No one has quite used these words, but I’ve now heard the sentiment more than once. The gatherings of dusty shacks, the tents that line the roads — homes for people who live one hundred rupees at a time.
For the middle and upper classes, these slums provide the cheap labor that build, clean, and service people’s homes.
A daughter who might work in a wealthy household, cleaning, cooking, and sweeping. A father who might scale bamboo scaffolding without a safety harness as he helps build a upper class home. A mother who might make chai on a street corner, if she isn’t busy raising the family.
The daughter as maid? 2000 rupees ($50+) a month. The father as construction worker? 80 rupees ($2.00) a day. The mother as chai-wallah? Perhaps another 100 rupees a day. It adds up to something — maybe 6000 or 7000 rupees a month for a family of a few.
This is my economic guess at the myriad stories that fill the shacks and tents along New Delhi’s streets. Some might be long-standing, while others are new — homes for migrant laborers from the many, many villages across India’s northern regions. People who are tired of rural subsistence and come to “the city” to earn more and send more home.
To put it in perspective, an Indian nonprofit lawyer might make 30,000 to 40,000 rupees a month. A doctor might earn 200,000 rupees a month. And if you are a senior manager with a multinational corporation? Higher, higher, higher.
Of course, it is impossible to understand these numbers without also understanding the price of goods — 30 or 40 rupees for a kilo of oranges. 2 rupees for an egg. 7500 rupees ($185) a month rent for my half of the two bedroom flat I share. And roughly 38 rupees to the dollar. But still, a full-time maid’s 2000 rupees a month isn’t much.
It would probably be shocking for an average middle/upper income New Delhi home to know that the maid earning 2000 rupees a month in New Delhi might earn 100,000 rupees ($2,500) a month in a U.S. city. And of course, even though the salary would be 50 times higher, the rents would be much higher as well. It is hard to imagine finding a decent — but tiny — studio for less than $1,000 a month in San Francisco.
But try telling that to the autorickshaw driver who took me home one night. He listened intently as I explained the California minimum wage of $8 an hour — roughly 2400 rupees for an eight-hour day — the absolute minimum someone can earn legally in U.S. society. Even though I also explained how little that wage got you, his response regarding life in the U.S. was simple:
Sab amir hai.
“Everyone is rich.”
