Pirambi has been rolling incense sticks in the Dairy Slum of Bangalore for twenty-six years. Now 34, she continues to roll incense seven days a week for at least eight hours a day. Her house is a one-room shack in a maze of similar homes without any plumbing or electricity, crisscrossed by dirt paths and streams of raw sewage. In her home, there are no windows and only one small door through which little air passes in this dusty sauna of a city. A dark cloud of charcoal dust hangs in the air.
After a few minutes in the room my eyes begin to tear. My sinuses and throat itch and burn. As I sit with her in this cloud of pollution, her two-year old grandson plays in the corner and another infant sleeps in a cradle suspended from the ceiling. She and her daughter work in their house every day while her son-in- law struggles as a day-labor construction worker. “We are exploited,” she tells me in between a chain of deep, wet coughs.
“Rollers” like Pirambi are hired on a weekly basis to roll the basic unscented sticks that are then resold to incense perfumeries. They are supplied with the raw materials (bamboo, charcoal and jigat powder). At the roller’s home, a portion of the powder is mixed with water, making a dense clay-like substance. She sits on the floor before a small table about four inches high and rolls a thin bamboo reed in the paste. Once an adequate amount of paste surrounds the stick, she pats it with powder and sets it aside to dry. This process is repeated non-stop for the next eight hours. If she uses too much material she will not have enough supplies to meet her quota and will have to purchase more from her own pocket. If she does not use enough material, the stick is deemed poor quality and is tossed aside. For 1,000 sticks (roughly 8 hours’ labor) Pirambi is promised 16 Rupees (around US$ 0.34). Twenty to thirty sticks are always deemed inadequate and are removed. For a day’s work she usually makes US$ 0.16.
Charcoal dust, kicked up during hours of rolling, hovers in a black cloud in the one or two-room shacks, severely damaging the lungs of anyone spending a long time inside the home. Pirambi, her daughter, son-in-law and two young grandsons live, eat, and sleep in this room and breathe this dust all day, everyday. These homes have very poor ventilation and the surrounding living conditions only worsen the situation. Children cooped up in the small houses with no toys and little attention often play with the powder and paste. Mothers with small infants cannot afford to stop rolling when the child is hungry and so breastfeed it in their laps, within inches of the hazardous material.
One of the most common diseases resulting from working with incense is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Chronic bronchitis, occupational asthma, silicosis and emphysema are all connected with the incense trade. Black lung disease, an illness traditionally associated with coal mining, is also suspected but not confirmed as an occupational disease of the incense industry. It occurs when deposits of coal dust gather around the bronchioles and eventually spread throughout the lungs. As time goes on these particles spread, coating the lungs.
Home-based workers cannot afford to seek medical treatment. A single bronchodilator injection costs $3, nearly 19 hours worth of work. Government hospitals provide some free health care but even then the journey requires 14 cents round trip bus fare (nearly a day’s wages) plus the loss of half a day’s work and the cost of childcare.
Work with incense also results in skin disease, the most common of which is primary irritant contact dermatitis. A direct result of handling incense powder and paste, dermatitis involves great discomfort as blisters itch and burn. If left untreated, the skin will begin to chap, crack, and ooze. With incense rollers who use their whole palm to make the sticks, the entire hand may puff and swell and the ability to perform household tasks, not to mention continuing to meet production quotas, becomes impossible.
Treatment for dermatitis can be very expensive. Workers may take a prescription ointment that costs around $2 and only serves to relieve irritation, or they may choose to get an antibiotic injection to prevent infection. The injection costs between $6 and $10 and requires the patient to return to the hospital once a day for a week (US$ 0.98 bus fare). Very few women are able to receive the injection. As a result, the sores often become infected and the condition worsens. The only way to truly cure the disease is to prevent direct skin contact with the paste. It is impossible for a worker to wear gloves, as they will make her sloppy. She risks the loss of precious powder and paste or of making an inferior product that will in the end be rejected by her client.
These occupational diseases are by no means the ends of the illness and injury Pirambi and her family face. The slums of Bangalore run rampant with disease. Rivers of raw sewage run through the community. Houses are so close together and overcrowded that contagions are easily transmittable. Rudimentary fire fuels such as cow dung and wood along with Bangalore’s own air pollution (equivalent to smoking six cigarettes a day) further affect the lungs and general health of workers and their families. Living in these conditions could result in disease even for the healthiest person. With so many strikes against them already, weak and injured lungs make incense families even more susceptible to illness.
Among other serious diseases, tuberculosis is very common among this population. In most cases it is the workers who have the most sensitive lungs. They are the first to contract the disease, and then pass it on to their families whose lungs are also weak. It is not uncommon for workers or their family members to suffer from chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma along with the new symptoms of tuberculosis that include high fever, night sweats, weight loss, and the coughing up of blood. With the onset of tuberculosis, medical bills skyrocket. A TB patient requires long periods of inpatient care to recover, an unimaginable concept for these families. Pirambi and her daughter most likely already have tuberculosis, though they have never been to a clinic to be tested.
To find a solution to this situation seems, at this point, to be impossible. There are so many barriers and the issue is so complicated that it is hard to know where to begin. These women should be able to work to support their families without putting their health or that of their family at risk, but little effort is being made to remedy the situation.
As unnamed subcontractors, incense rollers are largely invisible to the Indian government. These women were born in the slums, never received a birth certificate, and are entirely unregistered workers. Any attempt to unionize only leads to the abandonment of the workers in that slum for another where families are eager to work.
Medical experts claim that the only effective means of preventing these health hazards are to wear protective gear or stop the work altogether. Neither of these options is viable. Any use of gloves affects the final product. Supplying masks is impractical, as they must be replaced regularly and the entire family, including infants, would have to wear them. The real source of the danger is the confined space in which the woman and families work and live. The work should be done outside the home, but that poses the risks of powder being blown away and paste drying too quickly in the sun, and in any case still does not address problems of skin disease.
Women’s Voice, a Bangalore based women’s organization, is doing some work with incense rollers, but even they feel that it is a near impossible task to tackle. Their primary achievements thus far have been to establish health education programs to prevent the spread of disease. Free daycare centers have been established with the hope mothers will be able to get their children out of the house and away from these health hazards. These centers have been successful to an extent, but many families keep their older children at home to help with the labor, and the children who do go to the centers return home at the end of the day to eat and sleep in a cloud of black dust.
As printed in Workers First Watch, Winter 2003
Filed under: India | Tagged: bamboo, Bangalore, black lung disease, charcoal, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, cottage industry, dairy slum, home-base incense, homebased incense production, incense, incense productions, India, jigat, lung disease, muslim labor, occupational asthma, occupational health, rollers, women, women's voice, workers first watch
