Proletarian Photo Story from Kapas Hera:

A New Working Class Dormitory Shanty-Town in Gurgaon, India GurgaonWorkersNews - June 2010

Kapas Hera is one of the biggest new 'working class dwelling clusters' in the Delhi industrial belt. Within the last ten years rent-based mass-accomodations for around 200,000 to 300,000 workers and families emerged out of dusty scrub-land around a minor peasant village. Kapas Hera is where over 100,000 garment export workers eat and sleep or conspire after 12 to 16-hours shifts in neighbouring Udyog Vihar Phase I to IV - one of Delhi's biggest 'planned' industrial areas.

GurgaonWorkersNews - Newsletter 23 (March 2010)

(full version at: www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com)

Gurgaon in Haryana is presented as the shining India, a symbol of capitalist success promising a better life for everyone behind the gateway of development. At a first glance the office towers and shopping malls reflect this chimera and even the facades of the garment factories look like three star hotels.

Behind the facade, behind the factory walls and in the side streets of the industrial areas thousands of workers keep the rat-race going, producing cars and scooters for the middle-classes which end up in the traffic jam on the new highway between Delhi and Gurgaon.

full version: www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com

Gurgaon in Haryana is presented as the shining India, a symbol of capitalist success promising a better life for everyone behind the gateway of development. At a first glance the office towers and shopping malls reflect this chimera and even the facades of the garment factories look like three star hotels. Behind the facade, behind the factory walls and in the side streets of the industrial areas thousands of workers keep the rat-race going, producing cars and scooters for the middle-classes which end up in the traffic jam on the new highway between Delhi and Gurgaon.

Thousands of young middle class people lose time, energy and academic aspirations on night-shifts in call centres, selling loan schemes to working-class people in the US or pre-paid electricity schemes to the poor in the UK. Next door, thousands of rural-migrant workers uprooted by the agrarian crisis stitch and sew for export, competing with their angry brothers and sisters in Bangladesh or Vietnam. And the rat-race will not stop; on the outskirts of Gurgaon, Asia's biggest Special Economic Zone is in the making.