All in a day’s work!

This was one article which came through on it’s own even as I was sitting in my out-patients post-christmas.Shreeram Singh entered the OPD with classical symptoms attributed to tuberculosis.As the normal trend of questioning goes ,I asked him if he has a history of migration .He says he’s just been back from working as a weilder for ACC cements in Wadi in Karnataka.I asked him how the living condition there was ?He said four labourers shared a room 12 feet by 8ft with a single window….they had a fan.Did anyone in the group have cough?Crinkling his forehead,he thought for a while and he said yes he remembered one of the labourers who used to cough consistently.My next question was did you have medical facilities provided by the company and the answer was no.Apparently the company has a hospital but only the permanent employees are allowed to avail the facility.Immediately a question came to my mind.exactly whose lot are these hordes of rural population who migrate to these industrial areas to earn their living and provide cheap labour to the industries?
The government has to seriously introspect and act if they want to just stop harping on the rural-urban divide and make that critical difference to the face of rural India.This is the impressionable population whose way of thinking ,the way of living is mouldable because they are out of their comfort zones,they are also the population which are potentially going to influence the way the people live back in the villages because they would be ‘the know all’, ‘see all’ man of the world who has a mighty influence on the way the youngsters think in the villages. Even the industrialists need to make a paradigm shift in the way they think-profit is good but keeping the bigger picture in mind would make a whale of a difference to the way they function and flourish,from becoming just another profit-making venture they would become a great industry.
As it stands now,the migrant labourers when they come back from the bigger cities get back a meager amount of money but bad habits in plenty.. drinking,smoking….and ofcourse those dreaded diseases..!Yes they get back one more thing ,the bollywood culture…!what a big role the film industry can play in making in-roads into these simple minds.