The Nagrik Podcast

Following the announcement of nationwide pandemic control measures in India on March 24, 2020, tens of thousands of daily-wage migrant workers in India suddenly found themselves without jobs or a source of income. At inter-state bus terminals and railway stations in cities like  Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, thousands of such workers gathered, waiting to be evacuated back to their homes. According to the government's data, more than 1.14 crore inter-state migrant workers returned to their home-states. Many of them worked in the construction industry, the second largest source of work in India, after agriculture. Nearly all construction workers (almost all 56 million of them) are part of India's 411 million informal workers.

The significant majority of work in India, over 90% of it by most accounts, is informal. These workers do not benefit from social security schemes such as employee state insurance and the provident fund. They are also not protected by the laws that regulate employment, such as the Factories Act. For example, informal workers have no legal right to paid leave. The events that unfolded after the “lockdown” announcement left us in little doubt about the very real effects of these wide gaps in the law.  

The visible ejection of informal workers during the pandemic lockdown from Indian cities, including nearly all its construction workers, shed light on their lack of any meaningful social security. As part of the relief package announced by the government, the labour ministry announced a scheme that would credit 24% of wages into the provident fund accounts of those eligible. But only 1.5% of India’s construction workers, part of the mere 5.7% that work on a regular basis, are contributing members of the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation and thus eligible for such PF-related benefits. The remaining overwhelming majority of construction workers could hope to qualify for another relief measure announced by the government: direct benefit transfers to the accounts of workers registered under the Building and other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996 (“the BoCW Act”) using the Building and Other Construction Workers cess (“BoCW cess”) funds. In most cases, the BoCW system was the rusted and creaking infrastructure used to deliver social security benefits to construction work.

In this episode, we learn about the campaigns that contributed to building the BoCW system - the welfare infrastructure that became law in 1996 and in 2020, would be used to provide Rs. 2250 crores worth of emergency pandemic relief to 18 million construction workers.

You will learn from:

R Geetha, the southern regional coordinator of the national campaign committee for a comprehensive legislation on construction labour (NCCCL-CL)

Subhash Bhatnagar, national co-ordinator of the NCCCL-CL

Rina Agarwala, Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University

Chirayu Jain, Delhi-based advocate

Shruti Herbert, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Edinburgh

References

"Dial W for Wage Theft - the India Labour Line Story: Sushovan Dhar, Sanotsh Poonia, Shreehari Paliath, Chandan Kumar", The Nagrik Podcast 

Unni, Jeemol. 2020. “Impact of Lockdown Relief Measures on Informal Enterprises and Workers”, EPW Engage, Vol. 55, Issue 51. 

Pandey, Vikas. 2020. “Coronavirus lockdown: The Indian migrants dying to get home”. BBC, May 20, 2020. 

Mathews, Rohan Dominic. 2019. “A Comprehensive Legislation for Construction Workers in India: Unpacking State, Capital and Labour” in Hawel, M., & VSA-Verlag für das Studium der Arbeiterbewegung, WORK IN PROGRESS. WORK ON PROGRESS: Beiträge kritischer Wissenschaft: Doktorand_innen Jahrbuch 2019 der Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. pp. 90-109. 

Jha, Ajit. 2020. “Covid-19 Relief Package: Will central largesse help construction workers?”. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol LV Issue 17, pp. 20-22. 

Jain, Chirayu. 2018. “Are the Centre’s welfare measures for daily wagers effective or mere paper tigers?”. The News Minute, July 2, 2018.

Jain, Chirayu. 2022. “A New Labor Regime”. Phenomenal World, July 9, 2022. 

“How Many Migrant Workers Left Cities During the COVID-19 Lockdown?”. The Wire, June 20, 2022. 

Agarwala, Rina. 2006. “From Work to Welfare: A New Class Movement in India”. Critical Asian Studies 38:4, pp. 419-444. 

Agarwala, Rina. 2008. “Reshaping the social contract: emerging relations between the state and informal labour in India”. Theor Soc (2008) 37. pp. 375-408. 

Agarwala, Rina. 2018. “From Theory to Praxis and Back to Theory: Informal Workers' Struggles against Capitalism and Patriarchy in India” In Gendering Struggles Against Informal and Precarious Work edited by Agarwala, Rina and Jennifer Jihye Chun, Emerald Insight, 29-57.  

Agarwala, Rina. 2019. “Using Legal Empowerment for Labour Rights in India”. The Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 55, No. 3, 401-419. 

Ahuja, Ravi. 2019. “A Beveridge Plan for India? Social Insurance and the Making of the “Formal Sector””. IRSH 64, pp. 207-248. doi:10.1017/S0020859019000324 

"Labour Code Lecture Series: Lecture 3 - The Code on Social Security, 2020", Working People's Coalition

Yellappa is among thousands of migrant workers who wait every morning at one of Bangalore's several labour stands to seek work from construction contractors. He is one of 56 million people employed in India's construction industry. 

Nearly all of them are part of India's 411 million informal workers, who constitute over 90% of India’s workers. Not only do they not benefit from social security schemes such as employee state insurance and the provident fund, they are also not protected by the laws that regulate employment. Even after Independence, the large majority of Indian workers never benefited from the labour legislation of the twentieth century because they worked in small scale enterprises that were exempt from any obligations under those laws. Even for that narrow slice of India’s workforce to whom these laws apply, access to any mechanism that can provide redress for work-related grievances or hold employers accountable, is not guaranteed.

When Yellappa was not paid by his employer, he called 1-800-833-9020, the India Labour Line. It is a helpline that workers across India can call to receive counseling about any grievances in relation to their work, like unpaid wages or an uncompensated workplace accident. It was set up in the wake of the forced exodus of migrant informal workers from Indian cities following the sudden announcement of pandemic control measures in 2020. Aajeevika Bureau teamed up with the Working Peoples' Coalition to demonstrate that it is indeed possible to imagine a grievance redressal system that works for all workers.

On this episode of the Nagrik podcast, we learn about India Labour Line and Aajeevika Bureau’s Rajasthan-based labour helpline on which it is modeled, how the helplines operate to demonstrate a workable model of grievance redressal for workers, and about their objectives. 

You will learn from:

Shreehari Paliath, Senior Policy Analyst, India Spend. Read his journalism and other stories at www.indiaspend.com. IndiaSpend is a public interest data-driven journalism non-profit. 

Sushovan Dhar, director, India Labour Line

Sanotsh Poonia, programme manager leading Aajeevika Bureau’s legal aid work

Chandan Kumar, organising secretary, Working People’s Coalition

References

BBC News, “Coronavirus India: Death and despair as migrant workers flee cities” 

Indian Express, “Explained: Indian Migrants, Across India”

Sumant Banerji, “A look inside one of the most unsafe workplaces”, Mint (Oct 11, 2022)

Ravi Ahuja, “A Beveridge Plan for India? Social Insurance and the Making of the Formal Sector”, IRSH 64 (2019), pp. 207-248

Aajeevika Bureau, “Unlocking the Urban: Reimagining Migrant Lives in Cities Post-Covid 19”, 2020

ICDD Interview Series, “The Informal Economy, Labour, and Collective Cooperation in India (with Pravin Sinha)”

Shreehari Paliath, “How A Labour Helpline Is Helping Informal Workers Recover Wages”, India Spend (Aug 3, 2022)

Press Release for the launch of India Labour Line

November 7, 1938, 21 years after the October Revolution and two years after he published his searing critique of Hinduism in The Annihilation of Caste, B.R. Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party called for a one-day strike against the passage of the Bombay Industrial Dispute Bill. Among its other provisions, the law would make strikes a criminal offence. More than one lakh workers are said to have participated in the strike in Bombay alone.

Earlier in the year, Ambedkar had marched at the head of 25000 small peasants, landless poor, and agricultural labourers as they demanded the abolition of the khoti system.

Thus in 1938, in the space of a few months, Ambedkar led agitations that advocated for the interests of what we today call the informal poor and for the interests of industrial workers. Both of them were the results of years of political work, advocating against exploitative agrarian practices in the Konkan region, building effective bridges between social groups, and negotiating on behalf of Dalit workers with leftist trade unions. In this episode of the Nagrik podcast, we learn about Ambedkar’s advocacy around issues of labour in the 1920s and 30s, from our guests:

• Dr Jesus Chairez-Garza, Lecturer in Modern History, University of Manchester

References

Sarvodaya Shivaputra, “Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar role in the Bombay Legislative Council (1927-1939)”, Swami Ramanand Teerth Marathwada University

Abha Trivendi, “Indian Labour Movement (1927-1929): A Critical Appraisal”, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress Vol. 70 (2009-2010) 

Georges Kristoffel Lieten, “Strikers and Strike-Breakers: Bombay Textile Mills Strike, 1929”, Economic and Political Weekly (1982), 

Sumeet Mhaskar, “How a Strike 40 Years Ago Dismantled Workers’ Claim Over Mumbai, Hastened its Gentrification”, The Wire (2022) 

Shivangi Jaiswal, “Labour Ministers, State and the Prism of Law, 1942-52” 

Santosh Suradkar, “The Anti-Khoti Movement in Konkan Region, c. 1920-1949” 

Unnamati Syamasundar, “Independent Labour Party & the Legacy of Ambedkar as Organizer”, Round Table India (2018) 

Antaripa Bharali and Ankit Kawade, “A Lesson From Ambedkar’s Unusual Choice of Symbol During 1937 Poll”, The Quint (2019) 

Prabodhan Pol, “100 Years of Mooknayak, Ambedkar's First Newspaper that Changed Dalit Politics Forever”, The Wire 

Kari Kumar, “Ambedkar and the Bombay Textile Workers”, Dalit History Month

The Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (or KKPKP) is a membership-based trade union of waste pickers and itinerant waste buyers in Pune in Maharashtra. Formed in 1993, it wanted to assert waste pickers’ status as workers and their role in the city’s solid waste management. Today, it has over 9000 members, 80 percent of whom are women from socially backward and marginalised castes. Each member pays an annual fee to the organization and an equal amount towards their life insurance cover.

In 2005, KKPKP formed a wholly-owned workers’ cooperative called SWaCH in partnership with the Pune Municipal Corporation. 1500 waste pickers became providers of door-to-door waste collection services to the city’s households. In 2008, the PMC entered into a five-year agreement with SWaCH to decentralize door-to-door waste collection services. Cooperative members would collect segregated waste from over 2000 households. The non-recyclable garbage is further segregated for sale, while the wet or organic and non-recyclable waste is dropped off at the PMC’s ‘feeder points.’

A union of informal workers had formed a work co-operative.

Both historically and geographically, standard or formal work has been the exception. The vast majority of work in history has been performed without paid leave or work-related social security. Even when a significant portion of work in the rich nations came to be performed through formal arrangements, the large majority of work in the poorer nations remained informal.

In recent decades, the proportion of informal work has increased in the global north. This development has coincided with the emergence in the 1970s and 1980s, of a set of policies adopted by governments around the world to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society, collectively known by the term neoliberalism. These policies have whittled away at the islands of formal work in the rich nations and impoverished informal workers in the poorer nations. One such policy is the privatisation of municipal services. Municipal contracts for waste collection services in the poorer nations have, instead of welcoming them into formal work, dispossessed waste pickers of their sources of livelihood. 

In this episode of the Nagrik podcast, we learn about organising informal workers in neoliberalism through the example of Pune’s KKPKP. What are the different forms in which informal workers organise? What barriers do informal workers face in organising? How did the founders of KKPKP bridge the gap between them and the city’s waste pickers who lived very different lives? What kind of demands did KKPKP make? Did entering into a direct relationship with the PMC affect the union’s ability to advocate for its members? How do we understand the role of a work co-operative of waste pickers in resisting neoliberal trends? How can it safeguard against larger forces that can diminish the quality of waste picker lives? You can learn about all of this from the guests on this episode:

Lakshmi Narayan, co-founder, Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat

Poornima Chikarmane, co-founder, Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat

Melanie Samson, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg

Jane Barrett, Director of the Organising and Representation Programme at WIEGO

References

ILO, “Integrating Informal Sector in Municipal Solid Waste Management - SWaCH Cooperative, Pune”

Poornima Chikarmane, “Integrating Waste Pickers into Municipal Solid Waste Management in Pune, India”, WIEGO Policy Brief (July 2012)

Poornima Chikarmane and Laxmi Narayan, “Organising the Unorganised: A Case Study of the Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (Trade Union of Waste-pickers)”

Waste Matters, “Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat - Photo Blog”

Supriya Bhadakwad (KKPKP), “Waste Pickers: Paving the Solutions Path to Climate Change-1”, Speech at event organized by Zero Waste Europe GAIA and Zero Waste France at the COP21 in Paris

WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, “SWaCH Pune Seva Sahakari Sanstha | WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities 2018-2019 Finalist

TERI, “Swach Across Bharat - The Future We Want Series”

SWaCH, “We, SWaCH”

WIEGO, “Recognizing Waste Pickers”

Melanie Samson (ed.), Refusing to be Cast Aside: Waste Pickers Organising Around the World, WIEGO (2009)

Faranak Miraftab, “Neoliberalism and Casualization of Public Sector Services: The Case of Waste Collection Services in Cape Town, South Africa”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, December 2004

Lilita Gcawbe, “Reclaimers yearn for formal recognition from government”, Health-e News (August 18, 2021)

2021 marked 15 years of the Forest Rights Act and its most transformative provisions - those related to community forest rights and their governance through village gram sabhas. Along with the PESA in 1996, the FRA carved out spaces in the law for community participation in the management and governance of forests. These laws were the results of more than a century of social movements in various parts of India that cried out against the injustice of treating forest dwelling communities as encroachers on their lands, an injustice that persisted even after the constitution of independent India promised special protections for adivasis and scheduled tribes.

For over a century, the Indian state's legal control of forests had extinguished the traditional rights of forest-dwelling communities, who came to be perceived as illegal occupants or encroachers of government forests.

Things changed dramatically in 2006, when the Forest Rights Act recognized and vested a set of forest rights in the scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have been residing in forests for generations but whose rights had not been recorded. Most radically perhaps, the law recognized their rights as communities of ownership of minor forest produce that has been traditionally collected within or outside village boundaries, and the rights of access to collect, use, and dispose of this produce. 

Minor forest produce includes all non-timber forest produce of plant origin including bamboo, honey, wax, tendu or kendu leaves, medicinal plants and herbs, roots, and tubers. 

Apart from recognising and vesting these rights, the Forest Rights Act also set up democratic procedures for decision-making at the level of settlements.

Like any paradigm shifting project of decolonisation or for the de-centralisation of power, fears are expressed about whether the newly empowered people are actually ready for the responsibilities of power. 

This episode of the Nagrik podcast reflects not only on the economic and ecological impact of the community-led management of forest resources, but also on grassroot-level democratic practices in relation to the governance of forests. 

The Nagrik Podcast is among the world's best civic engagement podcasts.

You can listen to:

• Purnima Upadhyay, who runs Khoj, a civil society organisation that works in the region of Melghat in the Amaravati district of Maharashtra, on the promotion of the effective use of community forest rights under the Forest Rights Act;

Further reading:

Mittali Sethi, “How 2 Landmark Laws Can Come Together To Make India’s Forest Communities Secure”, Article 14

Geetanjoy Sahu, “Experiences in the Vidarbha Region of Maharashtra

Implementation of Community Forest Rights”, Economic and Political Weekly

Sharachchandra Lele, Shruti Mokashi , “Mapping the potential of Community Forest Resource Rights in central India”, Mongabay

Shreya Dasgupta, "Does community-based forest management work in the tropics?", Mongabay

Lekshmi M, Anup Kumar Samal, Geetanjoy Sahu, “15 Years of FRA: What Trends in Forest Rights Claims and Recognition Tell Us”, The Wire

Madhusudan Bandi, “Looking beyond the Forest Rights Act”, The Hindu

Vandana Dhoop, “In Nayagarh, India, community women get long-due recognition for protecting their forests”, Rights+Resources

In September earlier this year, many of us received a video depicting the violent murder of 33-year-old Moinul Haque during an eviction drive in the Darrang district of Assam. Many of us who saw the video were forced to reflect on what could make a man hate a stranger enough to act with such shocking violence. For some others, it was the nonchalance of some uniformed participants in the violence that struck home. The video became another landmark in a long history of ethnic contestation over land in Assam, which shares a 163-mile border with Bangladesh. Over the years, as the region went through several tumults, including the partition of Bengal in 1905, the partion of India in 1947, and the genocide in East Pakistan followed by the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the narrative took root that “indigenous” Assamese were losing their land to “migrants from Bangladesh”. It became the political foundation for the Assam movement during the early 1980s, the creation of a legal procedure to detect illegal immigrants and expel them from the state of Assam, and later, the creation of a National Register of Citizens for Assam, associated tribunals with the power to determine the validity of a person's citizenship, and detention centres to hold the people who failed these tests. The BJP came to power in the state in 2016 and intensified efforts to weed out so-called illegal immigrants. These efforts have disproportionately affected Muslims. According to government data, nearly 87,000 people were declared foreigners in Assam between 2015 and 2020. As of April of 2021, 1,36,173 cases were pending in the Foreigners Tribunals.

This is the background in which Aman Wadud practices law. In many parts of the world, the people who most urgently need legal services are not able to access them. The people whose citizenship has been questioned in the Foreigners Tribunals of Assam are among them and Aman Wadud, as a lawyer and co-founder of the Justice and Liberty Initiative, provides these services pro bono or free of charge. 

Further reading:

Rohini Mohan, “‘Worse than a death sentence’: Inside Assam’s sham trials that could strip millions of citizenship”, Vice News (July 29, 2019)

Siddhartha Deb, “How India disenfranchises Muslims”, The New York Times (September 15, 2021)

“Prove your Grandfather is Indian: Ground Reportage on NRC”, Bangalore International Centre on YouTube (November 20, 2019)

Jagat Sohail and Apoorv Avram, "'Invaders', 'Terrorists' and Now, 'Illegal Immigrants': Hindutva’s Reframing of Exclusion", The Wire (February 7, 2020)

Rahul Karmakar, “When you can’t find foreigners, you manufacture them: Human rights lawyer Aman Wadud”, The Hindu (June 27, 2020)

For several years now, we have all tuned in to a global conversation on the power of technology firms, that included often intersecting themes such as privacy and surveillance; electoral manipulation and democratic backsliding; the sourcing practices of hardware firms; misinformation, hate speech, and censorship; algorithmic bias and the frightening capabilities of machine learning and artificial intelligence; ownership structures and monopolies; and exploitative labour practices in gig and platform work. In India, we spoke about privacy and digital exclusion when the government forced through the implementation of Aadhaar, its biometric-identification system, about network neutrality when Facebook introduced its limited version of the Internet, about the foreign ownership of software products during border skirmishes with China, about waves of anti-minority hate speech coursing through social networks, about the state's surveillance of political opponents and human rights defenders using military-grade technology, and about the widening digital divide when the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic forced schools to adopt online learning technology.

This episode of the Nagrik podcast is the second and final part of a series on labour organising in technology. In the last episode, we learnt about how mostly blue-collar workers were demanding better conditions in gig and platform work. Circumstances are markedly different in India's IT sector, where employment remains highly sought after. In this episode, we will learn about how these white collar workers are organsing, and for what. 

The increased public scrutiny of the technology industry around the world coincided with the sheen coming off India's information technology sector. After 2015, stagnant wages and the long hours of work made it a less attractive employer, a trend that continued into the difficult months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The increased precarity of work in the IT sector became the cause for and the focus of, its workers coming together.

Conditions of work in the IT sector have perhaps worsened during the periods of working from home forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Organisers have reported more intense surveillance of workers and increased hours of work.

Some of the organisers that we spoke to, articulated a particular view of the role that workers unions have to play in charting the course of the technology industry towards more justice and fairness in technology. The Kerala-based Pratidhwani however, is very different. To begin with, tt categorically does not see itself as a workers' union.

While Pratidhwani organised around cultural activity to be able to better advocate for the interests of IT employees, the other organisations that clearly identified themselves as workers unions, provided legal support during times of employment uncertainty. 

To understand the methods and objectives of these groups, and to learn about their challenges and successes, we spoke to:

- Jaai Vipra of AIITEU, the All India IT & ITeS Employees' Union

- Alagunambi Welkin of UNITE, the Union of IT and IES Employees

- Vineeth Chandran of Pratidhwani

- a founding member of the Bangalore chapter of the Tech Workers’ Coalition (who did not want to be named), and

- Devika Narayan, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Said Business School in the University of Oxford

More reading

- Rashmi Menon, “Even India’s tech workers are interested in employee unions”, The Mint (January 8, 2021)

- Prudhviraj Rupavath, “Accenture may layoff 10,000 employees as unions campaign against illegal labour practices in IT sector”, Newsclick (August 28, 2020)

- “IT employees union UNITE warns firms on workforce reduction”, The Hindu, (November 6, 2019)

- Swarnami Mondal, “Verizon Data Services Sacks 1200 Staff Across India, Employee Alleges Bouncers Used To Intimidate Them Into Forceful Resignation”, The Logical Indian (December 15, 2017)

- “Dumped by L&T Infotech, students in ‘no jobs’ land”, BusinessLine, (January 20, 2018)

- David Streitfeld, “How Amazon crushes unions”, The New York Times, (March 16, 2021)

- Gerrit De Vynck et al, “Six things to know about the latest efforts to bring unions to Big Tech”, The Washington Post (April 30, 2021)

- Matt O' Brien, “Google workers form new labor union, a tech industry rarity”, AP News (January 4, 2021)

- Moira Warburton, “'Amazon won't change without a union”: Canadian warehouse files for union vote”, The Star, (September 14, 2021)

- “Technopark, India's first & largest IT park, celebrates 30th anniversary”, OnManorama (July 30, 2020)

- “Prathidhwani organises virtual job fair for IT sector in Kerala”, Deccan Herald (September 17, 2021)

- “Techies beautify walls of government school in Karyavattom”, The New Indian Express (July 21, 2021)

- All India IT and ITeS Employees’ Union

- Union of IT and ITeS Employees

- Tech Workers Coalition

- Prathidhwani

In August and September of 2020, delivery executives of Swiggy struck work in many Indian cities. They wanted to draw attention to the fact that in spite of the Covid 19 pandemic and the steep increase in petrol prices, Swiggy had reduced what was known as the base component of the remuneration paid to the executives from Rs. 35 to Rs. 15. Images of Swiggy executives kneeling down on the streets of Hyderabad were carried by several media outlets.

In March of 2021, the Telangana State Taxi and Drivers Joint Action Committee announced that 35000 taxis participated in a Black Flag Cab March, a symbolic protest where taxis offered their services with black flags to highlight the fact that even amidst rising fuel prices, the app-based cab aggregators Uber and Ola had not increased the base rates for drivers. In May, the United Food Delivery Partners Union held an online protest that urged the state government for a financial relief package, vaccination on priority, and the provision of masks, sanitisers, and face shields. 

A significant majority of work in India is performed through informal forms of employment. The emergence of the gig or platform economy during the past decade has transformed this world of work in many sectors. Most visibly, location-based apps have transformed how people access location-specific work such driving, delivery, domestic work, and beauty services. Another category of work, known as cloud work, refers to short-duration jobs that could be performed from anywhere with an internet connection.

The claim made on behalf of technology platforms that have mediated work during the last decade is that they would increase transparency and as a result, wages and working conditions. Another claim is that they allow women, persons with disabilities, young people and others who are marginalized in traditional labour markets to access work. 

An issue at the centre of the global conversation on the gig and platform economy however is how platforms have avoided any obligations under labour laws. As a result of the characterisation of the workers who perform services using these platforms on a daily basis as entrepreneurs or freelancers instead of as employees, platforms are able to shift much of the risk of business to these workers. 

Platforms however, have claimed that people are able to access through them, work that is better than what would otherwise be available to them, under less rigid arrangements. 

In this episode of the Nagrik podcast, we learn from a group of experts about measuring the quality of gig and platform work and the challenges facing gig and platform workers who want to organise and negotiate for better work.

We learn from:

Shaik Saluddin, the Hyderabad-based National General Secretary of the Indian Federation of App Based Transport Workers

Vinay Sarathy, the Bengaluru-based President of the United Food Delivery Partners Union

Sadhana Sanjay, Research Assistant at the Bengaluru-based NGO, IT for Change

Aditi Surie, sociologist and consultant with the Indian Institute of Human Settlements

Ayush Rathi, Senior Researcher, at the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society

Additional information:

Amay Korjan and Vinay Narayan,  "Socializing Data Value - Reflections on the State of Play", IT for Change, July 2021

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, "Platforms, Power, and Politics - Perspectives from Domestic and Care Work in India", June 2021

"Future of Labour Post Covid-19: Part 1", Suno India

Aditi Surie, "Are Ola and Uber Drivers Entrepreneurs or Exploited Workers?", EPW Engage, June 2018

The Hindu, "Food delivery workers seek COVID-19 relief package", May 30, 2021

The Wire, "Swiggy Delivery Executives Strike in Chennai and Hyderabad Over Reduction in Payment", August 19, 2020

Soumya Chatterjee, "Food delivery executives protest in Bengaluru, demand compensation for loss of work", The News Minute, June 4, 2020Shilpa S Ranipeta, "12 days after strike began, Swiggy continues talks with delivery execs in Hyderabad", The News Minute, September 26, 2020

Vaccinating a significant part of the world's population is widely accepted as the most effective strategy to emerge quickly from the Coronavirus pandemic that we find ourselves in. As of May 20, 2021 however, only 3% of India's population has received both doses of any of the three vaccines that are currently available in the country. On average, only one in every 1000 Indians receives a vaccine dose each day. 

India is not the only country that has struggled to vaccinate its population against the Coronavirus. 25% of the population in high income countries has been vaccinated compared to only 0.2% in low income countries. The WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom referred to these inequities in access to the vaccine as “a catastrophic moral failure”.

The current themes of pharmaceutical monopolies and affordable access to health remind us of the global struggle to make anti-retroviral therapy available to people living with HIV-AIDS at a time when the continent of Africa was being ravaged by that disease. That campaign for equitable access to life-saving medicines, with the South African Treatment Action Campaign at its visible core, took place just as the WTO and the TRIPS Agreement had come into existence. 

What the AIDS epidemic and the campaign for life-saving medicines helped the world understand better was that the true vector of disease was inequality. The HIV virus disproportionately killed the world's poor and the marginalised.

Covid vaccines can be made available for all people, in all countries, and at speed but only if there is a fundamental transformation in how we currently manufacture and distribute medicines, but it has been done before. 

In this episode of the Nagrik Podcast, we learn from a group of activists and scholars who worked on ensuring access to life saving medicines twenty years ago during the HIV-AIDS crisis, and some who today, are working for the equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.

We hear from:  

Achal Prabhala, an activist for access to medicines, whose work spans India, Brazil, and South Africa through the accessibsa project

Anand Grover, a Senior Advocate in India and a founder-member of the Lawyers Collective, who was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health

David Legge, a scholar emeritus in the School of Public Health and Human Biosciences at La Trobe University in Melbourne, is part of the Peoples' Health Movement

Ellen t'Hoen, a lawyer and public health advocate, was the director for policy and advocacy at Médecins Sans Frontières’ campaign for access to medical treatment

Fatima Hassan, social justice activist and human rights lawyer, is the founder and director of the Health Justice Initiative

James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International 

Leigh Haynes, a lawyer and health equity expert, who is part of the Free The Vaccine campaign

Additional information:

Hannah Ellis-Petersen et. al., “Stench of death pervades rural India as Ganges swells with Covid victims”, The Guardian (2021)

Alia Chughtai, "Did India get its COVID vaccine strategy wrong?", Al Jazeera (2021) 

WHO COVID-19 Technology Access Pool 

Ellen t'Hoen, “The global politics of pharmaceutical monopoly power”, Open Society Foundations (2009)

Christopher Butler, “Human Rights and the World Trade Organization - the right to essential medicines and the TRIPS Agreement”, 5 J. INT’L L. & POL’Y 5:1 (2007)

“The Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health - Ten Years Later: The State of Implementation”, Policy Brief 7, (South Centre: 2011)

Joseph E Stiglitz et. al., “Patents vs. the Pandemic”, Project Syndicate 

Achal Prabhala et. al., “We can't let the WTO get in the way of a 'people's vaccine'”, The Guardian 

Ellen t'Hoen, “Covid shows the world it needs new rules to deal with pandemics” 

Achal Prabhala et. al., “The world's poorest countries are at India's mercy for vaccines. It's unsustainable”, The Guardian (2021) 

“OPEN LETTER: Uniting Behind A People’s Vaccine Against COVID-19”, Oxfam International  

"No profit on pandemic - European Union Citizens' Initiative" 

Susan George et. al., “Taking Health back from Corporations: Pandemics, big pharma and privatized health”, TNI Long Reads, 

Zachie Achmat, “How to beat the epidemic”, The Guardian (2001), 

“A Timeline of HIV and AIDS”, HIV.gov 

Katherine Eban, “How an Indian tycoon fought Big Pharma to sell AIDS drugs for $1 a day” 

Sarah Boseley, “How Nelson Mandela changed the Aids agenda in South Africa”, The Guardian (2013)

Peoples’ Health Movement, “Peoples’ Charter for Health”

From 1948 until the early 1990s, South Africa pursued a system of institutionalised racial segregation known as apartheid. It ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population. According to this system of social stratification, the Afrikaaner-speaking white citizens had the highest status, followed by Asians and Coloureds, and then black Africans. 

Sport was also segregated along similar lines. Black Africans, Asians, and coloured people participated in sporting environments that were separate and inferior to those in which white athletes participated. Non-white athletes could never participate at a high level of competition, or represent their country at international events.

From the 1950s, sport, with its myths of level playing fields and cross-cultural exchange, became one of the nodal points of anti-apartheid activism in South Africa and around the world. In 1958, Dennis Brutus, a vocal critic of apartheid, co-founded the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC). In the years that followed, SAN-ROC was the coordinating centre of an international movement to isolate South Africa in international sport.

In this episode of the Nagrik Podcast, we try to learn how a small group of people were able to lead a campaign of such global influence, and explore the lasting impact of the sporting boycott.

We hear from:

Sam Ramsamy, Brutus' successor at SANROC, who from the mid-1970s, went about constructing and protecting, along with his colleagues, an international boycott against South African sport.

Abdul Samad Minty, who represented SANROC at the meeting of the International Olympic Committee at Baden Baden, to persuade its delegates to exclude South Africa from the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. 

Douglas Booth, the dean of the School of Education, Sport, and Exercise Sciences at the University of Otago. His work primarily focuses on the political and cultural aspects of sport and in the mid-1980s, while at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, Booth started his work on the sports boycott of South Africa.

Sean Jacobs, an associate professor of international affairs at The New School in New York. He is founder and editor of Africa is a Country, and in 2019, published his book, Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization.

John Minto, who led Halt All Racist Tours or HART, which was formed in New Zealand to protest against rugby tours to and from Apartheid South Africa. 

Bruce Kidd, a Canadian campaigner for the preservation of the boycott, who had won medals at the 1962 Commonwealth Games.

Further reading

ES Reddy, “A tribute to Sam Ramsamy and others who fought apartheid sport”, South African History Online

“1976 - African countries boycott the Olympics”, BBC - On This Day

“The D’Oliveira Affair”, BBC - Sporting Witness

Mike Rowbottom, “Ramsamy, the man Mandela called his son, reflects at 80 on SANROC, the IOC and his “greatest moment” at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics”, Inside The Games

Tom Hunt, "Trevor Richards: 50 years on from Halt All Racists Tour and the power of protest", Stuff

“1981 Springbok Tour”, New Zealand History

"Rebel Rebel", BBC - The Documentary Podcast

Venu Madhav Govindu, “India’s gift to the struggle against apartheid”, The India Forum