In mid 2012, after having started working with garment workers in Bangalore, I was compelled to gain a deeper, pan-Indian understanding of the industry. Gurgaon and Tirupur, at different ends of the country, are, apart from Bangalore, the other two places in India on the global map of garment manufacturing districts.
Gurgaon
Making my way to Kapashera on the outskirts of Gurgaon – which borders the national capital New Delhi – the grotesquely large buildings emerging from the fog looked right out of a Chris Marker film. When the sun slowly eats up the winter fog, a flurry of people can be seen grappling with the unending rat race. Gurgaon, a city still under construction that contains Asia's largest Special Economic Zone, is now home to thousands of rural migrant workers uprooted by the agrarian crisis. They stitch and sew for export in over 1500 manufacturing factories, or units. Due to stiff competition from neighbouring countries like Bangladesh, the once sought-after tailor has been replaced in India by operators of machines mass producing ready-made garments for the global market.
In Gurgaon, the workforce consists mostly of men – nearly 80 percent of over 200,000 employees, sewing mainly women's garments. The majority of workers come from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. They are tucked away in tenements in areas such as Kapashera, where hundreds of matchbox-sized windowless rooms have been constructed, sometimes by the owners of the export houses or manufacturing units, sometimes by local landowners, charging around INR 2000 per month. Five to six workers jostle for space, sharing costs and food, but strangely never communicating with one another.
I found it rather unnatural not to talk to or know one's neighbours, but it seems that competition is encouraged, and that the workers themselves have been desensitised to their surroundings by the repetitive nature of their jobs: working late, cooking food and sleeping, to be repeated again and again. Workers are all identified, even between themselves, by their room numbers, not names. The only conversations one hears between them are about the salaries paid by different companies. This is how workers explore their possibilities with different employers. They never stay with a company for more than six to eight months, finding work with better pay when they can.