By midafternoon, Usha Devi’s one-bedroom home was a mess. Her infant daughter spilled water on the bed, and her toddler smeared food on the floor and picked up a knife as her 10-year-old thrust her homework under Devi’s nose. “I only get an hour for lunch,” Devi said, prioritising her youngest and unbuttoning her blouse to breastfeed the baby.
This precious, chaotic hour is the only time during the day that Devi, who lives and works on a construction site at Narela, on the outskirts of New Delhi, can be with her children.
Millions of people like Devi, 33, are leaving their ancestral villages and migrating to urban India to take construction jobs as India’s cities continue to swell. Devi works as a sweeper for a government project that is building low-income housing for residents of Delhi’s slums.
Construction accounts for roughly 8 per cent of India’s gross domestic product. But the economic pressures on these low-wage workers are disrupting age-old living patterns in villages, where grandparents and family members have traditionally cared for children while their parents worked on ancestral farms. In cities, parents who migrate from rural areas often have no choice but to leave their children alone while they work. The children of construction workers are often left to raise themselves and one another.
Devi is somewhat better off than others who have migrated to Delhi. On the site where she works and also lives, in simple housing provided by her employer, a charitable organisation called Mobile Creches (“creche” means “nursery” in French) has set up a child care centre where her girls are looked after for eight hours a day Monday through Saturday, with a break at home for lunch. “My girls are getting a future here,” Devi said. “They go to school every day. They get food. They don’t get hurt. They’re safe.”
Mobile Creches and its partners run 60 day care centres on construction sites and in urban slums around India. It’s a relatively modest initiative given the enormous need, but it remains an important model of how child care benefits low-income families. Centres focus on early childhood development and nutrition as well as play — an important part of childhood and social and emotional learning that remains undervalued by parents and many educators.
Meera Mahadevan co-founded Mobile Creches in 1969 after she saw street children in Delhi playing at a construction site, neglected by working adults. As India’s construction industry has grown, the organisation has scaled up: Since its inception, about 750,000 children have been cared for. Of note, many alumni have attended top Indian universities and landed coveted office jobs, both of which are usually beyond reach for children of India’s low-wage workers.
“When looking at a vision of new India, to know that our youngest are still excluded from the most basic entitlements — nutrition and care — it just compels you to do something,” said Sumitra Mishra, executive director of Mobile Creches. “There is a lack of support structures. Not every builder provides child care. It is stopping women from being more effective in the construction industry.”
Successive governments have taken note of the organisation’s successes. Mobile Creches now trains hundreds of caregivers in low-income communities and government-run rural child care centres. In 1996, partly through the organisation’s advocacy work, a law was passed that requires all construction sites with 50 or more female workers to have on-site child care centres. Although poor administration and corruption have left the law largely unenforced, Mobile Creches encourages builders to comply by offering to set up facilities if companies are willing to finance and accommodate them.
At school the girls learn songs, and they come back and tell us stories. They come home and teach us things.
India’s construction industry is the country’s second-largest employer, after agriculture. The work force is largely unorganised and unskilled. Women are expected to earn money, do housework and look after children. Most do not have maternity entitlements and have limited access to welfare.
The sight of unsupervised children from low-income families is so familiar in India’s cities that for many Indians, the children go largely unnoticed. Though similar day care centres have been set up on construction sites in India and in other countries, it is often left to the goodwill of companies, leaving many parents with no good options for care.
For parents in white-collar jobs, child care in India is still far from the norm; for workers like Devi, employed in the informal sector, it’s barely available and far from a legal right. In 2016, the government increased paid maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks, but the law applies only to the formal sector. More than 90 per cent of the female work force is employed informally, and they are left out. Without child care options, many mothers have no choice but to leave paying jobs.
Rural migrants come to cities for short stints, until the seasons change, or sometimes for a few years, hoping to save up. With little education or money, they have limited opportunities. They devise temporary homes under tarpaulins and tin panels on sidewalks or under street overpasses, or rent cheap rooms in slums. Many end up doing factory work or set up roadside businesses. Others, like Devi, do temporary work on construction sites.
According to a 2011 report by Mobile Creches, about seven in 10 children on construction sites are malnourished; newborns are often deprived of the health benefits of breastfeeding, and older children frequently miss school. Incomplete immunisations are common, too.
Many women on construction sites take young children to work because they have nowhere else to leave them, said Mubashira Zaidi, a research analyst at the Institute of Social Studies Trust. Interviewees in a recent study told her that children taken to work sites were often injured by falling debris. “Women were aware of the risks involved in taking their child to work sites, but expressed not having a choice,” she said.
In her village, Devi and her husband worked as potters. But with four girls to feed, Devi fretted about making ends meet. The reason for the move to the city, Devi explained, was all the weddings they are going to have to pay for. “We have only girls. How will we get them married?” she asked. (The bride’s family usually bears the brunt of wedding costs and is often forced to lavish the groom with expensive gifts or cash, even though the practice of paying dowries has been outlawed in India since 1961.)
Devi left her eldest daughter back in their village to care for her ageing mother. The younger three are looked after by Mobile Creches while Devi and her husband go to work on the construction site. To Devi and the girls, the day care centre is invaluable. When her infant daughter Gauri’s weight dropped below normal, a teacher noticed and put her on a special diet until she was healthy again.
On a recent Saturday morning, sitting in a circle with her friends, Devi’s 11-year-old daughter, Mahak, learned simple arithmetic. Next door, her sister was listening to a story about a little boy who finds a tiger under his bed.
“At school the girls learn songs, and they come back and tell us stories,” Devi said. “They come home and teach us things.”
In 2014, a report by the International Labor Organisation said that participation by women in India’s workforce is falling despite economic growth. Though this is attributed to a complicated and much-debated set of reasons, the report noted that much of the work handled by women in India is not counted as economic output. It is either not documented or accounted for in official economic statistics.
Women’s work in the home goes unrecognised — as it does around the world. Shubhika Sachdeva, a former deputy manager of advocacy at Mobile Creches, said that on a recent visit to the city of Udaipur, she spoke to women who told her about the various tasks that occupied their time, including cooking, cleaning and walking for miles to get fuel and water. But when asked how much they worked, they told her: “We don’t work. We do nothing.”
She found the same attitude among those in well-meaning organisations that want to encourage female participation in the workforce. “Many of these women empowerment initiatives encourage women to work, but don’t consider this unpaid work as ‘work’,” she said. “Child care and household tasks that women do are not taken into account. The nurturing role is considered a mother’s natural duty. It is just not culturally considered that looking after children could be somebody else’s responsibility.”
Mobile Creches alone can’t change the centuries-old belief that child care should be left to women, but it can illustrate the powerful social and economic benefits that quality child care can bring to all families, regardless of their social status.
Before she starts her job at 8am, Devi prepares the family’s meal, washes clothes and gets her girls dressed for school. When she comes home, she cooks again, cleans some more and prepares the girls for bed. Her husband sits outside, talking with other husbands.
But in Devi’s case the organisation’s efforts have allowed her to expand her ambitions by taking away the burden of child care and letting her earn her own income.
Devi’s fortunes have risen since she moved to the city. Now she has a kitchenette full of utensils and an electric fan she gazes at with pride. Next on the list, Devi said, will be a flat-screen television, an ambition that would have been well beyond reach had she stayed in her village.
“There, all day I work,” she said. “Here, I can rest.”
–New York Times News Service
