Next stop: at the gateway of the desert of Kutch!
On the 24th of July, I went to an annual meeting on the border of the Kutch desert with the agarias, or salt pan workers, and Janpath, an organization based in Ahmedabad. Browse, or at least PLEASE scroll down to see the pictures to get a visual about the agarias before continuing: http://saltpanworker.blogspot.com/
We drove in a jeep from A’bad to Patdi with some captivating people. We constantly meet fascinating people! Pankti co-pilots the agaria wing of Janpaath in addition to playing a pivotal role in its statewide Right to Information cell. Read the achievement section to understand the specific sectors she is involved with: http://www.aidprojects.org/projects-view-1.asp?login=guest&id=880
Vinay-Charul are an internationally famous couple who write and perform songs to raise awareness on various social issues. To get a synopsis of their evolution, read the achievements sections on the link: http://www.aidprojects.org/projects-view-1.asp?login=guest&id=780
AND THEY ARE ON YOUTUBE: SUCH SOUL RATTLING VOICES!! This is on the Right to Information Act. Beautiful doesn’t do justice to the lyrics.
The sammelan was at a middle school and more than 500 hundred representatives of agaria communities came from the deepest parts of the little rann (desert) of Kutch to attend this annual meeting. Many important points were discussed. The agaria’s job is a most unsanitary, risky, and painful occupation. The salt pan worker labors 12-14 hours a day facing both extreme desert heat and saline water. He/she suffers only to receive 10 paise, or 0.0022 cents for harvesting a kilo of salt. In the market, that same kilo will sell for 80 rupees, or 1.82 dollars. What price mark-up, right? With feet constantly in saline water far more salty than the ocean, most workers die by 60. Salt soaked limbs cannot burn properly during cremation either.
Earlier as we were driving through the Valsad district and watching the workers in the paddy fields in the pouring rain, I exclaimed why didn’t anybody invent boots specially designed to withstand the unique needs of working in the paddy fields? Why not create a distribution system that would give the workers this necessary innovation? Severe diseases are inflicted on the rice farmers. Walking barefoot through water that reaches their calves for several hours a day through the monsoon season months causes fevers, malaria, worms, TB etc. Then a typical humanitarian aid response seems to be build hospitals! But what about the cause? Why is aid not used for prevention instead of solutions? Small-scaled market innovations, though businesses or entrepreneurs must cease to recite the profit mantra, could make vast repercussions in the basic needs of the majority of the populace. It is frustrating to me that the poor cannot tap into the benefits of India’s progress and modernization. Just to hang on to the margins of this globalized economy they have to pay such a high price for very little gain. As we use AC or cars or washing machines to make our lives simpler, do they not deserve to participate in the market economy? Creating a local market of innovation and distribution that is not corrupted by castist politics or profit maximizing international conglomerates could be an important solution in abating poverty’s worst effects. Getting the capital is tricky and most businesses operate for the purpose of money, but like many of my social worker friends or activists all around India have simplified their lives to work in remote areas, business savvy economists can too! At least, that is my utopian hope and I intend to be one or give it a try!
Machines are anything that reduces human effort, as mind-blowingly brilliant philosopher Amir Khan said in his movie “3 Idiots”. Why cannot the poor receive products that will lengthen their lifespans, reduce headaches of dealing with sickness, educate their children? All the poor in rural areas seem to get from India Developed is packets of biscuits and tobacco. The mode of poverty alleviation as executed by both the State and NGOs is welfare or charity. Instead, the poor should be the agents in charge of development, both the product designers and marketing salesmen of a local economy.
But back to the saltworkers. India is the third largest producer of salt, and 75% of that production comes from Gujarat. Most of the 200,000 workers pan salt in the Little Rann of Kutch barefoot and in the hot sun for 8 months out of the year. The way they get salt is usually by digging hand pumped wells in the desert to bring the briny water to the surface, or letting seawater flood their pans. The former is more common.
Speakers at the meeting proposed the following initiatives to make the salt panning profession for agarias more profitable:
- · The cost of the hand-pump to draw the brine water from the ground could go down if it served as collective capital, so groups of workers could utilize the technology together to bring down burdensome debts and pay them off more quickly.
- · For the workers, diesel is the main expense – to operate machines that get out the water in the next stage of the process so the salt crystals are the only item left. Some speakers at the meeting said we should experiment with wind or solar energy to run the water extraction machines.
- · Also, The Research Salt Institute in Bhavnagar sent a researcher who said we should test the quality of salt of the salt pan workers to improve and standardize the quality so they can compete with bigger industrial agents.
- · In off season, which lasts for four months, agarias need to get work from NREGA.
- · Salt is technically a chemical and not an agricultural products, so the workers don’t receive protection under the Forest Rights Act, even though salt is a renewable resource.
· Middlemen usurp the majority of profits from the saltworker as they are the link from harvesting the resource to putting the extracted resource on the market for sale. However agarias deserve a share in a partnership between government and workers, companies and workers. They collect the salt and deserve a share in the ownership of their product. Salt = stock.
· Though the majority of the nation’s salt comes from these hardworking hands and saline soaked feet, they are still unorganized!! Some skilled worker organization or lose union or a cooperative would be a step towards improving their lives through regulating pay or getting preventive care from the three main killers: gangrene, TB, or third blindness.
I totally enjoyed this nerd talk! I was hanging on to every word of his discussion about the intricate chemistry applications to salt panning, how small market introductions can have rippling effects for the agarias’ livelihoods. Salts precipitate at various saturation points. Our regular table salt precipitates at 24-29.5 degree Boem, the only salt the workers harvest for. But there are plenty of other salts that can be sold like MgCl, which precipitates out below 24 and KCl, which precipitates out after 29.5. KCL, called low salt, is a craze in the West; it gives the flavor of salt but doesn’t cause the high blood pressure that table salt can, so many health fanatics or curious enthusiasts (like my mom) use it. The price is a whopping 30,000 rupees per kg. Huge difference when compared to table salt, right? Traditionally the workers discard excess solution, an enormous lost opportunity.
I took Honors Chem/ AP Chem a while back, and enjoyed the subject to a limited extent. It never felt compelling, never alive. The short talk invigorated my chemical understanding to an extent I was unprepared for. I don’t know how to describe the coolness of discovering how extracting and finding markets for other kinds of salts can revolutionize a poor family’s life – with this information the extra income can decrease hospital debts, malnutrition etc. In my mind, I saw the ripple effects perpetually multiplying. Discovering the chemistry of salt mining in a small agaria school’s classroom on the border of Kutch dwarfed the moments of fascination that hit me occasionally in structural classrooms. Coming out of the meeting evoked awe in me because the interdisciplinary-ness of working with agarias is astonishing. From organizers like those who work in Janpath, to journalists, to chemists, to researchers, to economists— the agaria issue lures volunteers from all fields. It is so important to work with these agarias on finding alternatives to languishing in the poverty that envelops its claws over generations.
The speakers at the meeting were saying that if the salt pan workers learned how to tap into the market for low salt or other industrial salts, they could reduce their penury. However, for this, they must deal with industries and not the traders they have dealt with for generations. Traders have no monetary interest in finding table salt substitutes because the middlemen get the most money already and are in profitable positions. So the agarias have to learn how to deal with the sellers themselves. They have to organize not simply to demand better conditions or higher work rates but learn and step up to raise capital, to learn the technical processes, to control quality, to negotiate and market, to distribute and reinvest the profits…
An agaria composed and sang a song about a woman salt pan worker to inaugurate the sammelan. A beautiful stanza saw the woman wipe away the streams of salty tears that flowed down her cheek with the corner of her sari as she pans in the salt desert. Mesmerized by the voice, I only recorded the last 15 seconds sadly, but hope you get a sliver of the poet’s message.
The last thing I want to say about the agarias is the status of the children. Ten years ago, one of the first trips I had taken like this one was when I went to the desert of Kutch and saw the children of agarias. I was only seven but I can remember a few things distinctly. I had on my blue Nike shoes as I walked the edge of the pan and saw massive mountains of white crystals around the barren desert. There would be a white tent literally in the middle of nothingness where I can still picture kids my age sitting on the ground and learning Gujarati, their shirts providing the only colors for miles. Now, more than a decade later, I didn’t get to go to the Kutch desert but I did see some children at the meeting in Patdi. This time it was in a location from which they migrate into the desert. It is near their ‘home villages’ where they take one rain-fed crop in arid land. The school the meeting was at was comprised of 75% Agaria children, or more than 800 kids.
A common situation that arises is that students start school with their classmates in June, but leave in September to work in the salt pans with their families when the season starts. They come back the next year and repeat the same grade because they haven’t completed the requirements. This cycle of stagnation resulting in little or no real learning or full-fledged dropping-out continues. However, Agaria workers are pushing for a school in Patdi during off-season and then schools deeper in the Kutch area throughout the season so children can take their exams nearer their village to pass and graduate from their grade level. Deep inside the desert, there are few hospitals or bazaars for vegetables and meat. Moving across the earth is also difficult. In off-season when the water parts of the desert, some of the agarias become prawn fishers. However, those are some of the most unsanitary conditions unimaginable. Millions of flies and fleas etc. Working in the agaria world is exceedingly difficult – several issues are entwined in the salt pans. Can you imagine, three different seasons, three different cycles of carving out subsistence living from the earth!
So how would you label someone working with these agarias? A social entrepreneur? Political activist? Community organizer? How absurd these different labels sound when you are sitting cross-legged in the middle of these people? Ideologies and opinions dissolve like salt in the water! People do what they have to do: innovate, organize, produce, market, finance, educate, serve, agitate!
On the way back I had lots of fun talking to everyone. We laughed so much my stomach hurt! Like what? Songs, lotus, gandobaval, keri no ras in the fridge…. Normal people, normal lives, normal fun!
