My research group of four women is stationed in the city of Jamshedpur, in the district of East Singhbhum, in the state of Jharkhand in northeast India. We’ve been given more details about our task, so we are mapping and assessing the social exclusion of tribal communities into a government-run program called the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). ICDS is arguably the largest government-run child development program in the world, and since it started in the 70’s, it has helped to raise India’s child health indicators so that the country is coming close to achieving the 2015 Millennium Development Goals set forth by the United Nations.
The ICDS program is currently being implemented at several different levels across the country, and it receives major support in Jharkhand from UNICEF and some support from the Tata Corporation. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tata, they are one of the world’s largest steel and car manufacturers. As an industry giant, the company recently unveiled the world’s smallest car called the Nano, and they bought out Jaguar and Land Rover. Everyone here in India knows the Tata brand, and they have several major factories here in Jharkhand. Tata has a big corporate social responsibility (CSR) department, which focuses on giving back to the community through the areas of health, agriculture, and water and sanitation.
Our group is being hosted by Tata’s CSR arm, so we have been charged to work in tandem with UNICEF, the Government of India (which is the main implementer of the ICDS program), and PKS (the Family Welfare Center which is the main health center of the Tata CSR projects) to provide a comprehensive assessment on the ICDS program’s nutrition strategies. Since our host institution is one of the biggest corporations in India (and worldwide), we have been given some quite surprising accommodations here at our site.
Coming to India, I thought I would have to sleep with ice water bottles next to me in a cot draped in mosquito netting in a tiny-sized hostel to battle the exhausting heat and malaria in the region. However, my roommate and I have actually been granted a beautiful air conditioner and cal-King sized bed, ceiling fans, a sitting area, a 27” TV, a desk, large closet space, a powder/changing room with fan and sitting area, and a big blue-tiled bathroom with a fancy toilet here at the Tata “hostel.” Our rooms are cleaned every day, and we don’t have to buy our own toilet paper. Our group also has a large, cold filtered water system just outside our door, so that we don’t have to purchase mineral water daily. Instead, we can just fill up our water bottles as we please because Tata wanted to make sure that everyone at this hostel had clean water to drink.
One of the reasons why this hostel has some of the cleanest filtered water in Southeast Asia is the fact that this is a Tata establishment through and through. This hostel that we’re in actually houses over 160 of its engineers who work at the nearby manufacturing plant. That’s right, there are about 160 bachelors in our hostel, and some women (though I have yet to count more than four so far). We learned over dinner conversation in the Mess Hall [cafeteria] today that these recent college grads who choose to work with Tata are given the option to live here if they have no other reasonable accommodations nearby, and only 30% of their salary is deducted for living expenses. Food is charged separately. They work seven days a week, for at least 8.5 hours a day, with only eight paid holidays off. The assistant manager I spoke to earlier had worked 20 days straight so far. It’s a completely different culture, and another guy had told me that it’s fine right now because they were told that the industry is booming…and all this hard work means that everyone is going to get a promotion soon.
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