Paid in Onions: Stories from the Field

 From the desk of Vitasta Raina

Dated: April 2025

Time: Irrelevant

As part of my fieldwork in Chowk and Nanivali during the Summer of 2022, I met and engaged with several groups of people, trying to understand the systems of peri-urbanization at play on the fringes of Mumbai Metropolitan Region. While there was excitement and expectation for the development of 'Mumbai 3.0' in the main town of Chowk, in the tribal hamlets of Nanivali, life was carrying on without much disruption or change. The tribal men I came across in Chowk panchayat were largely employed as daily wage labourers in Main Town Chowk, Panvel, and Navi Mumbai. They referred to their employment as begari work. Begari is translated in Hindi as forced labour, or the act of forcing someone to work without pay. While one might expect such systems to have faded away with time, particularly because the men were getting renumerated for their work, albeit only meager wages, there was a story that emerged from the field that left me feeling unsettled. 

In the early morning hours one day, as I was walking up towards Nanivali from Chowk Navin Vasahat across the railway overbridge, I came across a group of women who seemed to be heading for work. I stopped them for a brief conversation and asked them where they work. They told me that work in an onion export factory and were engaged in cleaning the factory and sorting onions into batches for export. However, much to my surprise, they told me that they are not paid wages in exchange for the work, but rather in sacks of rejected onions, that they then sell in the Chowk Market. 

At first, I thought that perhaps there was a miscommunication, and I had misunderstood what they had said, but later that day, in the evening, I came across a tempo delivering sacks of onions to one of the women’s houses in Nanivali Thakurwadi. The driver told me that this is an arrangement the women had with the factory owner and that sometimes they might get 100 rupees here and there, but they mostly got two to four sacks of onions. I asked the women why they continued to work without any income, and they claimed that this was the only work available for them. Most of the tribals I came across told me the same story, that there is no work available for them besides begari work. 

Onion Delivery at Nanivali

David Harvey's arguments on 'Accumulation by Dispossession' help illuminate this arrangement between the women and the owner to a fair degree. This arrangement, while it didn't seem fair or ethical, was however perfectly legal as I was informed. Harvey explains that economic growth often occurs through the extraction of resources- land, labour, and time, of structurally disempowered and marginalized communities. While the women feed into the global supply chain that profits the owners, they remain outside the formal economic order. Harvey argues that this disenfranchisement is a systemic outcome of capitalist urban expansion. 

Onions to Market at Chowk Main Town market 

While this story from the field left me feeling disturbed, it was also a reminder that peri-urban landscapes are shaped not just by infrastructure development and real estate growth, but also by histories of marginalization and exploitation. That it is in the shadows of these stories from the field, that the true geography of Mumbai 3.0 is drawn, and that these hidden narratives are the unspoken layers of urban transformation. 

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