KARACHI: The condition of rural workers and peasants, who make up more than 70 per cent of labour force in Sindh’s rural areas and toil long hours in agricultural farms and brick kilns, have gotten only worse, according to the Hari Welfare Association (HWA). The Sindh government has never given priority to these people who lack access to social security, good employment, and minimum wage, said HWA president Akram Khaskheli in a statement issued here the other day.

He said that a rural worker did not even earn an equivalent of the Rs25,000 minimum wage that the government implemented for unskilled labourers in 2019. Millions of young people in rural Sindh were forced to work for a little more than Rs6,000 per month in shops, restaurants, and workshops due to unemployment, and lack of opportunities for education, skills development, and employment and they included women, girls and minor boys who picked cotton and chilies for a piteous pay, he said, adding they were the prime targets of exploiters.

Khaskheli said that lack of irrigation water in the tail-end areas of canals had rendered majority of peasants jobless and forced them to relocate to urban areas or work as farm worker for meagre wages.

Leader says Sindh govt never extended any due rights to this segment, which forms 70pc of labour force

According to HWA, social and economic injustice, unemployment, hunger and poverty forced rural workers and peasants to rely on meagre economic prospects, which often resulted in their exploitation and abuse at the hands of contractors, middlemen, and corporate companies.

The majority of peasants had reportedly gone to rural labour market where they were given minimal wages due to growing shortage of irrigation water to tail-end areas of canals, said Khaskheli.

He said that workers frequently spent their free time in shabby roadside hangouts or agricultural fields looking for work when they were unable to find job or government support, causing suicidal tendencies to rise among them.

He said that the main cause behind rising number of suicides was a lack of political will on the part of the administration to implement labour law and policy. The Sindh Industrial Relations Act of 2013 provided a legal framework for the regulation of industrial relations but it was not implemented. The government had not made an effort to ensure that the rural workers, particularly those working in agriculture and brick kiln sectors, were unionized, he said.

Although the Sindh Women Agriculture Workers Act was passed in 2019, it had been currently rendered inert like every other law passed since the independence. The law could help rural peasants and working women protect their tights from marginalisation, exploitation and abuse in tribal societies, he said.

He said that landlords and feudal families were never in favour of a shift in land ownership patterns and land distribution.

Therefore, since 1955, the successive governments had never implemented the Sindh Tenancy Act, 1950, which was aimed at addressing the issues of tenant exploitation and landlessness by granting security of tenure to tenants and regulating the relationship between landlords and tenants.

However, he said, despite the existence of the STA, the tenant’s exploitation and landlessness continued unabated in rural Sindh. In the entire Sindh, HWA was unable to find even a single peasant or sharecropper with a written agreement with the landlords required under the law, he said.

He urged the Sindh government to ensure that all workers in rural areas received Rs25,000 minimum wage and recommended that the government should strengthen monitoring systems by increasing number of labour inspectors and labour courts so that rural workers could approach them for redressal and establish unions to bargain for and defend their rights under labour laws. It also urged that the government should devise a mechanism for implementing the STA, said Khaskheli.

Published in Dawn, May 3rd, 2023