Chopped hands, missing fingers, and the cars they once made

Dive into the gritty underbelly of India’s auto sector, where the pursuit of profits appears to crush the lives and livelihoods of its workers.

"Please be careful, watch your arms and legs" (!)

Flying home after participating in the Safe in India (SII) Foundation’s release of Crushed 2023 with over 1000 workers, the otherwise ordinary call seemed to jar. The report documents worker injuries among auto sector suppliers, or Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and I had just interacted with a thousand of these injured workers. Had such a call gone out to workers—the ones who lost their hands and legs? In the circles where I spend most of my time, the counter-question that might have been asked is: Was there a business case to do so?

Throughout the day, the sight of missing fingers and chopped hands had become alarmingly commonplace. With worker after worker sharing their stories of toiling nearly 12 hours a day, seven days a week, I pondered the significance of the “70-hour debate” sparked by Narayan Murthy for these workers.

The debate served as a stark reminder of why India’s work culture can be among the most toxic, even for the more educated. It was not that the workers I met were not educated. Most had completed the 8th standard, and knowledge, however, was not the problem. But that was clearly not enough to avoid working on the faulty machines they operated. The report suggested that 54 per cent of injured workers were aware that the machine they were working on was faulty, and most (70per cent) of these had even reported this to their supervisors. And yet, nothing had been done. Could incidents with such awareness be classified merely as industrial accidents?

Speaking to them on the sidelines of the main stage, a veteran worker who had lost his hand 18 months ago comforted another newbie who had lost his hand three weeks ago. The warmth of solidarity they shared perhaps provided a glimmer of hope. Even as the veteran spoke softly, it was clear that the one who had lost his right hand three weeks ago hadn’t come to terms with his loss yet. It wasn’t a matter of emotions alone; it was the trauma associated with the physical loss of a missing body part that had been around until recently. He appeared to struggle with dealing with it as he kept trying to cover the wound with the piece of white cloth that clearly seemed insufficient to hide what had been lost. The blunt, wounded appendage that he carried seemingly made him conscious and even apologetic. Even as he repeatedly folded the starched fabric over it, he gently recounted and then recounted again how he lost his hand in a power press.

He was convinced that the manner in which he lost his hand was not like how others did while working on power presses (70 per cent of workers who lose hands or fingers in the auto sector lose them working on the press, and the average cost of replacing the parts that cause most of these power press accidents, i.e., the spring and key, is about Rs 14,000 a year). He seemed to berate himself. But for someone like me, who has never worked on a power press, it was impossible to grasp the nuances. Perhaps my lost expression gave my ignorance away, and he tried again. The “veteran,” with the longer experience of living without his hand, seemingly understood and, perhaps to commensurate, narrated his own story. He was done working for the day but was asked to work an hour longer. It was in that last hour—an hour that he was not supposed to be working—that the press crushed his hand. Fairly inexpensive sensors (typically costing less than Rs 10,000) would have stopped the powerful plates of the machine crushing the hand that operated the machine.

Recounting the incident is not what broke the veteran, though. It was when he shared his inability to understand why he was unable to obtain his last installment of the promised ESIC insurance benefits. It was now the “veteran” who needed comforting. And our naiveté about the ESIC system did not help matters.

Calming himself down, the conversation moved forward, and he asked his fellow worker where he was from. On hearing the reply, a new emotion seemed to surge. Not a sympathetic one anymore. But holding on to his politeness, he let out words that he knew sounded impolite in this context: “Workers coming from your state depress our wages by half.” Now it was the turn of the “newbie” to empathetically remind the veteran that we are all part of the same country. An argument that didn’t seem to rekindle the warmth of solidarity that provided some succour until a few moments ago. The conversation then turned to questions of migration, identity, and religion, and, for the sake of politeness, it ended with silence. The same industry that treated them callously also pitted them against each other as individuals competing to work in unsafe factories. A competition that shattered their solidarity as workers who had lost hands in the profit of others and replaced it with an invocation of identities that promoted conflict and silence at best.

But the silence was broken by a call from the stage in front. A call from a young 17-year-old Jyoti, who was completing her 10th grade. She had read a letter on behalf of her mother and four other women who had lost their hands while working on making parts for automobiles. The letter was a plea to the auto brands. Jyoti had prefaced her reading by announcing that she was reading it since her mother couldn’t read. The letter was read powerfully, but not as powerfully as when she unexpectedly announced to the gathering that she too had a message, an independent one. When her mother lost her hand, she spoke matter of factly: not only did her mother lose the ability to wear any mehendi or nail polish, she and her two sisters lost their education. Her plea on behalf of children like her was a simple one: please think, understand, and pay attention to these difficulties.

In making this appeal directly to the auto-sector brands, Jyoti was joining the 80 per cent of over 300 MBA students we had recently surveyed who agreed that auto-sector brands have the most power, expertise, and control over working conditions in their supply chains.
 I wonder if those of us who look for the business case for worker safety would be willing to face this young woman and tell her we are yet to find one. Their humanity did not matter or was not enough. Their lives and those of the mothers only mattered to the extent that they showed up in the balance sheets of folk trained by people like me. And that without auto-customers caring more about safety or governments caring more about regulations, in the language that decision makers are most familiar with, their lives were simply yet another “externality.”

Several reports have pointed to the direct involvement of the PMO in overseeing the rescue of the 41 workers trapped in the collapsed Uttrakhand tunnel. Perhaps another longer, even more complex rescue task awaits them and us?

(The writer is faculty, IIM Ahmedabad)