“In the past one year, I have conducted 27 funerals,” says Pramod Bisoyi, 45, a loom master from Ganjam district in Odisha, who works in Surat. “The workers’ families are often too poor [to travel to Gujarat] to attend the funerals.”
Bikash Gouda’s father and brothers were right next to him though when he died. It had barely been 24 hours since 16-year-old Bikash entered the gruelling world of loom work. The teenager had travelled more than 1,600 kilometres from his home in Landajuali village in Ganjam to work in a powerloom factory on Ved Road in Surat. On April 25 this year, just as he pushed the starter on a machine, a high voltage current passed through his body – killing him instantly. His father and two older brothers were working on adjacent looms.
“Everyone knew the machine was faulty. We had experienced minor shocks previously… but we never expected it would kill my son,” says his father Charan Gouda, who has been working in Surat for nearly three decades. “Our condition back home is very difficult. I thought by bringing even my youngest son here we would be able to save some money for the family.”
Two weeks later, on May 10, in a loom unit in the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation area in Sachin (in the Surat metropolitan region), Rajesh Agarwal was sucked into a machine. The young migrant from Maharashtra was killed on the spot. “The machine was old. It would not stop unless there was a power failure,” said a co-worker in the crowd that
— source ruralindiaonline.org | Reetika Revathy Subramanian | Jun 12, 2018