File photo of domestic workers protesting in Bengaluru. , photo Credit:
Mahalakshmi has two children. One of them is in class 5 while the other has just completed class 10. While she is a domestic worker in Vidyaranyapura, she hopes to provide quality education for her children so that they can build a better future for themselves. However, he does not have enough money to send his children to private or aided educational institutions. For her, the biggest demand she can place before any government is for educational scholarships.
“When candidates would come near my house to campaign, I would ask them if they could promise a scholarship for my children. Then, I will see whom to vote for,” she said.
For many domestic workers like her, their demands from the new government are mostly on a nuanced level. Savitha, another worker from Puttanahalli, travels about 5 km daily to her place of work. She gets down at a bus stop, walks two houses to work and then takes a bus to reach the third house. “I can see that the government has built good roads and provided many buses, but the ticket prices eat up half of my salary. I hope the new government will reduce the ticket prices or give us some concession.
There are around 6-7 lakh domestic workers in the state. While most of them are influenced by social and peer pressure, some workers have empowered themselves to look beyond it. “As a woman and a domestic worker, I would look for a party that would fight for our issues. Like every other section of the society, we too are burdened with the rising prices of all commodities. We want leaders who can reduce this burden and not just do communal politics,” said Radha, another domestic worker.
Apart from individualistic issues, there are also some important demands of the sector, which will be headed by the Labor Department. “We hope that the new government in Karnataka will work for our welfare and give us the identity of labourers. We want to be spoken to and treated with respect. “We demand registration, recognition and social security,” said Geeta Menon, joint secretary of the Domestic Workers’ Rights Association.
(This is the first part of a series on What the People Want – people from areas whose voices are often unheard, and who are not at the helm of votebank politics.)