3.5 years after note ban, thousands of labourers in Pune still out of jobs

Pune city is host to more than 200,000 construction workers

Arjun Kale, 50, a daily wage labourer in Pune, refused to vote in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. “It makes no difference to us who is in power. All governments have ignored the needs of us labourers,” he told us on the morning of May 1 at Pune’s mazdoor adda (labour chowk).

It was 8 am and hundreds of men and women dressed in clean shirts and pants, carrying bags and digging tools, had assembled outside the Late Pruthak Barate Garden in Warje, a Pune suburb. While most organisations had the day off on account of