In India, No Job Is Too Small

All day long, Subodh Mahato cools postal workers in this West Bengal village by tugging a rope attached to a grass-mat ceiling fan. He’s been pulling it for 17 years because no one thought to connect the post office to the power grid.

In Calcutta, the state capital, Mohammed Jamal and other sidewalk entrepreneurs extract clients’ earwax with modified tools made from bicycle spokes, clean betel juice stains from teeth with a mysterious red fluid and wash street muck from feet in rusty basins -- just like in the days when maharajahs ruled.

India is a nuclear power and a leader in information technology that rockets its own satellites into space, but millions of its people live as if time had passed them by. The fan, or pankha, puller, Mahato, and curbside caregivers like Jamal are among the masses of 21st century India’s working poor. They are the bedrock of an economy that is one of the fastest growing, yet most unbalanced, in the world.

Most of the benefits of India’s rapid economic growth are going to the wealthiest 20% of society, said economist Malay Chaudhuri. They have swimming pools in a country where millions of people don’t have clean water, and they stroll through gleaming new air-conditioned shopping malls where security guards keep beggars at bay.

India’s elite is getting steadily richer from cheap labor that has been one of the country’s main economic advantages since it began opening up to global competition just over a decade ago, Chaudhuri said.

“The gap is growing between the poor in the bottom 80%, and the middle class and upper class,” said Chaudhuri, founder of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management and author of a recent book on India’s ills.

“Those at the very bottom, below the poverty line, are seeing hardly any increase in their income,” he added. “If this growing gap goes on, it will be very difficult to govern the country.”

India has more than 1 billion people, and by more optimistic estimates, as many as 300 million belong to a middle class. Their hunger for consumer goods has helped the economy grow at 6% or more a year during the last decade.

But about 350 million others -- more than a third of the population -- live in dire poverty, according to the United Nations. In Calcutta alone, an estimated 250,000 children sleep on the sidewalks each night.

The luckiest among India’s poorest make a steady wage, like pankha puller Mahato, who toils through muscle ache and monotony for next to nothing because it’s the best work he can get. And he is too proud to beg.

The village of Kantadih sits in a neglected stretch of eastern India, down a potholed, single-lane road surrounded by lush rice paddies, about 155 miles north of Calcutta.

Kantadih, with its several hundred people, is just important enough to have a sub-post office in a small, rented building on the walled campus of a local high school. The outpost’s three full-time staff and five part-timers serve about 30,000 people in 11 villages.

The postal workers sort and deliver about 300 letters a day. They cancel postage stamps on outgoing mail by hand and melt wax over a small oil lamp on the floor to close mail sacks with a government seal. It is a restful place, where telephones don’t ring and computer keyboards don’t click.

The little sunlight that spills through two windows, and the flickering lamp, leaves much of the post office in shadows. The only noise is the occasional thump of a rubber stamp, the mournful wail of a distant train, and on this day, the steady, all-day rain of a slow-moving cyclone.

Because there’s no electricity, the pankha is all that stirs the air when the post office heats up to 115 degrees or more during the long, humid summer months. The fan is made of two grass mats, sewn together with a red cloth border that is badly frayed. It is about 5 feet across and swings on chains from a wooden cross bar over the desk of the sub-postmaster, Jiban Mukherjee, and his desk mate, postal assistant Karan Chandra Mandi.

Mahato sits a few feet away and tugs on a lime green nylon rope. He is the last known pankha puller in the state, and while the bosses he cools wish for the day when a more efficient machine replaces him, they are also his friends and worry that he won’t find another job.

Mahato sits in the shadows, in a grimy white plastic patio chair. His back is straight, his stare blank, and one arm is raised at a right angle, tugging on the rope like a bus passenger pulling the bell cord for his stop -- except Mahato has to keep pulling, dozens of times a minute, for hours on end.

“No, I don’t feel bored. I have gotten used to it,” he said. “There are times when, even if I doze off, my hand keeps tugging at the rope automatically.”

He would rather be pursuing his real passion: cockfighting. He has trained several of his birds to be winners in local rings, but there’s little profit in village gaming. When he pulls the pankha cord, Mahato insists, he focuses on the work at hand.

“My mind is completely clear when I am doing this job,” he said. “Except, of course, at times when my son or someone else in the family is unwell. Then I only think of them.”

It was 1986 when the sub-postmaster sent a messenger to summon Mahato and asked if he wanted to pull the pankha from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day, with a 10-minute break for lunch, for about $7 a month.

Mahato, now 38, was the sub-postmaster’s last hope. No one else wanted to do it, Mahato said. At first, his thin wrists and shoulders ached from the repetitive pulling, and his wife had to massage him every day after work. But with time, the pain passed, and Mahato kept pulling.

“No, I never thought of quitting this job,” he said. “Tell me, what else can I do if I quit?”

Even with steady pay raises over the years, Mahato earns about $45 a month, which supports an extended family of 13 people. By Indian standards, it’s not a bad wage for a man who can’t read and can only write his name.

Mahato knows that someday progress must come, even to the Kantadih sub-post office. When that happens, his pankha will come down, an electrical ceiling fan will kick in, and he will be out of a job.

He’s worried it will happen soon, and he won’t have $7 a month to put his 5-year-old son in school.

“If I lose this job, I don’t know what I will do -- except for begging, maybe,” he said.

A pink slip is one thing Mohammed Jamal needn’t worry about. He’ll have a job as long as there are dirty ears, and in the filthy streets of Calcutta, there’s no shortage.

With barbers, teeth cleaners, feet washers, ear cleaners and tonic peddlers all within walking distance in central Calcutta’s Chowringhee district, it’s almost a sidewalk spa for anyone who wants a complete, and cheap, makeover.

For about 10 cents, Jamal sticks one of the implements he has fashioned from bicycle spokes into a customer’s ears and scrapes out the wax. He earns about $2 a day. There are hundreds more ear cleaners like him trolling for customers along Calcutta’s curbsides.

Jamal, 34, normally works by a busy bus stop in Chowringhee. His regular spot is outside the Reserve Bank Employees Sports Club. A large sign at the gate declares: Members Only. Jamal invites his clients to sit on the edge of a concrete planter on the sidewalk, in the shade of a holy peepul tree.

His best customers are people whose ears fill up quickly with the dust and grit of Calcutta’s crowded streets. They are bus drivers and conductors, taxi drivers and traders.

“Some women also do it, but they summon me to their houses,” Jamal said. “Only those who trust me call me. It’s a great responsibility, to be trusted with other people’s ears.”

The method is simple, but the technique is Jamal’s art. He pulls a small piece of the cotton wool tucked into a leather loop on his camel skin satchel, twists it around the end of a sawed-off bicycle spoke and inserts it in the ear canal. For the hardest wax, he uses a spoke flattened into a tiny spatula. “There is no magic, no mantra, whatsoever,” he said.

But Jamal is much less modest in action. When he’s closing in on a substantial ear clog, he leans way back and squints, as if peering down a long tunnel. Then he raises the pinky finger on his working hand and gently twists his wrist with an artistic flair.

Like the cat that shows off a dead bird to its owner, he enjoys displaying the uprooted wax to his client before wiping it on a handkerchief flung over one shoulder. Jamal got into the ear cleaning business eight years ago, when the Bank of India stopped buying his refurbished crates for storing its stationery.

Jamal used to buy used crates for 25 cents each, fix them up and sell them to the bank for 38 cents a piece, a 50% profit. But he sold only about 100 crates a month, so he wasn’t getting rich.

When he needed a new job, someone from his village who was doing well cleaning ears suggested that he give it a try. “I practiced it on his ears at first,” Jamal said. “He told me I had a good hand after this trial run and asked me to get started in the business.”

As Jamal reminisced, cabdriver Ratan Das paced impatiently to one side, waiting to get a nasty blockage cleared. He was paying his first visit to Jamal, instead of seeing a doctor, for a simple reason: Jamal is cheaper.

“These days are bad,” Das, 38, said, while Jamal probed deeper into his ear. “We are not earning enough to even sustain ourselves. How can we go to a doctor?”

A few minutes later, Jamal was wiping off his bicycle spokes and Das said he felt lighter. He handed the ear cleaner a 2-rupee coin -- about 4 cents -- and Jamal clicked his tongue in disbelief.

Das dug deeper into his pocket, pulled out another rupee and a half and dropped the coins into Jamal’s open palm. It was still short of Jamal’s 5-rupee minimum, but he let Das go with a smile, hopeful that at least he might have earned another steady customer.