Hello Bastar

by Rahul Pandita

One such area is north-west Delhi's Bawana that the TV journalist Ravish Kumar calls the Bastar of Delhi. In a medium obsessed with pretty faces and glam news, Ravish does something that the big bosses of TV journalism term as 'downmarket': he visits areas like Bawana, inhabited by the poor, and chronicles the life of people living in such areas in his weekly show. What Ravish has seen has left him shocked. He speaks of meeting women who earn 60 paise a day after a day's hard labour. 'I couldn't show that in my show because no one would believe me,' he says. But such women do exist, he says, here in the national capital. These are women who sift through mountains of paper waste out of which about a kilo of cardboard is prepared for which they are paid an amount ranging from 60 paise to Rs 1.25 a day. He has met women who glue together key chains commemorating the Commonwealth Games, and after putting together 144 such keychains, the women are paid three rupees. Out of this, 50 paise is taken as commission by the contractor.