Geetanjali Krishna: Safety last

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

Why isn't that worker in protective gear?" I asked, hurriedly moving away from the dangerous looking blowtorch, with which he was burning away excess yarn from a newly woven carpet.

Even though I was about 10 feet away, I could feel its heat on my face "" but the worker wielding it, only had a flimsy cloth over his head. We were looking at the first step in the long process of finishing carpets. After this, the carpet would be washed in acid and other chemicals, dried, and then clipped and colour-sorted.

"Actually, you could call most of these finishing methods hazardous. And exporters, now being more than aware of international safety standards, do insist that workers take adequate precautions. In fact, sometimes our buyers insist on seeing what types of safety norms we follow. But it's the workers who often complain that protective clothing is too warm for our climate, or restrictive of movement," said my exporter friend, who was showing me around.

We walked up to the tufting unit, where the ratatat of tufting guns drowned all other sounds. Some carpets were lying on their backs, and workers were spreading an evil-smelling, gluey liquid on them.

"This is the process of latexing, with which the canvas backing cloth and the woolen front of the carpet are stuck together," my friend explained. I noticed that most of the workers were wearing gloves and shoes.

But my friend said, "they're wearing them only because they know they'll be severely punished for flouting safety norms "" not because they want to protect their skin from toxic chemicals!"

That was perhaps why one of them promptly removed his gloves when the supervisor moved away. He caught my eye and said, "It's so hot, it's impossible to work in these gloves! And anyway, I find I can work better without them!"

In the washing contractor's courtyard, where newly woven carpets were washed and given different finishes, I saw what happened when workers worked without the factory-type supervision of the sort we'd just seen.

"We wanted the contractor's workers to wear shoes, which some did reluctantly, others, not at all. But the shoes they can afford are those typical plastic shoes one gets in villages "" which are not only hot and uncomfortable, they are not effective in keeping the toxic chemical solution from sloshing around their ankles," said my friend. We were watching a carpet get an acid wash.

The carpet, soaked in an acid solution, was being beaten with wooden paddles by four men. "This removes all the excess liquid, but also causes quite a bit of a splash," said my friend.

"The bottomline," he said with a sigh, "is that ours is a cottage industry, where a carpet is made in one place, finished elsewhere and washed in a third place. It is impossible for us to monitor whether our contractors insist on protective gear for their workers "" even if we follow the rules in our factories!"

But none of the workers looked like they were complaining. Instead, they showed us their legs and feet, which looked healthy to my untrained eyes, in spite of being subjected to so many "finishing" processes every day.

"I've been washing carpets for years, just like these other men here. Nothing untoward has ever happened, and I'm absolutely hale and hearty," said one of them. They all insisted that such safety measures were unnecessary in washing carpets.

"As they themselves don't see their work as potentially hazardous to their health," said my friend pessimistically, "nothing short of a bad accident is going to convince them otherwise!"