How a bustling Bhiwandi is embracing change
The shift from powerlooms to warehouses has led to a growth in opportunities but government neglect has meant little change in lifestyle
MUMBAI: Forty-five-year-old Momin Abid is a fourth-generation Bhiwandi-kar. His father, like most Momins here, had a small powerloom unit which he gave up during one of the slumps which keep hitting the industry. Now, his son has taken up the family profession – only, he uses an automated machine, in which production of cloth is fast, and labour required minimal.
Abid is part of Bhiwandi’s modernized textile industry, but that’s not his primary profession. He’s primarily a dealer in imported automated textile looms. According to him, switching to these looms is the only way forward for Bhiwandi’s traditional power loom owners. “If they don’t modernize, in five years there will be just 50,000 power looms left here,” says Abid.
“It’s nature’s norm. Didn’t we discard our old mobiles and embrace the Android?” asks Vinod Malde, 52, who switched from powerlooms to automated looms with the help of the Centre’s Technology Upgradation Fund Scheme (TUFS).
This reporter visited Bhiwandi at the end of what was announced as a 20-day strike starting November 1, by the city’s power loom associations. The strike was supposed to send a strong message to the Centre to intervene in the crisis that’s engulfed the almost 100-year-old powerloom industry. Alas! The strike never took place. Those who had surplus stock kept their looms idle; others who had orders to fulfil couldn’t afford to do so.
However, the crisis is more than visible. Earlier, the sound of power looms greeted you into the suburb. Not so today. Bhiwandi was in 2014, as per a government-commissioned survey by A C Neilsen ORG MARG, the country’s biggest centre for cotton and spun yarn. In 2007, it had 14 lakh power looms. Today, that number is down to six lakh.
Shift of power
Businessmen like Malde made the decision to diversify more than a decade ago. Like Momin Abid, Malde straddles both the new and old in Bhiwandi. Apart from his textile firm, he also runs Arham Logiparc on the city’s outskirts – a 300-acre logisitics hub where MNCs have their warehouses.
Bhiwandi has emerged as one of Asia’s foremost warehousing centres. Amazon’s first warehouse in India was built here, designed by Durraj Kamankar.
Prodded by his kirana-shop-owner father, Kamankar became the first in his Konkani Muslim family not only to finish school, but also to graduate in civil engineering from Mumbai’s M H Saboo Siddik College in 1990. Basic cement-tin godowns were already lining Bhiwandi’s outskirts, as it was an octroi-free zone. But it was ‘KK’, as he is called, who transformed the villages around Bhiwandi into acre upon acre of state-of-the-art warehouses for global companies, such as Flipkart, Samsung, BMW and Myntra. Small farmers were induced into allowing their land holdings of one acre to be converted into warehouses. They ended up earning more in a month’s rent than what their single crop of rice per year got them.
KK claims that every day, 60-70,000 Bhiwandi residents, including women (excluded from the powerloom industry), make their way to the 300-plus warehouses, for salaries approximating ₹15,000 a month. Ramanna (name changed) is one such. A Std X dropout, he tried his hand at various jobs, including handloom and powerloom units, before ending up at a warehouse in 2015. Since then, the 28-year-old has changed five jobs, and seen an increase in his earnings from ₹8000 to ₹ 15000. But prospects are limited for a non-graduate. Though Ramanna works as a supervisor, he gets the same pay as those he supervises, because technically, only graduates can be supervisors.
Ramanna gets PF, a weekly off and overtime. What irks him is the contractor’s cut from his salary. “The contractor who hires us is our boss, not the company,” he fumes. Only English-speaking graduates who appear for interviews at head offices are direct employees in these warehouses, says Ramanna; the rest are hired by contractors.
With all this, Ramanna considers himself lucky; his bike ride to work costs him ₹ 3000 but takes less than half the time spent by his co-workers from far-flung suburbs. He can thus supplement his income by ironing clothes in the evenings.
Money matters
Warehouses helped the farmers get rich (the women are loaded with gold; the men with the latest cars and even helicopters), but they also helped keep the city afloat during the Covid lockdown when e-commerce boomed. Interestingly, they have led to a shortage of housemaids, for poor women have flocked to them, despite the distances and strenuous work. Today, they provide a cushion to offset the decline of powerlooms, Bhiwandi’s lifeline.
“Bhiwandi exists if powerlooms exist,” said an auto-driver. The suburb’s entire economy revolves around powerloom workers. This economy is in decline today. Rehan Ansari, a tailor, once employed five men. “My shop used to overflow with powerloom workers who wanted their clothes stitched. Today, the workers have gone, I run my shop alone,” he says.
Demonetisation and GST combined to deal lethal blows to an unorganised industry that runs on cash, with migrant workers often getting weekly payments. Owners run units from the ground floor of their residences or from small rented sheds. Few of them are able to take advantage of TUFS where loans are only given to those whose paperwork is flawless. “Momins, Ansaris and padmashalis from Telengana, all khandani weavers are languishing, while those who traditionally had nothing to do with weaving but have the capital to invest in expensive machines, are flourishing,” laments ex-MLA Rashid Tahir Momin of the Congress. “We can produce the cheapest cloth in the world - if the government helps.”
But instead, the government has allowed unchecked competition from Chinese yarn and textiles; imposed high export duties and reduced capital subsidies. Add to this fluctuating prices of raw material and sky high power bills: all these together have led to a situation where owners make sure their children don’t end up in the same profession.
Akram Ansari is one of the few who decided the family legacy could not be abandoned – even his mother used to spin the charkha back home in Allahabad. Though he works as a civil engineer, his unhappiness at his father selling off his looms when the Vajpayee government imposed excise duty on the powerloom sector in 1999, drove him to buy 24 looms some years back. He has rented them out, but worries about the lack of workers.
One reason for this is that only the most desperate opt for this work today. Indu Prakash Pande earns ₹15,000 a month and works on 12 machines now compared to four in 1990, but still saves as little as he did when he earned ₹5000. Not only is everything more expensive, his job gives him no benefits. “Even using a public toilet costs us ₹4, because all that our owner gives us is a matka of drinking water. If our finger gets caught in the machine, he gives us first aid and a ticket home.” Attempts at unionization have brought about a severe backlash, as Vignesh M, who was part of a Leftist union, learnt. Blacklisted and arrested many times, he finally left the field and became a municipal employee.
Pande has borrowed money to ensure that his son doesn’t end up like him; the latter studies pathology in Bengaluru. But the father himself has no choice. “If my maalik decides to shut shop, I’ll either have to return to my UP village where there’s nothing, or commit suicide. I’m 50, no warehouse will employ me,” he says.
Bhiwandi has always been a working class city. This hasn’t changed even after the establishment of warehouses. Nor has the condition of the working class.
Like Pande, Ganesh, whose father came from Telengana, has made Bhiwandi his home. He recalls bitterly how he didn’t get a flat even after his name figured in the MHADA housing lottery. “A worker needs a room – the government should ensure that,” he says.
“The powerloom industry is the second largest employer in Maharashtra after agriculture,” points out Rupesh Mhatre, former two-term MLA from Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena. “Its decline is not irreversible, if the government follows the examples of AP and Telangana, which offer power subsidies, and allows looms to be set up in homes.”
Bearing govt apathy
But, says Samajwadi Party MLA Rais Shaikh, the BJP’s policies are “aimed at benefiting big business and killing small industry. You need a separate policy for the unorganized powerloom industry. Small owners need capital and markets. Bhiwandi has 33 % of the country’s looms, but gets zero support from the government.”
Shaikh was part of a government committee set up to frame Maharashtra’s textile policy. “The committee met once; my suggestions for Bhiwandi were ignored. The textile minister didn’t even visit Bhiwandi,” reveals Shaikh. Vinod Malde points out that in Surat, the government has set up offices in the powerloom market to publicise its schemes. Bhiwandi’s owners must travel 35 km to Mumbai to the Textile Commissioner’s office.
Bhiwandi also falls in CM Shinde’s district, but “increased traffic jams is all that we’ve got,” says advocate Kiran Channe, one of the leaders of the Independence Day march demanding “azaadi” from Torrent Power, the Gujarat-based franchisee of Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (MSEDCL) which has been providing electricity here since 2007.
KK and Malde attribute Bhiwandi’s growth in investment, seen in warehouses and residential towers outside the city, to Torrent’s uninterrupted power supply, in contrast to load shedding by MSEB earlier. However, the city itself has paid a high price for this basic facility. From doctors to powerloom owners, everyone complains about inflated bills, an unresponsive vigilance department, and ruthless disconnection of metres and filing of police cases.
“There is a lack of coordination between politicians and the administration in Bhiwandi,” rues Malde, adding that capable administrators would have been able to “take everyone along”. “In the 20 years of our municipal corporation’s existence, we’ve had 21 commissioners,” points out KK.
The most glaring example of the government’s neglect is Bhiwandi railway station: connected neither to Thane nor Kalyan, with only eight trips being made by the Vasai-Panvel shuttle that stops there. A study by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research shows that Bhiwandi has the slowest moving traffic in India, and the fifth slowest in the world.
What makes this negligence criminal is Bhiwandi’s human potential. An entire generation has grown up after the last major riots here of 1984. Bhiwandi remained peaceful even in 1992 after the Babri Masjid demolition. Yet, Salik Ansari, who broke the mould to get admission into JJ School of Art in 2010, recalls that his roommates had been warned by their parents about sharing a flat with a ‘Bhiwandiwalla.’ Salik, who did a masters in design from IIT Bombay and has exhibited here and abroad, plans to set up his studio in Bhiwandi.
An empowered gender
Faisal Ansari was the first from Bhiwandi to get into IIT Bombay in 2009. Today, Faisal’s IT start-up in Powai has its back-office in Bhiwandi, run by his brother, who gave up a comfortable managerial job in a warehouse to help train aspiring Bhiwandikars, including girls, in IT.
Faisal had to spend two hours commuting every day for his JEE coaching class; today, NEET, JEE and IT classes can be found in Bhiwandi. Kiran Masuna runs one such class; his students include those like him, from workers’ families. Ayesha (name changed), a hawker’s daughter, studies MBBS at a government college in Kalwa; her mother stitches clothes from home. Like many others in Bhiwandi, she was spotted and nurtured by a team of doctors and professors led by veteran Bhiwandikar Dr Abdul Aziz Ansari, after she scored 96 % in SSC.
Girls like Ayesha make up most of the students at the Safiya Girls High School, whose principal recalls how, when the school started in 1994, students would throw their slippers out of the window and then dash out of the classroom. Today its alumna are doctors and scientists. Thanks to distance education, the number of Bhiwandi graduates is increasing, says career counselor Fayyaz Momin, while Asrar Momin, Bhiwandi’s first doctor, proudly compares the city’s G M Momin Girls College to girls’ colleges in Mumbai.
One of the biggest testimonies to Bhiwandi’s spirit is Jedlo, the food delivery app started in 2019 by three engineering graduates. Viewed with skepticism by a population that loved to eat out, today Jedlo has successfully kept Zomato and Swiggy out of Bhiwandi.
Bhiwandi is ready to bloom; but the government isn’t looking.
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