The Lehenga and the Law: Women who embroider bridal lehengas in Mumbai’s Shivaji Nagar earn just INR 5 per piece
The auto driver didn’t want to take me when I told him where I wanted to go: Shivaji Nagar, Govandi. He turned to look at me properly. It was 2022 and I was a social work student conducting field research in the area. That day my field partner had not come and I was a woman, alone. The driver asked me why I wanted to go there. I told him I had to work. He drove, but the whole time he talked about gangsters, drugs and how the area was unsafe for women. At one point he asked, not unkindly, if I was sure I wanted to go.
I didn’t tell him that the women I would meet didn’t have such an option. That they would wake up every morning in Shivaji Nagar, work there, raise children there and, in all likelihood, die there Average age 39. Mumbai’s M-East district has the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) of all districts in the city. More than half of the children there are malnourished people, and the station is next to the Baiganwadi-Deonar landfill, India’s oldest and Asia’s largest, which has been burning regularly since 1927 and emitting toxic fumes.
This is where a majority of Mumbai’s bridal zari embroidery is made.
Baiganwadi-Deonar landfill site. Image source: Pal Pillar/AFP
Sanjay Nagar Basti, where I conducted my fieldwork, is located in the larger Shivaji Nagar area. The lanes are so narrow that two people have to turn sideways to pass each other. Houses are single rooms measuring approximately 10 by 15 feet that accommodate entire families. Open drains overflow during the intense monsoon in Mumbai. The landfill is so close that its foul stench has permeated the air here and most have learned to live with it. Most of the residents have migrated from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and have been living here for a decade or more, yet the city still calls them “migrants”. If so, who exactly are the locals? This is her home. The city simply refuses to accept this.
The work, what it paysand who does it
The work they do is called stone gluing. A piece of clothing arrives – a lehenga panel, a dupatta, or a neckline piece – and a woman sits with it in this 10-by-15-foot room, attaching rhinestones one by one to the fabric for hours, no matter what light comes through the single window. Your eyes and shoulders bear the strain. When the work is done, she returns it to the chain it came from: a local contact passes it on to a contractor, who then passes it on to someone at Crawford Market, Dadar, or to a textile store, where a bridal lehenga will eventually cost INR 25,000 or more. But for two days of this work, she only gets 300 INR.
Stone carving by a worker. Image source: Kannagi Khanna/Penn Today
Maharashtra Minimum Wage Act, 1948stipulates a daily wage of around INR 430 for unskilled laborers in Mumbai. A woman working for two days should earn at least INR 860; She earns 300 INR. Some earn less: 60 INR per piece, 25 INR, 12 INR and even 5 INR. The health and safety officer at the Shram Raksha Bhawan confirmed that it was a clear violation; Workers must be paid on a daily or hourly basis, she said. Piece rate payment is outside the enforcement scope of the law. Piece-rate wages are not a neutral payment system; In this way, the minimum wage law is intentionally made unenforceable. And it works, because when women call their own work leisure, no one rushes to correct them.
One of the first women I met at the basti was Khatunisa. Before making zari, she sorted the garbage at Deonar landfill. There she earned INR 225 per day, more than what most women earned from zari. However, due to the effects of the work on her body, she had to stop. When we met her, she told us that she still couldn’t eat fish because the smell held her back. She is now a zari stone sticker in the same ward, breathing the same air from the same dump. The transition from garbage collector to home-based embroidery worker is not a story of mobility; Exploitation has simply moved inward, into a private space, where it becomes even more difficult for enforcement mechanisms to reach workers.
The transition from garbage collector to home-based embroidery worker is not a story of mobility; Exploitation has simply moved inward, into a private space, where it becomes even more difficult for enforcement mechanisms to reach workers.
Not far from Khatunisa’s workplace, Farida, a twenty-year-old woman, runs zari stones and also teaches at the community learning center at the basti. When we first met her, she described zari work as a leisure activity. Then, almost immediately, she corrected herself: “Actually, it’s not relaxing.” You have to be extremely careful. If a stone is placed incorrectly, the piece will be rejected and payment refused. Her eyes hurt. Her shoulders hurt. She did the work for the income and also because her husband was a zari weaver and the work came to her through him. She called it leisure. But leisure doesn’t strain your eyes.
Nine years: That’s how long Fatima has been doing this work. She earns INR 50 per piece for neck designs, each of which takes two days to complete. Her husband is an alcoholic and doesn’t work. He takes the money she earns and spends it on alcohol. She has suffered from seizures for several years, which she said began after the physical abuse escalated. Fatima makes money. She has earned it for nine years but owns nothing. Even if she were paid fairly, the wages would still pass through a budget that gives her no right to it. What a woman earns and how much of it she has are two very different things.
Zehra is thirteen. She said she enjoyed the work and earned INR 60 per day. However, she had to stop. Her father was bedridden and after her older sisters were married, someone had to take care of him. She had already left school after the 6th grade. When I asked her why she left school, she said, “Karna padta tha, aur koi option nahi tha (It had to be done; there was no other option)”. She said it the way you say something that’s already been decided long before you’ve been asked about it.
Who has the choice?
When we tried to trace the value chain to find out who the contractors were and where the finished garments went, we kept hitting the same wall. Nadia, who had been doing this work for twelve years, called her husband so we could talk to him. She told us she didn’t know anything about it; she simply picked up the work from him. Another woman didn’t know her contractor’s name at all; she only referred to him as bhai (brother).
If we needed to find someone, the easiest way was to use their children’s names at the local learning center rather than their own names. It’s not just about social invisibility. To file a minimum wage complaint, you need to know who your employer is. To organize, you have to know who your colleagues are. If neither is possible, the law simply cannot work here.
When we returned to look for the women we met, no one could identify them by name. Women were identified as someone else’s wife, daughter, or sister. Even among themselves, they called each other Khala (aunt) or referred to each other based on their relationship with a male relative. If we needed to find someone, the easiest way was to use their children’s names at the local learning center rather than their own names. It’s not just about social invisibility. To file a minimum wage complaint, you need to know who your employer is. Organize requires you to know who your colleagues are. If neither is possible, the law simply cannot work here.
The informal networks of contractors who employ these women remain largely beyond the reach of labor law. That hasn’t changed. The Deonar landfill is still burning. I can’t say what happened to the women themselves because I didn’t go back. Nadia’s contractor had no name. Fatima’s earnings went to a man she could not leave. Khatunisa couldn’t eat fish. Zehra left school to take care of her father. The unions in the region are trying to organize these women, and that’s where the story may be slowly heading. But first they must be seen. Not as a political problem to be solved or a statistic in a labor report, but as women living in a community that the rest of Mumbai would rather ignore; who spend their days making clothes for weddings they will never attend; and who learned to call their work “leisure” because no one ever told them anything about their rights.
The auto driver asked me if I was sure I wanted to go to Shivaji Nagar. However, these women were never asked.
Names in this article have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
The fieldwork on which this article is based was conducted between 2022 and 2023.
Sreya holds a Masters of Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She writes about gender, urban informality, work and development. She currently works as a development consultant at MicroSave Consulting, where her work includes inclusive and digital finance and startup ecosystems.
