Taanika Shankar on slaying dragons before the final victory

Taanika Shankar has been a Solve Ninja since grade 9 and is currently a second year student of Economics at Azim Premji University. She wishes to pursue a minor in Sustainability and is also interested in the field of equitable education and music. Taanika has continued to work closely with Reap Benefit over the years and is currently a Youth Board Member and an integral part of our Covid Ninja volunteers team. She shares a recent experience as a Covid Ninja.

Arekere, Hulimavu in Bangalore is one of the areas we have been working in to reduce the burden of COVID-19 on daily wage earners. As a volunteer of Reap Benefit’s COVID response campaign, I have been especially invested with requests from Arekere, as I verified most of the requests for assistance over the phone with more than 50 families. In the second week of May, a volunteer delivered rations to some of these families; unfortunately, one of them, Ramesh*, was not at home during this time. He called me the next day and asked if I could help in any way. Ramesh is differently abled and had been out looking for work when our team member had gone to deliver the rations. He mentioned in passing, that the factory where he had been working for the past 20-odd days had sent him and other employees home without paying them their salary.

While I had read and learnt of the poor working conditions of daily wage labourers and how they are often exploited by their employers at factories and construction sites but this was a first-hand experience of the ills of capitalism. The way Ramesh spoke of the incident like it was the norm, also affected me.

I reached out to Vibha Nadig, a fellow Reap Benefit Youth Board member who is a third-year law student at the National Law School India University to see if there was a legal avenue through which we could assist Ramesh. She told me about the Legal Services Clinic at NLSIUand that they would be able to help if Ramesh was willing to speak to someone about the event. When I reached out to him, Ramesh was hesitant to speak to anyone. He shared how he and his wife had come to Bangalore only a few months ago and didn’t want to jeopardise things for a mere 20 days’ salary! I could hear the emotion in his voice through the phone. It made me angry that this man had climbed up and down a factory working for 20 days despite physical-challenges and had been refused his basic wage outright! That this was just one of thousands of such stories around the world added to my ire.

As much as I wanted him to speak against the wrongdoing, his fears were (and are) completely understandable. To my great joy, he called me back a week later and said he would speak to someone. I conveyed the same to Vibha and by the first week of June came heartening news: the factory had agreed to pay him his salary once he returned and did a bit of work. He was all set to do this when Covid struck a person in his neighbourhood and the entire area was quarantined (and still is).

I speak to him once in a while to ask how things are going and am trying to find ways to ensure the BBMP provides rations to the families in the locality. He seems content with the assurance that he will figure out how to get his salary with our help once he can move out of his house.

That day, back in May, when I first spoke to Ramesh and learnt of the events, I remember messaging my friends in rage and dismay at how such situations have been normalised. In a way, this incident made me rethink my choice of working at only the grassroot level. We need stronger policies and legislations in place to help marginalised citizens.

I am eager to win this battle; there are often many dragons to slay before the victory.

*Name changed.