Aditi Unplugged

It is very pleasing to the ears to hear words like ‘organic’, ‘eco-friendly’, ‘green’, ‘non-toxic’, and of course ‘Sustainable’ ……. Isn’t that a beautiful façade they’ve put up? All food packages are sustainable! We see products have been printed Sustainable in font size 12 and the ingredients in font size 6. YES! It is a MYTH! Because 100s of brands are called out for greenwashing every year. It is when a company makes fake claims to be sustainable. The word sustainable has completely lost its meaning and relevance! Now coming to DEVELOPMENT, specifically, economic… Some companies utilized phrases like sustainable to attract clients when they were afraid of losing them and displayed illusions like planting trees. As the UN definition for sustainable development states, ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs …. Is it enough? NO! it's useless. Because it does not define needs! I could call ...

As Mary Harris (an American labor activist) says, “The hammer of the employer chisels away at the rights of the organized worker, but it shatters the unorganized worker.” I am here to elaborate upon those shatters of the unorganized workers! If you go to the Warje Bridge (in Pune) at 9 in the morning, what you will find is a herd of people hungry for employment every morning! The number of these naka workers, specifically the daily wage workers, goes beyond 4 crores across India, according to the India wage report of the International Labour Organisation. Most of them are migrant workers due to various reasons such as lack of opportunity, infrastructural gaps, lack of land for agriculture, and many other things. They move to cities to get employment, but what they get is being exploited! A carpenter is working on a construction site as a mason for wages even lower than the government's declared minimum wage according to the Minimum Wages Act, of 1948 . But he still works eve...