Kuttiamma and Rita: 100 plus days of sanitation workers' struggle

(This article is based on an interview conducted on 3rd November 2025. The article was first published in GroundXero.) 

Starting August 1st 2025, 1500 sanitation workers have been protesting the loss of their jobs. They have been relentlessly protesting, even as they face police repression and a dire economic situation. This is a conversation with two of the protesting workers, Kuttiamma and Rita.

Sanitation workers Rita (left) and Kuttiamma (right) in their house.

Background 

Every morning at 6:30 am, about 30,000 sanitation workers sign into work at ward offices all over Chennai. They then fan out into the city’s neighborhoods to sweep the streets and collect garbage for the next few hours.  

In 10 out of the 15 zones in the city, these sanitation workers are employed by private companies, and in the other five they are under the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC). On August 1st 2025, two additional zones, Zone 5 and 6, were transferred from the Corporation to a private company called Delhi MSW Solutions Pvt Ltd under the Ramky group.  

When sanitation workers in Zone 5 and 6 reported to work on the morning of August 1st, they were told they could not sign in. They were told to join the private company Ramky instead. Ramky was offering a lower salary, and it was not clear whether they would employ everybody.  

But there was no time to figure out the details. “Get out, get out, neenga inga ninna prachanai varum." You will cause problems if you stand here, they were told as they were forced out of the ward offices. These workers had signed in and out of work in these same ward offices for the last 10, 12 or 15 years.  

1,950 workers were thrown out of employment that day. They were contract workers under the Corporation under the National Urban Livelihood Mission (NULM) scheme.  

Women driving autos, autos driving women

Tamilselvi in her auto

(This article is based on interviews conducted between June and September 2024.)

Tamilselvi on becoming an auto driver

About one percent of auto drivers in Chennai are women. S Tamilselvi, in her mid-fifties, is one of them. She lives in Kundrathur, Chennai.

At age 45, Tamilselvi lost her housekeeping job. She had taken a long leave for her daughter’s delivery, after which the contracting company that employed her refused to take her back. There was no hope of getting a similar job, as workers above the age of 30 are not hired for such jobs. As a single woman, Tamilselvi was at a dead-end. 

Some time before that, she had seen a woman auto driver near Central station. The memory stuck with her because she liked the idea of driving. With no other employment options available, she decided to learn how to drive. 

She said: “Intha thozhil eppodhum irukkum. This job skill I will always have with me. There is no boss. I don’t need to take permission to take leave.” When she started learning to drive, everybody made fun of her, ‘at this age, you are learning to drive’, they would say. “Today those same people have taken rides with me. I have even driven at midnight. In this job, we can travel like gents,” she said. 

For many women drivers, driving has been a way of overcoming fears and stereotypes and feeling confident. 

Aspirations of an all-rounder

When I first met Anil, I asked what his occupation was. He said he was an all-rounder, and that he can do any work. I wanted to learn more, but he was in a hurry, and told me he could come to his house the following morning.

Anil lives in a 100-square foot room on the terrace of a building in Chennai. There are no windows, and the roof is made of a metal sheet that lets the summer heat in. He lives with his wife, his cousin and two small children. It is 9 am on a Sunday morning, and the children are restless in the heat.

Anil is from Nepal, and he has been in Chennai for over six years.

Anil's cousin, Go Bahadur sits next to him. When asked about their experience working in Chennai Go Bahadur says, “the only problem is that we get paid less than local workers, and we are made to work more than them.”

Anil says, “my experience has been different. wherever I work, I have been paid more than what I expected. I go to work at a place only if the employer respects me.”

Lynal : protesting against a polluting company

Ongoing protest to demand the closure of Coromandel's fertilizer plant

 

On 26th December, ammonia gas leaked from a sub-sea pipeline of the Coromandel International Limited cement plant in Ennore. The winds carried the fumes to Periakuppam, a settlement next to the Coromandel factory. There, news of the leak was passed on by people to each other, knocking on doors, calling on the phone. People hurried out of their neighborhood in autos, 2-wheelers, and on foot. Many fainted and were admitted to government hospitals. There were 52 recorded cases of ammonia poisoning.

The next morning people from 33 settlements of Ennore started a protest demanding the permanent closure of the Coromandel plant. On the first day, people from each of the villages stood on the main road outside their village. On subsequent days, they started sitting outside the gate of the Coromandel factory. The plant has been a polluter for a long time, but this time, "we were face to face with death", said one protester after another. Their protest is ongoing and is now in its sixtieth day.

We talk to Lynal, a protest organizer from Thazhankuppam, one of the 33 settlements.

Michael's Kattur

 Michael lives in Kattur, a village north of Chennai on the delta of the Arani and Kosasthalai rivers. His house is part of a small hamlet surrounded by vast open lands. There are coconut trees, mango trees and some  plants around his house. I planted these coconut trees when I was 12, says Michael. He plucks some tender coconuts, gives one to me and the others to his brother’s children.

Michael giving coconuts plucked from his trees

Michael, who is 31 years old, switched to organic farming six years ago. He switched to traditional varieties of rice such  as Kattuyanam and Mappilai Samba, replacing the hybrid rice variety BPT Ponni that everybody else in the village grew.  He also stopped using fertilizers and pesticides that the high-yielding hybrid varieties demanded.

“I made the change because I really wanted to lead my life in a nature-friendly way, without consuming chemicals or putting chemicals in the soil, or feeding chemical-laced fodder to the cows."   

"The change was difficult. My father opposed me.  At that time I was the only one in the village who was growing organic varieties. It is difficult to grow something different from everybody else. For example, these varieties take 20 days more to mature, and in those last 20 days my crops  are the only ones standing in the field, so kattupanrri (wild pigs) would go for them. I alone had to guard my crops night and day."

"The hybrid variety of rice fills one’s stomach, but it is devoid of nutrition. Most people grow those because its yield is higher, for them it is just about money. "

"I work part-time as a crane driver. If I take a job in a factory,  I can only work in my field on Sundays, and that’s too difficult to manage."

"Anyway, all of this is for a couple of years. After that I won’t have any land to farm on.”

Rajalakshmi's Gunankuppam

Gunankuppam is a settlement of  Pazhaverkadu that lies on a thin barrier island separating the Bay of Bengal from a distributary of the Kosasthalai river. The settlement is a grid of colourful houses home to about 500 families. In the afternoon heat when I visited, groups of people hung out under trees or under sheds chatting. There were women playing little gambling games such as dayaboss and maniattam. Some women were laying out their fish to dry.

Where is Gunankuppam?

The proposed extension of the Adani Kattupalli port, once constructed, will result in a steady erosion of land that will eventually lead to this barrier island fully submerging into the sea. The residents of the village did not learn about this upcoming project from the government. Rather, they learned about it from activists opposing the Adani port about 4 years ago. Since then, they have very little information about the progress of the project and the fate that awaits their village.

Aside from the existential threat facing Gunankuppam, the character of the village  has also  changed over time as fishing yields have dropped. Subsistence fishers  around the world have seen their yields drop because of acidification of oceans resulting from climate change, excessive fishing by large trawlers,  and local pollution. In this area, fish catch has been affected by the gradual industrialization of North Chennai, and it got a sudden jolt from the oil spill of 2016. Rajalakshmi, who is in her mid-forties, has lived through these changing times. She was born in Gunankuppam and has lived here all her life.

A year after a shop demolition

 

On 14th January 2022, around 100 shops were demolished. The shops occupied a square lying in between  the Wimco Nagar railway station and the metro station in North Chennai. The shops were built illegally on  land that was owned by ITC. ITC is a conglomerate worth more than fifty billion dollars  The Indian government bought the land from ITC with the stated goal of building a subway underneath the level crossing going across the railway tracks.

More than a year has passed since the demolition, and the subway construction is yet to commence. Vendors whose shops were demolished got vague promises of relocation, but it looks unlikely that they will get anything. As the months passed, some of them started running their shops on the street. 

On 3rd February 2023, I talked to Sarassu, one of the vendors who lost her shop.  She had a vegetable shop. Post-demolition, her shop consisted of a wooden platform that she had set up on the street.  She sat under an umbrella propped up by some stones on the ground. 

Sarassu adjusting the umbrella above her shop