'Maruti's Woes In Manesar Will Be Repeated In Gujarat'

The film is part of a larger South Asian research and film project called "The Justice Project" which looks at the theme of justice in the context of conflict. I had chosen to do my film on industrial conflict. In addition to this, I have always worked around subjects concerning labour but mostly with unorganised or informal labour. This was the first time I was looking at organised labour. The idea for the film had been there since 2012 when this incident took place. There were two issues which struck me in 2012. One, while watching the television coverage of the event, people from the industry, industrialists and activists, friends and family members of the manager who had been killed, all spoke, but there was no voice of the workers. Similarly, various people had been doing short videos or writing on the problem of workers since 2011, yet there was a complete absence where mainstream media was concerned. This struck me and I made a few calls, thinking that there was a film here.

How long did the process of making the film take?

The entire process took more than two years. I filmed for exactly one year. This was from July 18, 2013 till July 18, 2014, July 18 being the day violence erupted in Manessar. I started filming a year after the incident when there was a protest meeting organised by the various unions. Before the filming I spent some months on research and gathering information because I was dealing with the history and the production of these vehicles along with the setting up of the Maruti factory and its background. There was a fair amount of research that had to go into it before starting the filming.

What sort of preparations went into building the film? How do you prepare to show a different side of the story to people?

My plan for this film was to look at a larger picture of Maruti. Maruti is quite a metaphorical industry and marks the opening up of the automobile industry in India. The car itself revolutionalised the automobile industry and has had a huge social impact as it brought in completely radical ideas of labour management relationships. So I was interested in looking at what this company symbolises and what shifts and changes happened within the company. For me all this actually leads up to the July 18 incident. I was trying to look at labour issues and management practices while looking the history of Maruti itself. I didn't get access to the company though. They never agreed to talk to me or even provide me with any opportunity to work with them.

I then started looking at the background of Maruti to get an understanding of why this incident happened and the consequences of the incident in terms of the families that were involved in it. This issue became so important to the state that they appointed a senior Supreme Court lawyer as a public prosecutor. I have been told that no lawyer has ever been paid this high a remuneration for taking a case as a public prosecutor in a sessions court as Mr (KTS) Tulsi was. He was ultimately paid about Rs 5.2 crore for the case until he was removed by the new government. The salary was coming to about Rs 11.8 lakh per day.

Members of various labour unions shout slogans during a protest against Maruti Suzuki management outside Shramshakti Bhavan in New Delhi. (Photograph by PTI Photo/Vijay Kumar Joshi)

Why do you think it had such an impact on the government that it was willing to spend so much money on this case?

Post any incident of violence, there is always a certain way in which the industry starts threatening the government. The government thinks that this will have repercussion as far as foreign direct investment is concerned resulting in companies withdrawing their investments. Also there is some amount of arm twisting about shifting from the location. Besides that, India is keen to push itself globally as a destination for cheap labour. Thus when such incidents take place it becomes a problem, especially when it involves such large multinational corporations because of a fear that this will start getting reported internationally.

The fact is that this conflict starts almost at the stage of drawing a map. How one imagines industrial towns and whether you are looking at housing for labour or other amenities or not becomes important. In areas where these basic amenities are not provided and workers are under pressure, there is bound to be conflict. Towards the end of the film, it talks about the villages from which this land was acquired and the impact it had on the residents as well as the environment in the town. The place becomes a cess pool during rains because such industries do not bother to do an environmental and social impact assessment. Strangely the people whose lands have been acquired become party to the act of controlling labour through their relationship with the company because they are completely dependent now on rents from the workers that live in houses where there earlier used to be agricultural land. The peculiar way in which this nexus is created leaves for no other option but for conflict to erupt.

A burnt down reception block of Maruti Suzuki factory a day after workers rioted, in Manesar, Gurgaon.
(Photograph by Manoj Kumar)

How much is the government to be blamed for letting Maruti evade proper checks and balances before setting up a plant?

If when the map for Manesar was drawn, it had been looked at by environmentalists and sociologists, almost all problems could have been predicted and avoided. The factory starts from just under the base of the Aravali and the gradient of the place is in a way that rainwater comes down and flows through this area. This rainwater feeds various lakes in Haryana including the Sultanpur Lake which has now completely dried out. One can easily design this area in a way that water channels are not blocked but it simply needs a certain sense of what I think can be called sensitivity on the part of the government.

The system though has hardened in a manner that it is now only interested in a plan to attract companies to set up in an area and give them infrastructure including land, electricity, roads etc. But there is no social responsibility beyond that in terms of maintaining these roads and the welfare of the people living in the area. One way to see this is that this is the only way growth is imagined in the country. But I think that even within the system which has its issues of inequity; there could still be a more sensitive way in which things could be done.

What is the state of the labour in the factory and the labour union today?

There are two plants of Maruti, one in Gurgaon and the new one in Manesar. The Gurgaon plant has had a union which is independent and close to the management. In Manesar, the factory came up in 2006 without a labour union and when the issue of working conditions came up, there was a demand for a union, the management set up a grievance committee to address all labour issues. The labourers on the other hand wanted to set up an independent union. This became a conflict resulting in three strikes.

More and more workers are now in favour of having smaller independent unions which are not tied to central trade unions. There is a feeling that the central trade unions are not as effective and have relationships with the management which results in inefficiency. If you look at it, in the last two years or so, Gurgaon and surrounding belt have witnessed a huge spate of incidents of strikes, sit-INS and agitations. One of the areas around which the strikes happened is contract labour. There is an increasing trend to have more and more contract labour and lesser regular jobs as the contract labour is not given all the facilities provided to regular labour.

Maruti is setting up a new plant in Gujarat now. Do you think a similar fate awaits this plant?

In a way what happened in Manesar is exactly the same thing that will happen in this plant. From the acquisition of land itself, there is already conflict. The people whose land is being acquired are not ready to give land. Maruti along with all its ancillaries are going to come up and the villages around the area will become dependent on rents. The place where the Maruti plant is coming up is between the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridors. Gujarat has made special investment regions which include a lot of villages which have protested at being included in this industrial belt. The government has been able to convince these villages to give up their land but not without protest. It is thus a sort of waiting game where these industrialists wear people down. The area where the new plant is being set up is also next to the Rann of Kutch which is the only area where the Wild Ass is found in the world. The setting up of the plant will severely affect water tables resulting in environmental problems. It's thus pretty clear what will happen a decade from now.