The little strip between the drain in front of our apartment complex in Kolkata and the tarmac road surface was filthy. The municipal sweeper whose beat it was had a point when he said he could hardly get to the rubbish as it lay between rubble, weeds and overgrown grass. So some of us decided to organise a clean-up ourselves. And thereby we learnt a bit about how much people earned at the bottom of the pyramid.
The first hurdle was to get somebody, anybody, to do the job. No, there is nobody willing to do this kind of casual work, and the less said about the young men the better, gloomily observed the provision store owner across the road and the nearby tea stall owner.
Eventually we had to split the work into three parts: we needed someone to clear up the rubble, broken bricks and the like; someone else to de-weed (in effect, yank out the taller growth); and yet another to crop the grass. Once this was done, the sweeper's broom would be able to reach what was a part of the street.
The first two tasks were eventually done by two people, identified by reliable intermediaries to avoid overcharging, who spent no more than two hours each and charged Rs 250 per head. But there was simply nobody to be had to crop the grass. The lawnmower that the complex's part time mali, or gardener, used once a month to tend the little children's park was no good for the uneven roadside. And we knew how he fleeced us for every little additional chore. So we looked around for someone else.
Finally, a middle-aged man offered to help out, but I had to get him a scythe since he had a back problem and could not bend. So, after trying several hardware shops, I got what I thought he wanted, only to be told that I did not know the difference between a scythe and a sickle.
In order to use the sickle that I had bought, he would have to sit on his haunches, whereas with a scythe he could just bend a little and swing away. He eventually delivered with half a day's effort at Rs 500.
The cultural gap between the two farm tools was so much bigger than their difference in size, I realised. Bits of Hilaire Belloc's essay, "The mowing of a field", which I had read in high school and carried with me thereafter, came back to me, along with the rhythmic swinging of the scythe and the peace of the English countryside that it evoked. The sickle, on the other hand, represented the revolution and the violence that went with it, not the least in West Bengal over the last few decades.
Then, in a few days, I finally kept our date with the electrician, managing to get all the stuff from circuit breakers to plain brass screws, which he required to do the work needed in our apartment in order to ensure that there was no burnout - thanks to the air conditioner load, since the mercury hovered around 40 degrees Celsius for days. He had said he would get a boy to help him but eventually came by himself (supervising youngsters is a headache, he said), spent an intensive five hours and asked for Rs 1,200.
He was amused when he saw I was a bit taken aback and agreed to settle for Rs 1,000. This was twice the Rs 500 that the expert carpenter had charged earlier. Sure, the electrician had technical skills, but there was something aesthetic about what the carpenter did. Then I remembered that the latter had worked over a year ago and it hit me powerfully how wage inflation had more than kept pace with overall inflation.
How did all this square with official wage figures and consumer prices? The current daily wage rate for the national rural employment programme for West Bengal is Rs 169 and the national minimum wage for the unskilled is Rs 311. So casual labour - unskilled and skilled - in cities was doing splendidly, buoyed by the floor set by these official wages.
And where was this extra income going? In milk certainly. In the last year, milk prices, Mother Dairy's, for example, have gone up by 27 per cent!
There is no doubt that in recent years a revolution of sorts has taken place at the bottom of the pyramid. If you are neither old nor handicapped but plain able-bodied, then even without any particular skills you will be able to keep body and soul together in a way that you earlier could not. So tough luck for those fighting inflation from within the middle class - and good luck for those knocking at its door.
subirkroy@gmail.com
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
