When his mother died in 2005, Shambhu Thakur inherited the job his parents had done for nearly three decades: fetching water from a kilometre away to clean the floors and toilet of the post office in Ratu village, 18 km from Jharkhand’s capital, Ranchi.
For this, he was paid Rs 10 per day.
The amount was higher than the Rs 2 his father earned, and the Rs 5 his mother earned, but it was still far below the minimum wage set by the Jharkhand government – Rs 275 for a working day of about eight hours. Even by an hourly calculation, Thakur’s wage did not meet the minimum wage standard.
In 2018, Thakur began pursuing a wage hike. He wrote several letters to the post office, requesting the authorities to increase his pay. “My daughter was ready to be married. But we didn’t have enough for dowry,” he said.
Two years later, the post office agreed to increase his wage to Rs 275 per week, effectively Rs 39 per day. This included Rs 200 for sweeping and mopping the floors, and Rs 75 for washing toilets. It was still below the state’s minimum wage.
This year, a local activist Basant Prasad Kumar came to know about Thakur’s wage and decided to spread word on it. One of the people he informed was researcher Vipul Paikra, who tweeted about it on April 5, in the hope of drawing the attention of postal authorities.
But the tweet backfired. The very next day, Thakur was turned away from work. On Twitter, the India Post, the postal service that functions under the Central government’s...
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