Gurgaon Workers News #34 - January 2011

English Language edition of the class struggle newspaper produced in Gurgaon, in Haryana, India. The paper contains workers' enquiry and testimonials, collective action reports, theory and analysis.

Author
Gurgaon Workers News
Submitted by Django on January 1, 2011

Gurgaon in Haryana is presented as the shining India, a symbol of capitalist success promising a better life for everyone behind the gateway of development.

At a first glance the office towers and shopping malls reflect this chimera and even the facades of the garment factories look like three star hotels. Behind the facade, behind the factory walls and in the side streets of the industrial areas thousands of workers keep the rat-race going, producing cars and scooters for the middle-classes which end up in the traffic jam on the new highway between Delhi and Gurgaon. Thousands of young proletarianised middle class people lose time, energy and academic aspirations on night-shifts in call centres, selling loan schemes to working-class people in the US or pre-paid electricity schemes to the poor in the UK. Next door, thousands of rural-migrant workers up-rooted by the rural crisis stitch and sew for export, competing with their angry brothers and sisters in Bangladesh or Vietnam. And the rat-race will not stop; on the outskirts of Gurgaon, new industrial zones turn soil into over-capacities. The following newsletter documents some of the developments in and around this miserable boom region.

If you want to know more about working and struggling in Gurgaon, if you want more info about or even contribute to this project, please do so via:

www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com
gurgaon_workers_news[at]yahoo.co.uk

Comments

Samotnaf

13 years 8 months ago

Submitted by Samotnaf on March 1, 2011

This doesn't say anything

This doesn't say anything other than a headline. Wonder if any contacts in India know what's happening.

And this AJ report, to which this headline is linked, doesn't show anything about a riot:

(not sure if this has come out properly - never tried to embed any video before, and preview shows only html code, so won't know until I save it; if it doesn't come out, can someone tell me what to do in future?)

And just seen this, from Gurgaon Workers' News from a month ago (apologies if this has already been posted up):

On 1st of February 2011 – while riots rocked the Kasbah and downtown Cairo – around 150,000 young people arrived in Bareilly, near Shahajanpur in Uttar Pradesh, India. They came in order to apply for 416 vacancies at the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP). Facing the enormous mass of applicants the local administration called off the hiring procedure. The angry youth started smashing the place up, burnt cars, pelted government and media buildings. The trains heading home were overcrowded, people had to sit on the engine and wagon roofs. Crashing into a bridge more than a dozen young people died. Desperation and anger of the youth spreads from the ‘illegal’ vegetable markets of Tunis, to the Parisian banlieus, to the textile industrial suburbs of Mahalla… across this world of widening contradictions between what is and what could be.

Mike Harman

13 years 8 months ago

Submitted by Mike Harman on March 1, 2011

@Sam - I updated your comment

@Sam - I updated your comment to allow the video embed.

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