As the new India rises, so do slums for building crews

Construction industry, number of accidents grow

''Being poor is a curse,'' said Sumedha, 35, who moved to the boomtown New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon from the countryside to do construction work. The work sites are often dangerous. (Emily Wax/ Washington Post)

GURGAON, India - Rubbing the cement dust from her eyes, Gudiya, a 10-year-old girl with braids and a torn, frilly dress, weaved her way through a column of women in tattered cotton saris hauling bricks on their heads.

She slipped into a labyrinth of ramshackle shelters in this New Delhi suburb, her tiny legs sprinting over stacks of 10-foot-long steel rods.

It was dusk, and the air was heavy with the fog of cooking fires. Gudiya, whose name means doll in Hindi, boiled a pot of lentils for her family on what passes here for a stove - a pile of burning kindling surrounded by rocks.

That is because this is Gudiya's home: a construction site.

Gudiya has grown used to being shuttled from one such site to another. Two years ago, her parents gave up farming for jobs spawned by New Delhi's construction bonanza. They have helped build shopping malls, houses, and highways, aspiring to one day be part of a new, more prosperous India.

But with every glass-and-steel skyscraper and high-tech call center that goes up, a slum also rises. And efforts to demolish those slums have only pushed thousands of migrant worker families like Gudiya's to squat in the very structures they are building, hanging their laundry on clotheslines strung between support beams.

"I don't always like it here. My parents are always working, and it's lonely," Gudiya said, sitting on a mound of earth dug up to make way for a condominium and shopping complex near her family's shanty.

Her mother, Vimal, 35, stared at the ground. "We were hoping that if we came here, things would be easier than in the village," she said. "At least here we can get work."

Gudiya and her parents are among an estimated 40 million people, mainly unskilled porters, bricklayers, and other laborers, who have left poor and remote areas to build the new India in emerging towns such as Gurgaon, just outside India's capital. By contrast, an estimated 2 million people work in software jobs. The construction industry is one of India's largest employers and is growing at a rate of 15 percent a year.

The work sites are often dangerous. India has the world's highest accident rate among construction workers, according to a recent study by the International Labor Organization, which cited one survey by a local aid group showing that 165 of every 1,000 workers are injured on the job.

Anil Swarup, director of labor and welfare at the Ministry of Labor and Employment in New Delhi, has said the government is "very concerned about the accidents that are taking place, and we are looking into ways to do better." Builders' associations also say they are improving conditions.

But workers rarely wear helmets, and work sites often lack fire extinguishers or first-aid kits. In India, multistory buildings are demolished not with explosives or wrecking balls, but by dozens of laborers with pickaxes and sledgehammers. Since most families live onsite, children and toddlers often wander unsupervised amid the rubble and scaffolding, raising accident rates, labor rights groups say.

In the absence of clean drinking water and flush toilets, cholera and other diseases spread quickly, and many people suffer hacking coughs caused by inhaled paint fumes or cement particles.

About 70 percent of children at construction sites are malnourished, compared with the national average of 21 percent, according to a study last year by Mobile Creches, a nonprofit that provides day care and schooling for about 1,800 children at 24 construction sites in New Delhi.

"Today the outward story of India is one of a boom, of new construction projects, of growth. But that boom is on the backs of the poor and lower castes who are building this new India," said Mridula Bajaj, former executive director of Mobile Creches. "Does a new India want to live with thousands of worker slums next to five-star hotels and offices?"

Under India's ancient caste system, manual labor such as cleaning latrines, sweeping streets, hauling loads, and firing cooking bricks is stigmatized as work performed by those at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Members of lower castes make up 70 percent of India's 1.1 billion people, and millions of them are flocking to cities, hoping for better jobs and better living standards - if not for them, then for their children.

"In India, the caste system has always made it so the haves don't have a sense of the have-nots," said T.K. Mathew, chief executive of Deepalaya, a nonprofit that educates children who live in slums.

For most migrant workers in India, like Gudiya's parents, the decision to work in construction is born of a lack of options. For a few, it offers social mobility.

"It's not as safe as the village. But at least here she has some schooling," said Vimal, her mother. "I will stay working under the sun's hot fires to see my child get even a little learning done."