An employee of Goa’s electricity department, Krishna Pawar, variously described as an ‘assistant linesman’ or a ‘lines helper’, was killed in the last week of November, electrocuted while climbing down an electricity pole in Siolim after doing some repairs. ‘Action’ was immediately announced by the government. As announced by Sudin Dhavalikar, Power Minister, this ‘action’ included a suspension of the linesman who was Pawar’s superior, placing a junior engineer in the same office under scrutiny, and setting up an enquiry by a ‘high-powered committee’. Dhavalikar further added that the dead man’s family would receive compensation ‘according to the norms’ in two months, along with a job for the widow which he said he personally guaranteed.
For this government, this is indeed a lot of ‘action’. Because Krishna Pawar was not the first lines worker to die in Goa, nor even the first this year – he is reportedly the fifth to die this year in Goa. Yes, five electricity workers died on the job here since the beginning of 2023, all of them electrocuted while checking electricity lines. And no action taken till now.
Now the government has suddenly woken up, to boast of ‘action taken’. But is this action for real? Like, why the delay of two months to get compensation? To allow the media interest to die off, so nobody will notice if compensation is actually received? And how is the family supposed to survive for two months? Dhavalikar did not bother to explain. Perhaps he thinks that everybody has big reserves of wealth like he himself, to rely on for those short intervals in between ministerial berths? Doesn’t he know what people in his own electricity department earn? The kind of hierarchy of salary and work – with practically no work and lots of comforts at his end, and life-taking work with meagre returns at the other? The latter is where Krishna Pawar was positioned, in a job that required only two years of experience working on electricity lines, and was usually on contract which means that it paid crumbs. A job whose safety was supposedly protected by multiple rules and regulations, backed by a scientific knowledge of electricity that goes back more than a hundred years, but which, in India – like all other rules pertaining to the well-being of workers – are rarely implemented on the ground.
How is the shunting out of a linesman and the probe into a junior engineer (JE) going to make a difference here, especially when the four deaths before this were presumably not under these particular individuals? Isn’t this just the usual scapegoating of those considered unimportant, when it is obvious, with four earlier deaths followed by no action at all, that there is a much bigger problem here, something utterly callous and rotten, not to mention systemic?
India is a land of occupational deaths, with 45,000 such deaths annually, which account for a whopping 45% of such deaths in the world in 2015, according to one study. A recent BBC article used the phrase ‘factories of death’ to describe workplaces which take minimal care to protect their employees and do not get pulled up by the authorities. Discussing the case of an electronics-manufacturing unit in Delhi where 27 people died in a fire in May 2022, the reporter pointed out that injuries and deaths at work in India rarely result in compensation from employers; governments prefer to even offer compensation at times themselves rather than getting the employers to pay. And the grieving families themselves have no hopes of getting justice from the system, nor the staying power to fight, nor the backing of unions; and so remain quiet.
Things are no better in government-run enterprises, as the death of Krishna Pawar shows. Such incidents are usually termed ‘accidents’ like the trapping of the 41 workers in Uttarakhand inside the tunnel they were digging, who were finally rescued, after nearly 3 harrowing weeks, by rat-hole miners. Or the equally prestigious Bangalore Metro where 38 workers – mostly from among the lowest-paid contract employees – have died so far, without any action against officials.
Nationalist sorts – especially the Hindutva brigade – speak of Shah Jahan cutting off the hands of the builders of the Taj Mahal because he did not want anything like that to be ever built again. This is actually a myth, because it is known that Shah Jahan intended to build an equally – or more – grand tomb for himself as a mirror image of the Taj, and it is pretty obvious that the king would want all his experienced workers on the job.
But our Hindutvawadis keep repeating such myths, when what is happening now is worse. Indians are being killed at work, regularly and systematically, in a time when few ‘accidents’ are really accidents – they are the result of known issues which could have been taken care of. Like the risks of the geological conditions in the tunnel region were known. There are few ‘natural disasters’ that come unpredicted today, which means that they are really, directly or indirectly, human-induced. That’s why the powers-that-be prefer not to get any predictions done at all, besides quietly ignoring the existing rules and guidelines. So that if anything happens you can shamelessly claim, like Sudin Dhavalikar, that it was an accident.
There is no shame at the top in India, and no accountability either. Responsibility is taken by bosses only for successes, not failures. Hence, the suspension of two low-level employees, which, as everyone knows, will not make an iota of difference. In systemic failures, the only solution is to change the system, right from the top down. What really has to be done for anything to change, therefore, is to first kick out the top guys, beginning with the PWD Minister. The minister, along with the top bureaucrats in charge of public works, should have been out with the very first accident, leave aside the fifth death of the year. This is not a complete solution, of course, but a reasonable start.
(Amita Kanekar is an architectural historian and novelist)
