Farooq has been out of work since Eid-ul-Azha last year. He used to work at a bed wear factory. His job was to sew the corners of an export quality bed sheet.
“Seth is saying that even the orders we prepared back on Eid are yet to be dispatched. If those orders are still pending, how can he give us new work?” he asked. Farooq has been searching for a job for the past six months. His joblessness has made him cranky and very moody, his wife complained.
These days the only form of work Farooq has is assisting his wife and daughter in cutting rope for walkers used by infants.
His wife and daughter work in six different houses to make ends meet. Their combined household income is only Rs30,000 per month, including the Sunday job of attaching six hooks to ropes for preparing walkers for infants. Shamima gets Re1 per hook, which means that to get only Rs5,000 per month, she should prepare more than 200 sets of rope and hook for the walkers.
“My shoulders get swollen with all this work and I have to take painkillers to continue the necessary home chores. I clean, mop, and dust other people’s houses, and after a whole week of work, that includes washing clothes too, on Sunday I launder my own family’s clothes,” Shamima said.
The doctor asks her to take vitamin D and to cut down on her physical labour. But being part of the informal economy and having no record in NADRA due to her Bangladeshi roots, she has no social safety net to fall back on. She cannot quit working, especially since she sends at least two of her children to school, whose fee is Rs2,000 per month. The expenses of one of her child is taken care of by an employer.
On top of that the rising cost of house rent, essential commodities like wheat flour, milk, edible oil, perishables and transport have taken a toll on Farooq and Shamima, who live on rent in Peoples’ Colony.
The colony is mostly a squatter that houses a majority of people who work as house help, cook, driver etc in various middle class neighbourhoods in the surrounding area, including North Nazimabad, Gulberg, Bufferzone, and FB Area.
Their story is not unique. This is how a majority of working class people are scraping by in this economy, which recorded 12.24 percent consumer price index inflation in February 2022.
Sadly, Farooq and Shamima are not even eligible for the Rs1,000 handout that the government has been trumpeting via caller tunes. Their lack of identification documents keeps them deprived of any official help.
Memoona’s story is the same. Her husband was disabled in a factory accident some 15 years ago. With two ailing daughters, who are married to drug addicts, and a disabled husband, she has no choice but to continue working as house help at 65 years of age. On top of that, her house was bulldozed along the Gujjar Nala, which forced her to move to her own place on the city peripheries in Lyari Expressway Resettlement Project (LERP) near Taiser Town.
She claims her expenses have quadrupled since she moved there as she has to buy both water tankers and LPG cylinders every week. Her transportation cost has climbed up as well because all her clients live at DC Office Bufferzone, which was walking distance for her before the government’s so-called anti-encroachment drive. She now spends Rs1,600 on LPG and Rs1,000 on water every week. Transportation costs her Rs4,000-5,000 every month.
In the hopes of a better future, Memoona scraped all her savings together, and sent her only son to Greece illegally. But that too cannot help her cope with the rising expenses of living in Karachi. “I will have to now depend on zakat,” she said sadly. With a body getting frail and weak every day, her clients too have started hinting at retiring her. She just hopes that her long services will be appreciated with a few thousand rupees once a year, when she visits in Ramzan.
Countless such stories abound in various formal and informal neighbourhoods of the cities. The plight of the urban poor is mentioned again and again in the documents published by the government, as well as financial institutes like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, etc. However, what remains persistent is the poverty, no matter how much money is allegedly poured into alleviating it.
In social justice, poverty is not just defined as lack of access to money, but also a lack of access to basic health, education, and other social safety nets.
In his paper “Genesis of Urban Poverty”, Tasneem Siddiqui, the brain behind the low income housing project Khuda ki Basti, writes: “Poverty was not just about money. It is about access to power. It is deprivation not only in economic terms, but also at the social and political level.”
Poverty is being sustained because of the lopsided planning undertaken by the government to aid capital accumulation via megaprojects and industrial development to benefit only one class, the capitalists. For these capitalists, the plight of Farooq, Shamima and Memoona hold no meaning.
If it held any meaning, Farooq, would not be out of work and Shamima would not have to break her back to make ends meet; Memoona would not wistfully think of getting Zakat, and would not have risked sending her only son to Greece via a human trafficker.
According to Farooq, the seth is a textile exporter and thus falls under the European Union’s GSP Plus scheme. On being asked about the audits that are supposed to happen at exporting textile units, he said the seth tells them to just shake their heads in affirmative when asked how they were being treated.
“I just need to say yes if they ask I am happy and well taken care of,” he explained the redundancy of the EU audits.
Situation of industries in Karachi has not been great for a while. Textile exporters have been complaining of gas shortage, energy tariff, and rising cost of doing business for a while. These things also ultimately stress the economy and the working class people the most, who already struggle from accelerating inflation and a sagging currency.
(Names have been changed to respect the privacy of workers)
The writer is a staff member