Vinod at his home in Jeedimetla, Hyderabad.
Hyderabad: Vinod points down a narrow lane strung with sagging wires. “You see that Medha Engineering factory, the big one at the end of the gully? There’s a factory right behind that. That’s where I work.” Ask him what it is called and he has no answer. The elderly Bihari worker has never known the name of the place that pays his wages.
He is not unusual in Rami Reddy Nagar slum in Hyderabad’s Jeedimetla. “A lot of people here do not know the names of the places where they work in,” Fabian, an activist with the labour group Mazdoor Bigul, told Siasat.com.
“If you ask them, they’ll give you directions, this lane, that turn, but they cannot even name the place they work in,” he added.
This explains a great deal about how little of this workforce is on record anywhere.
The slum sits inside the Jeedimetla industrial estate, part of the manufacturing belt that underpins Hyderabad’s reputation as India’s drug capital. Its residents have come from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and further, and nearly all of them live from one payday to the next.
On the morning Siasat.com visited, a drizzle had turned the lanes into rivers of filth. The water settles into cesspools that drain only if the sun shines and returns with the next shower. Children were playing in the mud anyway, with whatever they could find.
The government school nearby stops at Class 5, said a man at a samosa stall. “If they want to pursue further studies, they’d have to go to a government school in the city, about 10 to 12 kilometres away. Some children whose parents have a vehicle drop them off, but most walk there and back.”
There are no school buses.
When asked about accidents at the workplace, Vinod described one at a unit he called the “Thakur Factory.”
“One night, five men were sleeping in a boiler room. One person left to relieve himself, and in that instant, the boiler exploded, killing all of them at once,” he told Siasat.com.
The man who had stepped out survived with a leg injury. “I’m not sure how much he received, or what the compensation was like,” Vinod said.
On overtime pay, he was forthcoming. “They do make us work overtime, and they do compensate us, but not double, like the state requires. Instead, they find a way to only pay us less.”
He earns Rs 10,000 a month. The minimum wage Telangana notifies for unskilled labour is Rs 14,000, about 40 per cent higher than what Vinod gets paid. His rent moves with inflation. His salary does not.
The wage is only half of what holds workers in place. The other half is the date it arrives. Salaries here, several men said, are sanctioned mid-month.
“Salary being paid in the middle of the month means if we want to shift companies, it’s always a liability,” a man who identified himself as Das told Siasat.com, while seated at the samosa shop that doubles as the slum’s town square. “If we switch, we either forgo the previous month’s pay or risk staying unemployed for another half a month. But usually, it isn’t even possible to quit mid-month because the owners threaten to withhold pay for the time we did work.”
Leaving does not settle the account either. “Even if they do go back to the factory to demand their money, they are usually harassed by the thekedars,” another worker said, using the local term for labour contractor. “If the thekedar is generous enough, he’ll give us a fraction of what we deserve.”
Asked what happens when workers push back together, Das said, “You see, if anyone does question or raise their voice, that worker gets blacklisted. It’s such that if a worker is blacklisted, his image is shared around their WhatsApp groups and that worker cannot find any work in the area anymore. He’d have to relocate.”
The groups, he said, belong to contractors and factory owners.
A question about whether any of this ever reaches the police produced an awkward prattle and a change of subject.
A thekedar known to Fabian declined to be interviewed. On why anyone takes such jobs, Fabian said, “A lot of these thekedars, they’re not some organised goons, but just people who want to have a better life. So, they bring a couple of people with them to work and that gets them more pay and more leverage in the factory, and therefore a better life.”
“Most of these thekedars get small batches of workers and sometimes the workers they get are other family members. So, most of them try to be on the side of the workers. However, in the end, when there is conflict, their own interests will prevail. They have more to gain by siding with the boss over the worker,” he added.
The man taking a cut of your wages, in other words, may well be doing it to hold his own family’s place in the queue.
Das, for his part, has seen worse. “Things are mostly good for us here, better than Mumbai or Bengaluru,” he said. “We have to keep moving wherever there is work, but it’s better than a lot of places we’ve been to.”
The comparison thins out on health. There is no government hospital within reach, Das said, and no Basti Dawakhana, the outpatient clinic the state runs in impoverished localities.
“The only people that practice medicine here are quacks, who will inject glucose and antibiotics for any small issue,” Fabian said. “People do get cured somehow, and they say the doctor here is good, but they are totally unaware of the side effects of consuming medicine like this.”
At the labour office in Chikkadpally, Saisat.com asked the Deputy Commissioner of Labour, Vijaya Bhasker Reddy, about the conditions migrant workers face in the city. “We can only solve the disputes that come here. That is the extent of our work,” he said.
Pressed on how far his office sits from Jeedimetla, Reddy said, “Our duty is only limited to the cases that do come here. We cannot go on doing vigilance work. That’s not in our scope.”
Asked how the department intends to address the problem at all, he said, “We’ll never turn a case down if it comes to us, but without any statistics, without any database of workers, there is not much to be done.”
A school that ends at Class 5. A medical system that runs on syringes of glucose. Wages below the notified floor, overtime paid at whatever rate an owner settles on, a blacklist that travels by WhatsApp and a labour office waiting for complaints that have no way of reaching it. Nothing here has failed all at once.
The absences have accumulated quietly and separately, in a settlement where the rain turns the road into a river and the afternoon sun clears away the evidence.
This post was last modified on August 18, 2026 9:47 pm