It's been a hard day's night by P. Sainath (The Hindu)
Hundreds of women in Maharashtra's Gondia district travel from small towns to the villages to earn a daily wage.
"At the station are many other women without options. They are also unusual in one sense: these are not migrants from village to city. They are footloose workers from an urban setting seeking work in the villages. This search takes them from moffusil towns [i.e., those away from urban centers] — Tiroda is a tehsil headquarters [i.e., the main town in its administrative area] — to toil as agricultural labour in the villages almost every day of their lives. Spending up to 20 hours away from home daily. There are no weekend offs and no jobs in Tiroda. 'After the beedi [cigarette] industry went,' says Mahendra Walde, 'it is impossible for them to find work here.'"
Comments