects that another 5,00,000 employees are expected to be out of work by March 2009. This has created panic within the trading community in all the major textile hubs of India, including in Ludhiana.