More and more women are breaking into the rough and tumble of a factory floor and proving themselves to be equals
Almost 50 percent of the workers on the factory floor of Ampere Vehicles in Coimbatore are women
Image: C P Shanmugam for Forbes India
For nearly two years since 2013, Pratixa Kher, now 27, marshalled an all-male crew to conduct blasts at Hindustan Zinc’s open-cast mine at Rampura Agucha in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara district. A graduate in mining engineering from Gujarat’s Bhuj, Kher had to mobilise forces with clockwork precision to extract ore by deep-hole drilling, charging explosives and initiating firing sequences, sometimes in difficult terrain with depths of up to 400 m, in temperatures between 40°C and 45°C, and between 8 am to 2.30 pm to ensure optimal use of time. She admits that it would get intimidating at times, but “in mining, if you haven’t done blasting, you haven’t challenged the rock”.
Kher wouldn’t have envisaged her current life even some years ago, when she was struggling to find a college that would let her study mining engineering, a discipline that was considered too challenging for women. When she graduated from the Government Engineering College in Bhuj in 2012, she was part of the first batch of graduates that included women.
Kher’s story is resonant across shopfloors of manufacturing companies in India where women have begun to trickle in only in the last decade or so. Prior to that, shopfloors were out of bounds for young women graduates partly by convention—because of the nature of work involved (heavy lifting, welding etc)—and partly by a culture of a loud, abrasive all-boys’ club, perhaps best reflected in the insolence of Stanley Kowalski, the Polish worker played by Marlon Brando in the 1951 classic A Streetcar Named Desire.
This exclusivity most famously came to the fore in a recruitment advertisement published by Telco in 1974 for a junior engineer, with a prominent disclaimer ‘Lady candidates need not apply’, to which a gold-medallist engineering graduate from Hubli shot off a letter to JRD Tata lecturing him on gender equality. That graduate later received an interview call, and when the panel told her that despite her impressive résumé, she should rather angle for a research job, she shot back and told them that women had to start somewhere, else they would never work on the factory floor.
That this spunky woman was Sudha Murty, chairman of Infosys Foundation and the one who provided her husband NR Narayana Murthy with the seed capital to start software behemoth Infosys, didn’t change the reality for women through the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Besides just one’s ability, factory floors needed to bring about a cultural change to accept women within their folds
(This story appears in the 16 March, 2018 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)