Seema Vairva weighs just 30 kilos. Both she and her baby son have been diagnosed with anaemia. Seema is a domestic worker in Jaipur, and a Dalit – the social group at the bottom of India’s traditional caste ladder. Jaipur, capital of India’s north-western state of Rajasthan, is a city bustling with traditional bazaars, offices and modern buildings. But there are pockets where government welfare doesn’t reach.

By Anumeha Yadav / Women’s Feature Service

Amidst comfortable houses in one of the city’s largest residential complexes are dilapidated, dingy structures that migrant construction workers and domestic workers call home. Seema is one of them. The frail 20-year-old has just finished making roti – flat breads – but she hasn’t eaten any. “I don’t feel hungry, I don’t feel like eating,” she says. Her infant son weighs six kilos – a case of ‘moderate malnutrition’ by the standards of the government-run Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS).

Turned away
The dismal nutritional profile of women working in the informal sector is a recurring story throughout Jaipur. Despite her condition, Seema has stayed away from doctors. She did purchase some prescribed medicines for her son once, but never for herself.

“The last time we went he asked for 800 rupees [12 euros] for treatment for both of us, and 200 rupees [3 euros] as consulting fee. We can’t afford it,” she says. The one time she went to a government clinic, she returned disappointed. “It was very crowded and the nurse almost turned me away,” she recalls.

The family has already exhausted their 15,000 rupees (230 euros) in savings on surgery she had to undergo for a tumour in her stomach. Seema’s husband works as a helper in a small restaurant in the neighbourhood, earning 160 rupees (2.50 euros) a day, just over the state minimum wage for skilled work. Until her son’s birth, she worked as domestic help in four houses, earning 100 (1.50 euros) a day.

Gruelling routine
Seema’s day starts at 5.00am. She makes several trips to the hand pump a few hundred metres away, to fill six buckets of water and an earthen pot. Her mother- and father-in-law work as construction workers. The family of four moved from their village to Jaipur more than five years back, but they don’t have a ration card here, so they can’t get the 25 kilos of government subsidised grain to which people living below the poverty line are entitled.

The young woman then cooks a morning meal of roti on the earthen stove using wood as fuel and inhaling a lot of smoke in the process. She packs lunch for her mother- and father-in-law, who leave for work at 7.00 am.

It’s mostly Seema’s mother-in-law who buys household provisions – fuel wood, wheat flour, dal or a seasonal vegetable, sometimes a litre of milk, but almost never any fruit.

To boost the nutritional content of her infant son’s meal, every now and then Seema tries to include semolina or banana. But there is never any for her, though she clearly needs it. The situation was pretty much the same during her pregnancy when she continued her gruelling work routine – typically she has a working day of 16 hours – almost till the day she gave birth, living on roti and vegetables. “I had a craving for oranges, so sometimes I would eat roti with oranges,” she smiles.

Anaemic
What about visiting a neighbourhood anganwadi, a centre where infants, children, pregnant and lactating mothers can get free food under the ICDS? Seema isn’t aware of any in her area.

“The anganwadi workers are not doing enough to tell these women about the services meant for them in their centres. Hardly any of these women go there,” says Harkesh Bugalia, secretary of an NGO that recently carried out city-wide health tests.

Of the 114 women from the city’s Parvati Nagar area who underwent haemoglobin tests, all were found to be anaemic, some of them severely. What’s more, two-thirds of the women were underweight.

Rat droppings in the rice
In a slum a few kilometres from Mansarovar, southwest Jaipur, Suraj Devi shakes her head when asked whether she has ever been to her nearby anganwadi. She is finishing sweeping the one-room house where she lives with her three sons, a daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren.

They belong to the Valmiki community that has traditionally earned its livelihood lifting night soil, despite a Supreme Court ban on the practice. Suraj Devi and her sons work as sanitation workers. They collect garbage from 10 to 15 households every morning earning 50 rupees (75 eurocents) a month per household.

Although she has not heard of the anganwadi, Suraj’s grandchildren Laxmi, 6, and Shiva, 3, get food through the mid-day meal scheme being run at the government school in the slum. The school is a brick structure with no roof and open on two sides. The food hand-out doesn’t necessarily mean the kids are getting at least one healthy meal a day, according to their grandmother. She claims she’s even spotted rat droppings in the cooked rice the children are given.

In the bustling Rajasthan state capital, there are hundreds of Seema Vairvas and Suraj Devis, women who work day-in-and-day-out in the informal sector and yet are unable to scrape together one nutritious meal a day for themselves and their children.