In this anthology-style feature documenting the fraught relationships between food and labour in India, Mukta Patil gathers perspectives from journalist Priyanka Tupe, union leader Anita Kapoor, and economist Dr. Jean Drèze.
That food and labour are intrinsically linked seemed obvious to me—we are all labouring bodies, we are all hungering bodies. But beyond this simplistically defined relationship—one of working to sustain ourselves, and sustaining ourselves to be able to work—what does it really mean? How different does it look for each of us?
In talking to Priyanka Tupe, journalist and feminist writer, I learn how tenuous the relationship between work and food can be for rural labourers in Maharashtra, especially women, and what agency means (or doesn’t) in these precarious conditions.
Anita Kapoor, unionist and advocate for domestic workers’ rights, speaks to me about the vulnerability of migrant workers, how little access they have to nutrition and social security, and the stark difference between their own kitchens and those they work at.
Lastly, economist and activist Dr. Jean Drèze tells me about the risks of talking about access to labour as a prerequisite to access to food, and yet, how the right to food can be a shorthand for the larger right to a dignified living.
“If you can’t light your chulha, then how and what will you cook?”
Priyanka Tupe, Journalist, BehanBox
No matter what happens, I will not compromise on food now,” Priyanka tells me over the phone, her voice full of conviction. “I want good, nutritious meals, which was something missing from my life for so many years.”
I’ve followed Priyanka’s work for some time now; her journalism, some of the best I’ve encountered—rooted in place, empathetic. She has made visible some very complicated relationships between what it means for rural workers, especially women, to have access to nutritious food, or the lack thereof.
Priyanka’s father passed away when she was 16. She, her mother, and five siblings had to contend with living in a city like Mumbai, with neither any generational wealth nor assets. Her mother, who worked as a domestic worker, cooked for people at their houses. They ran a mess from their own kitchen, packing lunches for students, while also managing a vegetable stall. During festivals, Priyanka and her mother would take orders for specialties like puran polis. “We were asked to labour, but we were never a part of the eating, the celebration,” she says.
Priyanka recalls how her father, for four or five years before he passed away, worked to transport huge sacks of food grain—wheat, jowar, bajri—from the wholesale APMC market to retail kirana shops, loading and unloading them. How, later, her younger siblings were completely dependent on mid-day meals—khichdi, usal—at their school in Chunabhatti. Days of eating nothing but vada pav or bhaji pav. “When there is a scarcity of food despite working constantly, nutrition is a very far-off thought,” she recounts. “We were always within and yet outside of the food system.”
“We were asked to labour, but we were never a part of the eating, the celebration."
Priyanka shares these stories not because she wants to focus on her deprivation. Her situation has changed for the better, but experience is a tool for her to build knowledge—a lens through which she can critically examine welfare schemes. How they are essential public services, and yet failing their beneficiaries. Now 31, she says these years have shaped her outlook—one of wanting dried fruit, green leafy vegetables, and fruit in abundance. But it has also made her the reporter she is, looking for answers resting at the intersection of gender, labour, and food, when she travels through rural Maharashtra.
“Whether I am reporting from the field, or writing at home, I constantly think, ‘What do people eat?’ And though this stems from my own life, everyone should do this, not just someone who has experienced deprivation.”
Women with access to agricultural land—though it might not be in their name—are able to make some decisions—in cultivating kitchen gardens, or using small parcels of land to ensure food security and nutritional diversity. But they are not participants in larger decisions; despite toiling to sow, weed, and harvest, they almost never get a say in what to grow, Priyanka says.
For rural women with no access to land, but who yet must work, access to food is even more precarious. Those engaged in sugarcane cutting, for example, have temporary shelters. Their problems start right from lighting the chulha, Priyanka says. When it’s raining outside, the wood is damp. “Chulach petli nai tar tumhi kasa ani kaay shijavnar?” (“If you can’t light your chulha, then how and what will you cook?”)
Because they migrate, they don’t carry or store too much food, at most a month’s worth of kirana (groceries). “When we say ‘hatavarcha pot,‘ that is the literal truth for them—earn every day, buy food every day,” Priyanka shares. There is no concept of wages; cane cutters usually take money from the mukadam or contractor, enough for a week’s kirana. The power lies entirely with the contractor, and women often face exploitation. When they calculate the accounts at the end of the season, if there is anything left, they get paid.
Women from particularly vulnerable tribes like the Koraku, who collect non-timber forest produce such as mahua in Nandurbar and Yavatmal, earn perhaps rupees 35 to 40 for every kilo of flowers gathered and sold. Irregularities with rations can result in extreme hunger crises. “For them, there is no political consciousness around food and labour, nor do I expect it,” Priyanka says. “When the question of what to eat two times a day looms so large, how will you get to anything else?”
In a fiction story that Priyanka is writing, the protagonist dreams of having a wealth of groceries in the house. But in reality, her protagonist always has to make two lists—the first one is never neat enough. When she calculates the costs and looks at her budget, she has to scratch out several items. The second list only has basics like jaggery and masoor dal. Often, the shopkeeper edits her list on a whim. “Why do you need Dove soap? Take Lifebuoy,” he says. Or “You don’t need saffron for your kheer, stick to cardamom. You people take these things you don’t need, and then don’t pay on time.”
Because she has experienced this vulnerability, Priyanka knows what her protagonist feels when she has to buy her food on credit. “People alter your desires,” Priyanka shares. “It snatches away your agency.”
Read Priyanka Tupe’s work here.
“There is a difference in our thinking for who we consider as doing work and workers. This work is not considered work at all.”
Anita Kapoor, Founding Member, Shehri Mahila Kamgaar Union (SMKU)
I have been trying to get a hold of Anita Kapoor for over a week before we are able to talk. She has been helping to organise Gudiya’s wedding, a young woman who works with SMKU. Gudiya, the daughter of a construction worker in a basti of Gautampuri in East Delhi, has just completed her Masters in Social Work. The next day, Anita is trying to find a shelter for a pregnant domestic worker she knows, followed by meetings. When we finally speak, her voice is hoarse. I ask if she is unwell, but she laughs it off as a hazard of her trade as she sips her adrakwali chai.
For Anita, who has been working for domestic workers’ rights for over two decades, they are the backbone of every household. “I’m a doctor, an engineer, an officer today, thanks to the labour of this domestic worker,” she tells me. “This worker labours in my house, makes my food, looks after my children, takes care of everything. And yet, no government is willing to see them as workers.”
SMKU works predominantly with migrant women who move to Delhi NCR from regions like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh in search of livelihoods. Living in jhuggi bastis measuring 10 x 10 feet, they can barely access two meals a day—largely comprised of dal chawal—and perhaps a cup of tea. “There is such a stark difference between the spaces, between the access to food in both,” Anita says, describing the differences between two households, where these domestic workers live, another where they labour. “When she enters the workplace, she will have to cater to each one’s individual tastes. Someone wants chai, someone wants milk, someone wants lassi, another wants a cold beverage. But she cannot even afford milk or potatoes. Even bananas are rupees 70 a dozen. There is no relationship left between eating and nutrition.”
Legalising domestic work has been a decades-long challenge. When I ask why, Anita points to multiple issues. Gender is one of them. Whatever labour women perform, she says, whether care work, their contributions on farms, or domestic work, they remain entirely invisible. “Hamari soch mein kaam karne wale aur kaamgaar mein bahot farq hai. Is kaam ko kaam hi nahi samjha jaata.” (There is a difference in our thinking for who we consider as doing work and workers. This work is not considered work at all.)
The other issue is bringing a home into the purview of labour laws, labelling it a workplace, like an industrial unit. “But why would law makers and government officials want to bring themselves into the purview of the law?,” she asks. “I know people still reserve separate utensils for domestic workers to use, different glasses, broken cups. They make workers sleep in balconies, and bar them from using the very washrooms that they clean. So why would people want to do something for domestic workers?”
“When she enters the workplace, she will have to cater to each one's individual tastes. Someone wants chai, someone wants milk, someone wants lassi, another wants a cold beverage. But she cannot even afford milk or potatoes."
Anita meets women who constantly live in fear, precariously poised between choosing undignified work and going hungry. Women under-cutting one another, accepting lower wages to be able to find some work. Muslim women hiding their identity to find work—wearing bindis or mangalsutras. Adivasi women from Jharkhand called pejoratives like ‘jungli,’ which is not just cruel, but illegal.
“These women, they are people, human, with just as much right to food, clothing, and shelter as the rest of us. But here they are, with makeshift homes, tattered clothes, and barely one square meal a day. This is what the fight is for,” Anita asserts.
There is also the vicious cycle of occupational hazards and illness—working conditions that cause under-nutrition, and lack of nutrition and healthcare leading to an inability to work. Without access to drinking water or toilets, women workers are dehydrated and develop urinary tract infections. They have calcium and iron deficiencies. Sometimes, they are on their feet for six to eight hours a day, cooking in summers when temperatures reach 45-50 degrees Celsius, in kitchens that are like a bhatti (furnace). “They neglect their health because there is no other option, and it shows on their bodies,” Anita says. “They will not be able to say with any confidence that they be given water or nimbu pani, because they are sweating in front of this gas stove three hours a day.”
Anita is weary, but she continues this work in the hope that civil society, larger labour unions, and the government in the city will take up these issues. She has been told time and again that even if some of these safeguards were in place—a Herculean task in itself—there would be no money to implement them.
“But then I say, why don’t you levy a cess and bring in money? If we think about every household that uses electrical appliances in their kitchens, and tax it for even a rupee, who will it make poorer, tell me?” There is a lingering silence—I don’t know how to answer Anita.
Read about the everyday realities of women domestic workers affiliated with SMKU in ‘Reversing Domestic Workers’ Rights: Stories of Backlash and Resilience in Delhi’.
“Ultimately, we want people to be in good health, and be able to lead a good life.”
Dr. Jean Drèze, Economist and Right to Food activist
Before I speak with Dr. Jean Drèze, my notes are filled with links to his work with the Right to Food campaign, as well as the Right to Work, under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. As someone who is privy to both—the specificity and smallness of lives, and the largeness of numbers and data—he is perhaps best equipped to show us the larger picture of how food and labour intersect at the level of governance and policy.
But I’m thrown when the first thing Jean wants to clarify is that “the right to food and the right to work, in my mind, are quite distinct. I don’t think the right to food is limited to people who work.” I quietly close my notebook, because while it hasn’t occurred to me that labour and food and food and labour need not be linked, he’s right, of course.
“The right to food is a universal right,” he adds. “And applies also to people who are unable to work, or people who are able to work but still not working, for whatever reason.” He cites an example of the people in Gaza, who absolutely have the right to food despite their inability to work in the face of destruction, or a pregnant woman.
Even so, when I press him to talk about what some links between the two might be, he allows that they could be used as a shorthand. “You can think of the right to food, or at least some aspects of it, as implicit in the right to work. You have to be properly nourished in order to work. But more importantly, the right to work can be a tool for achieving the right to food,” Jean says.
Here, the food itself is a shorthand for nutrition—people need nutrients, not just calories. While work entails more than the right to casual labour at the minimum wage—ideally, satisfying, socially useful work that is well paid—amounting to dignified employment. Without this, reliable access to good food becomes impossible. If people are working under really taxing, harsh conditions, for very low wages, then that’s suffering, not working. “Ultimately, we want people to be in good health, and be able to lead a good life.”
" If people are working under really taxing, harsh conditions, for very low wages, then that’s suffering, not working."
When considering food and labour in this broader way that Jean does, a number of other inputs that both Priyanka and Anita are trying to make apparent are required. Inputs like a steady income, access to education, a measure of gender equality, and adequate and affordable health services. “I think gender inequality plays a big role in under-nutrition—under-nutrition of children, and women themselves,” Jean says. “One of the major explanations for poor nutrition levels in South Asia, especially India, compared with other regions of the world, is the subjugation of women.”
For example, in the Jaccha Baccha survey from 2019—spanning Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Uttar Pradesh—Jean tells me, researchers found that only 22 percent of pregnant women were eating better than usual. “This is quite shocking, because their usual diet is already so poor,” he adds. “Their access to healthcare and rest is also far from adequate.”
For Jean, there is, however, one point at which all of these intersect—the lack of interest from the government towards improving these outcomes. “On the one hand there is very little focus on social security programmes,” he says. “And on the other hand, they don’t want the workforce to organise because the corporate sector wants cheap labour.”
Jean points to several programmes that have been undermined in one way or the other in the last 10 years—defunding of the Employment Guarantee Act, of pension schemes, even mid-day meals. Some states have introduced direct benefits, like cash transfers, but the climate at the Centre is not very favourable, he adds.
We talk for a time about being angry, feeling despair. But I am (somewhat) soothed when he tells me that this anger can be productive. “So, coming back to what we can do,” he tells me, “I think we can continue campaigning in every possible way, using all the democratic tools (or whatever is left of them), whether it’s the media or the court or electoral process or public discussions or street action, and push all the doors—get what we can get.”
Read notes from the Jaccha Baccha survey here, and how the Right to Food campaign evolved in India here.
Mukta Patil is Projects Editor at The Locavore. She works on stories that spotlight the intricacies of our food systems, and how they interact with the climate emergency, the environment, and people. She lives with her cat, Pooki, on the outskirts of Goa.
We would like to thank Priyanka Tupe, Anita Kapoor, and Dr. Jean Drèze for trusting us with their experiences, and time.
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