Opinion: A fan that stops at noon, a wage that never arrives - the dignity test the state keeps failing
In Chennai the fan stops at 9am. In Jammu the wage stops at Rs 8,000. Periyar asked who bears the burden, Anna asked whether work carries dignity. By that measure, the modern state still publishes notices where it should publish justice.
There are two ways a state tells you what you are worth. The first is a wage slip. The second is a power cut notice. This week, Chennai and Jammu received both.
In Chennai, TANGEDCO will switch off supply from 9 am to 2 pm on October 8 across Tambaram, Ramapuram, Rajakilpakkam and Thiruverkadu. The streets are listed with bureaucratic precision: Madambakkam, Sembakkam, Manapakkam, Mugalivakkam, Velachery Main Road. What is not listed is any sense of burden. Five hours in 33-degree heat is not the same for a flat with an inverter as it is for a single-room home with an elderly parent, a tailor paid by the piece, or a student in an online class. The notice is equal. The suffering is not.
In Jammu, daily wagers of the Grameen Bank say they are paid Rs 8,000 a month, and that colleagues absorbed after amalgamation saw their pay fall from Rs 14,000. They stood outside the Narwal head office on October 5 and said, plainly, that you cannot survive on that. A bank that lends to farmers cannot run on the poverty of its own counter staff and call it inclusion.
Periyar E V Ramasamy taught us to ask, of every arrangement, who carries the weight and who collects the honour. A maintenance shutdown carried entirely by the household, with no published calendar, no feeder-wise accountability and no promise that the same street will not be cut again next month, fails that test. Anna, C N Annadurai, taught that dignity of labour is not a slogan for May Day. It is whether the person who does the work can live from the work. Kalaignar M Karunanidhi, whatever his critics say, understood that a welfare state is measured at the ration shop, the bus stop and the hospital counter, not at the ribbon-cutting.
Apply those tests and the demands write themselves. In Tamil Nadu, TANGEDCO and the government that owns it should publish a rolling 30-day maintenance calendar, feeder by feeder, with the reason for each shutdown and a public report when the work is done. If the same area is cut twice, say why. In Jammu and Kashmir, the Grameen Bank should immediately bring daily wagers to the statutory minimum wage, restore the amalgamation cut pending review, and publish a dated regularisation roster for long-serving staff. A committee without a date is a waiting room with no door.
None of this is radical. It is the minimum that separates a government from a notice board. A fan that stops at noon and a wage that never arrives tell the same story: the state has learned to announce, but not yet to answer. Periyar would have called that dependence. Anna would have called it indignity. The people in Tambaram and Narwal are calling it, correctly, enough.