National Agenda : Ancient Scissors Industry Cuts Both Ways in India : On the one hand, it provides employment and self-sufficiency. But it has crippled thousands who work in unsafe conditions.

Amid a medieval cacophony of clanging, banging, grinding and scraping up a narrow and fly-choked lane of dust, Mohammed Anis squatted over his battered anvil, stoically pounding at the crude slice of rusted iron before him, painfully transforming it into the rough equivalent of a scissors blade.

Just a few feet behind him, sweltering in one of the dozens of sweatshops packed into the old scissors bazaar of Meerut, one of Anis’ three sons worked at stage two of the family scissors production line, slowly committing suicide for the sake of survival.

The 18-year-old youth hunched over a 24-pound Carborundum wheel spinning wildly at 3,000 r.p.m. as it tore at the crude metal in his bare hands. The wheel showered the hovel where the family works, eats and sleeps with torrents of sparks, driving millions of tiny metal particles up the teen’s nose, into his eyes and deep into his lungs as he sharpened the edges on one after another of his father’s hammered blades.

The youth has labored at this job since he was 8, grinding for hours on end, days into years in a generations-old business that has already killed his uncle and hundreds of others like him, many of them by the time they were just 50.

Their industry, which has disabled thousands in this bazaar, provides the workers with their only means and hope of feeding their families. It also has kept the markets of India well-stocked with inferior but fully indigenous scissors.

“On a good day, we’ll finish eight or nine dozen pairs,” Anis shouted over the noxious grinding, never breaking his rhythm on the old iron anvil. “The profit is about 50 or 60 rupees (about $2) per dozen, so it’s good. . . .

“You might think it’s dangerous, but we don’t,” he added. “We’re used to doing this. Yes, my elder brother died from this lung problem. So, too, have so many others. And yes, I wanted my sons to have a better life. But they showed no interest. Up to now, I see no hope for any change. This work is in their blood, you see. Besides, what other work is there for us?”

As a stark metaphor for the deeply diseased state of the Indian economy, the scissor makers of Meerut have few parallels.

Like more than a third of India’s mammoth work force, they are part of an unregulated industry that has slipped through the cracks of this nation’s inefficient, failing socialist economy. More than 100 million laborers have been all but ignored through the five decades that this country fought to build itself into a self-sufficient, industrialized state.

Employing strict import bans that cut out foreign competition, India’s succession of socialist governments have permitted small, private manufacturers like the scissor makers to reap narrow profit margins in exchange for enduring the horrors of chronic child labor, lethal occupational disease and technological stagnation.

These unregulated industries include child matchstick makers who routinely blow off their fingers; carpet weavers who slowly go blind; railway porters whose spinal cords collapse, and the scissor makers who die of pneumoconiosis and other pulmonary diseases.

But the Meerut craftsmen reflect more than just the death-at-the-workplace syndrome that has plagued many of India’s 850 million people. They also symbolize the neglect and questionable future of the beleaguered Indian economy itself.

Saddled with $70 billion in foreign debt, largely resulting from its bloated government and its inferior domestic manufacturing sector, India has embarked on a sweeping “Economic Structural Adjustment Plan,” an ambitious socialism-to-capitalism program that was a condition of a vitally needed International Monetary Fund loan.

The plan, which will lead to layoffs for millions of laborers annually for several years, opens an array of Indian manufacturing markets to foreign investors, experienced multinationals who will now compete with India’s substandard producers. It calls for the gradual privatization of many government-owned heavy industries and the closure of what Indians call “sick” manufacturing units--inevitably leading to more widespread layoffs in a nation where there already are 35 million unemployed.

It will also open some of India’s huge, long-protected consumer markets to outside competition, slashing import duties on everyday items like scissors.

“Even under favorable conditions, the (economic) stabilization program would result in about 4 million additional unemployed persons each year during the next couple of years,” Indian economist Sudipto Mundle declared at a recent United Nations workshop on the human impact of India’s sweeping economic reforms. “Under less favorable conditions, the extra unemployment could go up as much as 8 million to 10 million persons (each year).”

Further, the reform policy that the Indian Parliament adopted last month also calls for immediate modernization of the nation’s aging, inefficient factories, a streamlining plan that will improve quality and productivity but will cut employment opportunities even more.

“Modernization and upgradation of technology are components of structural change, (but) the immediate impact of modernization is on employment,” said Gopeshwar, secretary general of the Indian National Trade Union Congress. “There are 35 million uneducated unemployed in the country, and the introduction of modern technology will render many more redundant and jobless. . . . Besides growth and efficiency, the social dimension of the structural adjustment should be given prime importance.”

While the government has promised to assist workers who lose jobs in the nation’s economic reforms, the workers’ lot in India long has been largely overlooked, especially in small-scale industries like scissor making in Meerut. This neglect has prevailed throughout the decades of Nehruvian socialism and even through the centuries before India’s independence in 1947, when the British and, before them, the Moguls ruled this land.

It was during the 16th- and 17th-century rule by Muslim Mogul invaders in north and central India that the artisans of Meerut first taught themselves to manufacture knives, razors and, later, scissors from scrap metal bought from scavengers who wandered the medieval countryside.

Their trade has remained remarkably unchanged through the 20th-Century technological revolutions that have left so much of India so far behind. It continues to be an island of ancient craftmanship that is filled with as much simple wonder as it is human horror. Theirs is an everyday product made from industrial garbage and shaped entirely by human hands.

The scissors begin, not in the Meerut bazaar, but at another site nearby called the Loha Mandi, or the iron market. It is an equally gritty labyrinth of 80 or 90 open-air stalls, each separated only by corrugated iron sheets and each filled to the brim with a kaleidoscope of rusting metal junk.

There are Gargantuan anchor chains from oceangoing ships cannibalized long ago and far away; suspension springs and drive shafts from dismantled trucks and buses; bales of rusting barbed wire; giant pulleys; toothless gears; cracked carburetors, and hundreds of feet of broken sewer pipe. All the materials dangle precariously over sheets of iron scrap from failed factories, flanges from broken machines, retired transformers, dismembered well pumps, old girders and pitted I-beams.

It is in places like this that India stubbornly recycles itself each day. And it is here that the scissor makers come to buy their raw material in 10- or 20-pound lots each week. As customers, they are second only to the blacksmiths, who transform junk into shoes for horses, buffaloes and camels that remain the mainstay of industrial transport in much of modern India.

“We are forced to buy the raw materials from these scrap dealers because the government has never provided a facility for us to buy quality iron,” explained Mohammed Yasim, whose Minu Bhai & Sons Scissors Works is among the best-established manufacturers in Meerut. “We have requested the government to provide us a special kind of high-quality metal, and there was an office here to handle this request, but the office never worked.

“In fact,” he added, “the government has just neglected us in everything since the beginning. This scissors making, for example, should be treated as a handicraft, which is taxed at just 4%, but it is considered an industry, which is taxed at 7.5%. There is a form to get this exemption, but it costs so much in fees and it takes up so much time to get approvals, it ends up costing us 10% before we’re finished.”

Yasim certainly knows about the woes of his trade. He, like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather before him, grew up pounding scrap into blades. And he also watched his brother die a slow death from lung failure.

Still, Yasim was not apologetic but effusive when he volunteered that the trade employs children as young as 8 and women as old as 80.

Just a year ago, Meerut Mayor Arun Jain said that his government hoped to take a first, major step to improve the scissor makers’ lot. The government had an ambitious plan to build them a modern complex just outside town, complete with mandatory safety equipment and a medical unit. Jain said the proposal, which included plans for worker training, was one of the government’s highest priorities and the facility would open within a year. The only question was its site.

But Yasim said that the government has not even approved the complex yet, let alone selected a site. “Nothing has been done, nothing at all from the beginning up until now,” he said. “We are born here into this trade, and we die here. Nothing, I think, will change that.”