Surviving a city on ₹13,690

Outside a building that looks like a concrete cube, rows of buses wait to ferry workers home. The bell rings. Hundreds in sand-coloured uniforms stream out. Food vendors make their way through the queues, stationing their stalls in the gaps between the buses.

Surabhi (name changed to protect identity) walks out slowly with a group of friends, shoulders drooping after her 16-hour shift. One of the women points towards an ice cream stall and gently pulls at Surabhi’s sleeve, asking if they should each get a cone.

Surabhi shakes her head. “Rehne do; ₹80 ka ek hai (Let it be; one costs ₹80),” she says. She has worked overtime in the multinational corporation that operates within the concrete cube, its periphery guarded by other workers and barbed wire that runs across high walls. She has had to do the extra hours – 8 hours is a regular shift – to survive in the city.

Over a month ago, thousands of workers from various private companies in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Gautam Buddha Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh, took to the streets to demand better working conditions and an increase in their wages. With inflation, there was very little left for savings or even minor indulgences.

The State Government had not revised the minimum wage since 2014, despite considering it twice. Noida falls in the National Capital Region, an area spanning 55,083 sq. km centred around Delhi and surrounding areas across three States, constituted to ensure “balanced and harmonized development”, as per the government website.

After a week of workers claiming the streets, the government was forced to revise the minimum wage. A committee, which included members of the Labour Department and representatives of workers and industries, increased the wages for unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers to ₹13,690, ₹15,059, and ₹16,868, respectively, from the earlier ₹11,313, ₹12,445, and ₹13,940.

Hopes surpass salaries

Surabhi started working as a trainee in an automotive manufacturing firm when she was a little over 21 years. She had hoped to go up the company ladder but says she is still where she started.

Not learning anything new in the past nine years is her biggest problem with the job. “Learning how to make automotive parts is not tough: a 15-day training does that. But how does that add value to who I am as a person?” she says. “Will I ever get to learn anything about the world?”

“How long do you think it would take to buy a house? Maybe a 100 years!” she says, answering her own question. “I want to buy a house where I can live alone. Then I will adopt a child,” Surabhi adds.

At home, Surabhi pulls out her payslips from March and April. Comparing them, she says the increase will not have much of an impact on her life. She may still not have the money for the occasional ice-cream indulgence. “I would rather buy milk and vegetables,” she says.

She cannot afford to live alone. In the past, she has survived on loans from friends. Now, her brother has moved in with her, and they split expenses. “My monthly expenditure goes up to ₹15,000,” Surabhi says. “Restraint has now become part of the routine,” she adds.

The reason she was doing 16-hour days was that the government had reiterated that overtime work would be paid at double the rate per hour. The company insists that workers do the whole second shift if they want to work overtime.

Rakhi Sehgal, an independent researcher who works on labour and trade union matters, says there’s a crisis of employment. “Decent, secure jobs are barely there, and it’s only going to get worse once the real impact of the West Asia crisis starts to show up on the economy,” Sehgal says. “What gets lost in all the talk about wage hikes and the cost of living crisis is that workers want respect and dignity, their hopes and dreams of a better life respected, if not enabled.”

Surabhi hopes to graduate from college some day, so she can get a better job, then a house, then a child. 

The lure of a global city

For 23-year-old Yash (name changed), Noida embodied movement: upward and forward. “Aage badhne ke liye hum yahan aaye the (I came here to move ahead),” he says.

At first, everything seemed too good to be true: a job with a salary, food, and accommodation. Slowly, he would earn, save, and build a life in a city that often calls itself “world-class” in government advertising. Life would be different from what he had seen in the village, he thought. Different from the joint family set-up in the Auraiya district of Uttar Pradesh, where almost everyone he knew farmed the land. “I wanted to explore,” he says.

In March, he got a job in an electrical goods manufacturing company. Now, Yash occupies a 10x8-foot room on the top floor of a four-storeyed building with at least 10 rooms on each floor. “I am to get married next month. I thought I would save some money for that, but nothing is left at the end of the month,” he says, grimacing.

The entangled web of the city’s economic micro-activities took him to someone who offered a premium service: to review a group of companies and help him decide which one would be the best to join.

“I paid him ₹1,500 for the hard work of going through each company’s profile, studying the pros and cons and telling me which one was the best, with maximum benefits and the least amount of work,” Yash says. The man turned out to be a fraud.

The company he ended up interviewing for would also yield far less than what he had imagined. “The advertisement I saw promised ₹20,000 pay for an eight-hour shift with benefits of home, food, and transport,” he says. This seemed lucrative compared to the ₹ 12,000 he earned in Auraiya for 12 hours of work a day in a similar company. 

What he says he got was ₹11,000 with no benefits except transport. The company food was paid for from his own wages, and he had to find his own accommodation.

Scrolling through ads on his smartphone that tell him to “bring advance for accommodation”, Yash says he has no idea how to manage his expenses with ₹11,000. “It is scary: living alone in a city and not knowing how to go about it,” he says. “My brother had given me ₹7,000 to begin my stay in Noida. With that, I paid the rent in advance and bought a cot and a mattress. For the first month, I was dependent on outside food,” Yash says.

In May, he spent ₹5,000 on room rent, including electricity bill; ₹2,500 on food; and ₹1,200 on travel to the spot from where his company’s bus would pick him up. Another ₹500 went on phone bill, ₹1,500 on cooking supplies, and ₹500 on overhead expenses. “Before I could save anything for my upcoming wedding and a trip with friends, all the money had vanished!” With the pay hike, he hopes he can plan some fun time before his wedding. 

Yash will keep searching for a new job, he says. If nothing reliable turns up, he contemplates renting a motorcycle and starting to work with a platform-based ride-hailing company. “It is more profitable, some people say. At least you won’t have to sit in one place all day long,” he adds.

The arithmetic of survival

Returning home at midnight, after a 12-hour shift, Saurabh (name changed), 32, makes his way into a compact building, similar to Yash’s, though Saurabh has a two-room set.

He moved to Noida 12 years ago from Ballia in Uttar Pradesh and found stability in a well-known automobile company as a mechanical supervisor with a salary of ₹25,000. Last year, the company shut down the plant and told the workers it would call them back when a new plant opened.

Since then, Saurabh has been working at a carton manufacturing company.

The violence and the police action that followed the workers’ protest brought a brief uncertainty around his job, as all the workers were asked to leave immediately without any confirmation on when they would be called back. With an uncertain future, he asked his wife and children to move back to the village.

“Earlier, my two younger brothers would stay in a separate room, but now we have let that go and moved in together as it helps save money,” Saurabh says.

Together, the three brothers have also been trying to save money for their second brother’s wedding coming up next month. “It is impossible for a single man to survive in this city. Kar hi nahi payega (He won’t be able to survive at all),” he says.

According to Saurabh, a room in Noida costs ₹5,000 a month, groceries cost approximately ₹3,000 per head, the two children’s education costs ₹4,600, and medicines and emergencies account for ₹1,500. The little that is left at the end of the month, after sharing space with his brothers, goes into savings.

Earning more money means subjecting the body to more labour. “One needs at least ₹3,000 per month for two basic meals a day,” Saurabh says. “For how long can you keep on working? The body gets tired. There is a limit to what it can bear,” he says. The company he works at has not implemented doubling the overtime income, but he has had a salary hike.

Besides doubling the overtime, the government had also assured the workers of weekly holidays, salaries to be paid before the 10th of every month, a bonus, and a complaints box where they could submit their grievances anonymously.

The Labour Commissioner also assured the workers through a video on social media that it is the responsibility of the Labour Department to work for the workers’ rights.

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Edited by Sunalini Mathew