The haves and the have-nots

My first impression of Gurgaon was great. It was past midnight and we drove into the city from Indira Gandhi International airport via the NH8 highway. At the tim,e I didn't know that Gurgaon only really had three decent paved roads – the NH8, the MG Road and Sohna Road). It's no news that darkness hides all unpleasant detail; women with fat arses all over the world have exploited this truth for centuries by making love with the lights switched off. From the highway, it was a short drive to the flashy buildings of Cyber Greens in DLF Phase 3 and to our high-rise apartment block, grandly named "Belvedere Park". Before bedtime, Ingrid and Paula showed me the stunning view from out 19th floor balcony, including our very own swimming pool downstairs. I was happy. It looked like I was going to survive India after all.

The oppressive July heat made me toss and turn in my bed. A few hours and several showers later, the morning light started to reveal some of the less pleasant detail of my new hometown. I stood glued to the window, stunned and curious. Apart from a guy on a bike transporting a something that looked like a whole big fridge, endless construction sites and the erratic traffic, what caught my attention was a camp of blue plastic tents right outside the grounds of our building. I observed it for days. "What? Do people really live there? Can't be …" But I watched them and watched them and it became apparent they were going on about their daily lives whether I chose to believe it or not. There were women cooking, hanging out their clothes to dry, children playing. Yes, there really were people living there. Later, Ingrid explained to me that they were the people working on all those construction sites around us. Somehow, that made me feel a little better. It suggested their situation was not permanent. What I didn't want to realize at the time was that the conditions they came from in the first place were even probably even worse.

Coming from Latin America, Ingrid found it strange that the poor people here in India lived right next to the rich. She was used to separate neighbourhoods for the rich and poor, and the idea of having a slum right on our doorstep was new to her. I wonder if those people in the camp knew that right behind the high fence, just a few metres away, there was our fancy swimming pool. I also wondered how they survived without air-conditioning and fans. I myself was really struggling with the heat at that time. A few months later, the camp was cleared and steamrollers arrived to flatten the ground and make space for a car park. I always wondered why DLF (the company that owned the land and buildings in this area) had tolerated the camp in the first place.

Reading a local online newsletter, the Gurgaon Workers News, I found out that landowners often rent out land to those poor people to camp on as a way of protecting their land against uninvited settlers while waiting for planning permissions to come through. According to the website, a plastic tarpaulin hut costs Rs. 800 (£10) per month to rent. Not exactly cheap, considering that a construction worker might only earn about Rs. 2,000 (£25) a month, working 70 hours a week.

Most of these people come to Gurgaon from poor parts of India, such as Bihar, West Bengal and other northeastern states. Many comes from Bangladesh; the language and appearance of Bengali people in West Bengal and Bangladesh is the same, so it is difficult for the authorities to tell who is a local and who has crossed the border. The Bangladeshi immigrants attract a lot of negative sentiment in the local newspapers in Gurgaon, which blame them for the city's high crime rate.

The wives of the construction workers bring extra income by working as housekeepers and cooks in the nearby housing blocks of the rich. Our own cleaning lady used to come 7 days a week, for about an hour a day. She would clean the floors of our 4-bedroom flat, scrub our 4 bathrooms, clean the kitchen and the lounge, wash our dishes and wipe the windows – all for just Rs. 700 (£8.75) a month. Yet, this was the standard rate and an Indian family would probably also ask her to wash their clothes for this amount.

At the start, I had a naïve idea about poor, exploited domestic workers. It actually turned out our cleaning lady was far from hard working. Often, she would not bother with details. She would literally "throw" things into the kitchen cupboards without bothering to separate knives from forks and spoons or she would stack plates in no order, small underneath the large. These things are absolute common sense to me and I would do it the correct way automatically, without considering it as extra work. But as one of my friends in India noted: "I am starting to discover that common sense is not so common." Many times, our cleaning lady would not turn up at all, turn up too late (like 20 minutes before we had to go to work) or she would turn up but not do anything, saying that she felt ill. "Saying" is a little exaggerated – she spoke no English at all and our Hindi was very limited, so communication was by gestures, pointing and facial expressions. We had no way of telling whether she was ill or faking, so we let her go and I suspect she sometimes took advantage or our inability to communicate with her properly.

I still remember the moments when I tried to explain to her that she should turn up at 10 am every day. Pointing at my watch, I kept saying: "Das aana hai. Das." "Das" means "ten", "aana" is some form of the verb "to come" (I have next to no idea about Hindi grammar.) and "hai" is a more-or-less meaningless word that you stick at the end of just about every sentence. I knew it wasn't correct. But what bothered me more was this: "Does she have any idea what I'm talking about?" She didn't have a watch and I didn't know if she had any clue what watches are for. I didn't know what role "time" played in her life – does she have a notion of "hours", let alone "minutes" or does she simply recognize the difference between day/night and morning/evening? Our lives could not have been more different and I knew very little about her world.

Between ourselves, we often discussed what these people must think about us, foreigners. They must think we were crazy. One time, we took a cycle rikshaw home from a restaurant that was no more than 100 metres from our house. It was dark, there were no pavements, the traffic was mad and the road was dusty. The few rupees we paid the rikshaw wallah was well worth not getting killed by a passing car, and not getting our feet all dirty. But he must have been pretty puzzled why we needed to be transported over such a short distance. "Can't they just walk?" We also wondered what our cleaning lady must think of us when we sometimes left her standing outside our door out of laziness. In the mornings, we sometimes couldn't be bothered to wake up and open the door for her. "Why are they paying for a cleaner if they don't want their house cleaned?" Even now, it doesn't make much sense to me, but life in India was too exhausting at times, so we didn't always behave like rational human beings. But how could an Indian peasant, who lived in a plastic hut, make sense of our world? You should have seen our cleaning lady's surprise when she saw Ingrid "talking at the computer". Lovely and sociable as she is, Ingrid let her see herself on the screen via a webcam, which she found even more unbelievable. Talking to friends in Europe or Latin America via Skype must surely belong to the world of sci-fi for her and I would love to know what kind of explanations she made in her head for all the things she saw around her.

I sometimes felt sorry for the girl – for her lack of education and material resources. But at the same time, I knew she was lazy and I knew how hard I have had to work in my life to get where I am. The different social class, in this case, even affects the way that people look – out cleaning lady was half the size of us. Due to the difference in out diets since childhood, we had grown to be of totally different sizes. But nevertheless, I felt that we were still the same people. Our clothes were different, our jobs were different and our appearance was different. But at the end of the day, we are all just people. I often wondered if she had kids, what her husband looked like, I wondered how old she was, I wondered which other houses she worked in and how they treated her, I wondered where she lived, I wondered what her name was … and I will never know. For some reason, I never bothered to ask her that most basic of questions in Hindi: "Aap kaa naam kyaa hai?"

The haves and the have-nots live side-by-side in India. Both are part of "the system". Yet, the have-nots are hardly benefiting from India's economic boom – that is a fact recently acknowledged publicly by both India's President Pratibha Patil and its Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. For an outsider like me, it was hard to get a real insight into the lives of the poor. The rich, however, were only too keen to show me their world. Light skin attracts a premium in this country. Just like we Westerners use self-tanning creams, the Indians use creams to whiten their skin. So as a European, you gain minor celebrity status and are able to gain entry into any event anywhere, even if you are dressed in cargo pants with dirty trainers, wearing no make-up and you arrive in a battered 20-year old Maruti car. Ten minutes later you are holding a drink worth Rs. 400 (£5) and rubbing shoulders with people who are waaay higher on the social ladder than you. On the other hand, Indians will be given a thorough background check at the entrance to most bars and clubs – they need to have the right "profile", meaning money, clothes, appearance, ethnic background … And it's not just high-class bars and clubs. Even shopping malls have "bouncers" at the entrance. They are primarily there to man the metal detector frames and check people's bags for bombs, but social filtering is effectively applied, as you will never see anyone poor inside these temples of consumerism. Or maybe they don't even bother to go in? Maybe they understand where their place is – outside, in this case. In other parts of the world, the poor would rebel against this have / have-not division, refusing to accept their situation. Here, I was often told, thanks to the ancient caste system, people accept their place in the society. Nevertheless, the Indian government runs possibly the largest positive discrimination programme in the world, reserving university places and public sector jobs for members of the lowest castes and indigenous tribes. Gurgaon has experiences its own share of "ethnic" clashes when members of the Gujjar community recently blocked the MG Road, throwing stones and burning tyres to pressure the government into giving them "Scheduled Tribe" status.

A friend of mine, who was also working for the same company, once made an appointment with two German guys who ran a factory on the outskirts of Gurgaon. He wanted to discuss possible job opportunities with them. One of the questions they asked him was: "We have a lot of fights at the factory because of caste clashes between workers. What would you go about that?" In typical German fashion, he answered something along the lines of: "Kick their ass." For us working at the multinationals, such problems sounded like something out of the Wild West. As far as most of my Indian work colleagues were concerned, poverty did not exist. Their lives involved spending as much time in air-conditioned environments as possible. Home, car, office, car, shopping mall and home again. Never once would they make a comment about the poor when ewe passed a slum in the car. They would happily ride through the city as if the car windows were not transparent. I often joked that the reason why our colleagues spent so much time in the office (16 hours a day was no exception) was because the office was a safe environment where you can pretend that they don't live in India. I can't blame them, really. We ourselves were extremely fortunate with our apartment. The company paid Rs. 32,000 (£400) / month for it, plus several thousand for electricity, power backup, maintenance and security. The whole building had full power backup and our condominium association's annual bill for Diesel ran into millions of rupees.

Others were not so lucky – most of my colleagues had severe problems with electricity and water supply. So even the "haves" had problems. I couldn't express the situation better than my friend Pascal: "You work 10 hours a day, then you come home and sit in the dark because there is no electricity. Yesterday, I came home from work and I just went to sleep – there was no power or water, so what else was I supposed to do?!" One time, we had to save a house party by singing old classics (think "American Pie" and "Yellow Submarine") when the power stopped and with it the music was gone. In a candlelit room, we all stood in a circle, holding each other by the arms, singing and dancing … as well as keeping our throats lubricated with a good supply of the local Kingfisher beer. Due to the lack of public transport and abundance of traffic jams, we often hosted parties at home, instead of going out to clubs in Delhi. Our cleaning lady was never too pleased with that when she saw the mess in the morning.

In real, hard rupee terms, our world was completely unattainable to the have-nots. While a junior executive in a business process outsourcing / call centre job might earn about Rs. 15,000 – 20,000 (£187 - 250) per month, a labourer, a rikshaw or a call centre cleaner will bring home only about a tenth of this amount. Officially, the minimum wage for unskilled labour set by the Haryana government is Rs. 3,510 / month based on a 48-hour working week. In practice, many workers clock in 70-hours for far less money. Contrary to popular belief, India does have a rudimentary social services system with legal provision for sickness benefit contributions and pensions. In practice, however, companies in the manufacturing and construction sectors avoid paying this by hiring temporary / casual workers and "outsourcing" parts of the production to dodgy makeshift workshops. Sub-contracting and complex supply chains are one of the main reasons for worker exploitation, as the companies are unable to control the working hours and health & safety conditions at their suppliers' "premises".

Gurgaon Worker News - http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com/

The Gurgaon Worker News is a great source of information about the things going on in Gurgaon, especially when it comes to the lives of ordinary workers. For example, did you know that the price of a faulty shirt on Faridabad local market is 40 Rs? Or that poor labourers can get about Rs. 40,000 (£500) for their kidney in Gurgaon? Or that the minimum dowry poor workers have to pay for the marriage of their daughter is about Rs. 30,000 (£375) but more likely Rs. 80,000 (£1,000)? Or that they just opened a dog restaurant in Gurgaon, right next to slums and industrial areas, where a dog non-veg soup costs 7x as much as a meal that a textile worker might get after having worked for more than fourteen hours on stretch? The guy who writes this obviously has good sources, as well as a talent for writing. Here is the beautifully written "mission statement" of the newsletter:

"Gurgaon in Haryana is presented as the shining India, a symbol of capitalist success promising a better life for everyone behind the gateway of development. At a first glance the office towers and shopping malls reflect this chimera and even the facades of the garment factories look like three star hotels. Behind the facade, behind the factory walls and in the side streets of the industrial areas thousands of workers keep the rat-race going, producing cars and scooters for the middle-classes which end up in the traffic jam on the new highway between Delhi and Gurgaon. Thousands of young middle class people lose time, energy and academic aspirations on night-shifts in call centres, selling loan schemes to working-class people in the US or pre-paid electricity schemes to the poor in the UK. Next door, thousands of rural-migrant workers uprooted by the agrarian crisis stitch and sew for export, competing with their angry brothers and sisters in Bangladesh or Vietnam. And the rat-race will not stop; on the outskirts of Gurgaon, Asia’s biggest Special Economic Zone is in the making."

I will make no secret of the fact that I lived in the "privileged" India and the other side will, for me, remain a puzzle with most of the pieces missing. One thing that did become clear during my stay in India was that a foreigner like me has no authority or chance to help these people. Our reality and their reality are light years apart. Why would they listen to your advice? Your advice becomes completely irrelevant to someone who earns £25 a month and has to sell their kidney in order to pay for their daughter's dowry.

Handing out money will not solve anything either. Remember that India has a population of over 1 billion people – you and your purse are not going to solve its problems. All those multinational companies, which are currently enjoying tax-free status in India, need to start contributing to the system. They are already benefiting from the low cost labour, so some amount of taxation would certainly not ruin their profit & loss account. And if it would, then we as Western consumers need to rethink the pressure we put on companies to deliver cut-price goods and services. While I lived in India, my broadband connection used to cost around £15 / month. Now that I live in the UK, it costs exactly the same – but this would not be possible without the Bangalore call centre that my ISP uses. But it's not only multinationals who need to clean up their act. Indian factories need to start paying tax, too. A friend of mine once told me that in a typical industrial town with dozens of large factories, the company that pays the most tax is the local McDonald's restaurant because they go by the American rules. According to him, only 5% of Indians pay taxes.

It would be slightly ambitions of me to say that I have found the solution to world poverty, but I do believe that collecting taxes and using those taxes is at least a part of the answer. While NGOs may do a wonderful job in certain areas, they will never have the resources to deliver consistent, long-term education, healthcare and sanitation to 1 billion people. Not incidentally, these are called public services, and it is the job of the government to provide them. Here is where some people's would argue that India's democratic political system is too inflexible to respond to its population's needs. Passing legislation in a parliament with up to 795 members (two chambers – 545 + 250) can be a slow process. Some people argue that China's central, one-party system is more suited to meet the needs of a country with such an enormous population. Is it better to be poor but free? I will leave that one up to you ...