Dalit Girls Have Been Paying the Price for Fast Fashion: The “Sumangali” Scheme
by Kari Kumar
This part one is a two-part series about Dalit and oppressed-caste textile workers and their fight for workers rights.
The word “Sumangali” represents a conception of a femininity rooted in cis-Brahmanical Patriarchy. The word formulates a vision of a woman who is married, has a husband who she is living with, as a result of which she is able to carry the markers of marriage — including the wearing of a kumkum, bindis, jewelry, including the marriage necklace, flowers in their hair, and colored clothing (among others). It prescribes that women and girls are to be embedded within caste and family structures, and take on the roles of wives and mothers as ways to respectable womanly success.
And it is the carrot dangled in front of poor and Dalit families in order to secure cheap labor for the textile industries of Tamil Nadu.
Tamil Nadu’s “textile belt” is a region encompassing towns and villages largely around Erode, Salem, and Coimbatore, represent nearly a third of India’s textile industry. Brands all over North America and Europe source their garments from these factories and they include GAP, IKEA, H&M, Walmart, Tesco, Mothercare and Polo and others.
In the age of the West’s obsession with fast fashion, there is heavy competition and a need to reduce production costs. In a labor-intensive garment industry this has translated to squeezing the laborers life and engaging in what are essentially bonded slavery practices.
Sumangali schemes are widely employed in the region and aimed at recruiting child laborers, particularly young girls. Up to 60% of these girls come from Dalit castes especially from the Arunthathiyar caste who are considered most oppressed, even among Dalits. Most of the rest of the girls come from other oppressed castes as well. (1) Parents and family members are persuaded to let their daughters work in textile mills with an “offer”. She should work for 3 years at around INR 45 (0.60 USD) per day, get accommodation in a girls hostel with three good meals through the day. If the girl completes her 3 years of work, she will be presented with her Sumangali bonus. An amount of between INR 30,000–40,000 (USD 395–525) (2). This is supposed to go towards her marriage. In particular, towards her dowry for marriage. Ultimately rendering her — Sumangali.
Parents from poor and Dalit families can find these prospects promising. Being able to have their children fed three good meals a day in itself seems big. In addition, being able to provide for their marriage needs is a bonus.
However, the reality of the Sumangali scheme is highly exploitative of the people from these most vulnerable communities. The girls recruited are too often younger than 18 with questionable age certificates. They are hired as contract workers so that they are not owed raises, benefits, or insurance. They are also hired as “apprentices” not workers so that they can be paid well below the legal minimum wage.
Hostels they live in have been dubbed “coolie camps”. They are essentially prisons where 6–8 girls share a room and live without any privacy, freedom or access to their loved ones. They are allowed one call a month to their parents and that call is often monitored so they are not able to speak freely. They are allowed to go out into town for one day of the week accompanied by company guards. Nutritious food promised is in fact abysmal and most girls become severely malnourished and anemic to the point of missing their menstrual periods within only a few months of living there.
Their work environments too are hazardous. Textile mills are covered with fine particles of cotton and other particulate matter in the air. Long term inhalation of this air causes the formation of toxic cotton accumulations within the body. In addition, they have to work 12–15 hour days with hardly an hour of break, and are not even given chairs to sit. Bathrooms can be up to a kilometer away and bathroom breaks are not long. There are 3 to 4 women’s bathrooms often for thousands of workers.
In these conditions, reports of severe verbal, physical and sexual abuse by supervisors and other mill workers are common.
Even if these girls made it through the three years of hell and managed to get their Sumangali bonus, many have ended up using that money to address the serious health problems they accrued at work, and have continued to struggle to find the resources to get married anyway.
Home, hygiene, safety, well-being, time-off, nourishment, hobbies, education, relationships with loved ones, childhood — so many human experiences become impossible under these conditions. Young Dalit and oppressed-caste children are basically swallowed into a modern slavery set-up to completely dehumanize them.
Although, mill owners made it nearly impossible for trade unions to organize workers, these girls have fought tooth and nail to be organized and have access to collective bargaining and rights. Through a series of interventions mediated by the workers through trade unions, working with NGOs, and international unions, Sumangali scheme and textile workers as a whole have moved the needle on these issues quite far.
Their protests have resulted in better wages. Widespread awareness programs for parents about the realities of the scheme have helped prevent recruitment at the family level. By building international solidarity and putting pressure on the multinational corporations that source their materials through these mills, the age of workers, work hours, bathroom rights, food and safety rights have all been positively negotiated. Some grievance mechanisms and even a level of transparency has come into the industry.
Mill owners have had to accommodate these voices. They have had no choice but to show better conditions to their global clients or risk losing them. It has been reported that as of 2010 (2), Sumangali scheme workers have managed to fight and obtain much better conditions overall.
However, while some claim that the phenomena of Sumangali Scheme has been completely abolished, widespread reports of re-branding and reestablishing these schemes continue to come in.
Meanwhile, a deeper feminist struggle continues to co-exist. One in which any expectation that young Dalit girls must be placed into bonded slavery to pay for their dowry — stops being seen as reasonable.
In the coming part on this series, we will explore caste and the history of textile workers assertions in Tamil Nadu’s textile belt.
Kari Kumar is a Dalit lover of cats and workers movement histories.
- N., Rahul. “Gender and Caste at Work: Evolution of a Factory Regime Under the Sumangali Scheme.” Social Change, vol. 47, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 28–44, doi:10.1177/0049085716683067.
- HAQ Centre for Child Rights HAQCRC, 2011. “Captured by Cotton: Exploited Dalit Girls Produce Garments in India for European and US Markets,” Working Papers id:4161, eSocialSciences.
