In December 2018 Profs Sushil John (PI, Christian Medical College Vellore) and Andrew Russell (CoI, Department of Anthropology, Durham University) received a networking grant from the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). The title of the grant was ‘Network for the development of participatory methods to investigate current and alternative livelihoods with bidi workers in South India’. Through the Collingwood Connect program, I got the opportunity to get involved with their project under Prof Russell’s supervision. The aim of this network was to bring together academic and non-academic expertise in tobacco control and participatory research methods through research involving groups and individuals in two large bidi rolling areas in northern Tamil Nadu, India – Tirupattur (home of the D Arul Selvi Rehabilitation Trust) and Vellore (location of Christian Medical College and its Low Cost Effective Care Unit – LCECU – which aims to bring health and health care to disadvantaged groups in and around the city).The South Asian bidi (leaf cigarette, also spelt ‘beedi’) is produced by some of the most marginalized groups in the subcontinent. Bidi rolling is predominantly a cottage industry involving ‘bidi barons’, contractors and home-based bidi workers (‘rollers’). Most of them are women, although children are also get involved in the process to help roll more bidis and get paid more. The wages are determined by the number of bidi bundles they roll (generally 1 bundle must contain 1000 bidis and per thousand bidis bring anything between Rs 50-300 depending on the area they come from and the type of worker they are- registered/ unregistered with the factories, from what we learned). Rollers’ livelihoods are precarious and workers are extremely vulnerable to exploitation. Their voices are rarely heard in discussions concerning their current circumstances, the health costs of bidi production, or their aspirations for the future. My role in the project was to aid in field research, interact with social workers in this field, get intimate with the issues bidi rollers face and what is keeping them in this industry and set up a blog for people to better understand this industry. This network aims to start a process whereby bidi workers themselves become agents of change, developing more secure and sustainable forms of livelihood in order to improve their current situation.
The funding I received for this project came from a part of an International Engagement Grant held by Prof Russell that was match-funded by Collingwood College. It was to pay for my flight expenses to India (and internal travel between Chennai, Tirupattur, Vellore and Delhi). I flew to my home country (India) with the simple intention to explore the nuances of the bidi industry at the grassroots level and look into alternative livelihoods for the bidi workers with the bidi workers themselves. Arriving in Chennai, I was treated with the sweltering heat of the sun hitting the roads and the delights of soft idlis, and later a long car drive to Tirupattur with Mr. Stanley to Dr. Chandra’s house, D Arul Selvi Rehabilitation Trust. Dr. Pakyanath Chandra is one of the senior-most woman paediatricians of India and is the human abode of kindness and strength; she has dedicated her whole life to community health and welfare and left warm memories of profound thoughts being shared under the sweltering sun, recounting her experiences in field research and how much it means to her. She has travelled to more than twenty countries and met so many families and it all led to one conclusion: ensuring that through her knowledge, expertise and privilege she helps all communities around her. I loved the community the community workers had made for themselves with her. They are all women with their own families, who would choose to get involved with community welfare and social activism when the husbands would leave for office and children would go to school. We were trained by Praxis, Chennai members led by Mr. Stanley Joseph (they work towards facilitating participation towards democratisation of development processes and results that will pave the way for an equitable society) and worked under the supervision of Mr. Palavyswami and Saraswati ma’am, both of whom were active social workers working tirelessly on different projects from trying to end water scarcity to helping bidi rollers.
The Bidi industry today finds its foundations on the labour of women in majority from rural areas all across the country, Murshidabad in West Bengal, Tirupattur and Vellore in Tamil Nadu, Vadodra in Gujarat, countless areas of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Women make up 90% of this labour sector; around 5 million are people involved in this industry. What reveals itself when we explore further into their working conditions is hours of under-paid manual work, countless health problems, a sense of remaining trapped in an endless cycle of this system between the contractors, the bidi barons, the resources they provide and the wages the women deserve but don’t get, familial tensions, sexual exploitation for quite a few, inability to step out of the system and educate themselves and their family members. I also met up with Dr. Sushil John and Mr. Pavan Mukherjee from Christian Medical College, Vellore in the Low Cost Effective Care Unit to learn about the LCECU, bidi rollers who often come to avail medication and understanding their medical and socio-political situation from the perspectives of the staff members. It was personally a very rewarding experience, because firstly, it gives one a lot of peace to know how pure and sincere their work and engagement with these communities is. Secondly, it shatters the idea of horizons and helps one understand their position better in the society and how they can use it to destabilise oppressive institutions that continue to enforce poor working conditions for bidi rollers and related professions.
The way we engaged with the bidi rollers was through tools designed with the help of Praxis, Chennai team and the social workers. The tools were expanses of charts that displayed drawings of rollers and how they identify themselves (like their caste, their age, their marriage status, literacy, age group, religion etc.) and then little cards that depict different emotions that can emerge while working in the conditions they work in and they choose the one that resonates the most with them. After that, we engaged in personal long discussions about why they choose to remain here, if they could pursue another alternative, what would it be? What hope do they have for future generations? How could this process be more regulated for them? etc. Our focus areas were two different villages in Tirupattur and a big slum population in the outskirts. This labour system often ends up functioning like this: The bidi barons appoint contractors who go to villages and employ bidi rollers. These bidi rollers are meant to register themselves to avail benefits like free health services from the special hospitals and dispensaries set up in their states and districts and ensure they get the minimum wage limit set for their state. But the reality gets convoluted when contractors begin to employ sub-contractors (could be family members, friends or relatives from their communities) who eat up the money that was just meant for the bidi rollers with literally no accountability. The narrative they take up with the rollers grows on the ignorance of the numerous welfare schemes the labour welfare office has introduced for them. This narrative often is in some cases filled with caste discriminatory language and leads to mental distress. They don’t officially register all the bidi rollers in the bidi factory’s employee register thus depriving them of lots of benefits. They also take the liberty to freely reject as many bidis as they want, thus cutting resource wastage prices from their wages meanwhile collecting the rejected bidis and selling them in the black market to create a profit for themselves.
In Delhi, I met up with experts in the field Tobacco Control and labour institutes like Pranay Lal from International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, Dr. M M Rehman from V. V. Giri National Labour Institute and Ms. Shashi Tomar who is an activist and freelancer, with a lot of grassroot level research experience and Dr. Mira Aghi who is a behavioural scientist and has been deeply involved with advocacy in tobacco control and especially how women and children are affected by it. I even went to the Labour Welfare Organisation to understand the schemes the government has introduced for bidi rollers. My job in Delhi was to interview them and gather their perspectives and knowledge about this industry and understand the bigger picture better. We are setting up a blog which will be open for readers to read through soon!
After I finished my field research, I came back to Durham and worked on blog pieces for our blog, and worked on analysis of the case studies of bidi-rolling women to try and find the best alternatives and share their stories with the world. I hope you get a deeper and more thoughtful insight into the beedi world.