Nolina Minj of Scroll takes all of us who live in buildings which have separate “Service Lifts” to task in this hard-hitting essay. If you are someone who enjoys the fact that the people working for you use Service Lifts you might want to skip this article.
Service Lifts says Ms Minj not only eat up precious minutes for time constrained gig workers (who have only one Service Lift whilst the rest of the residents have 2-4 lifts which they can use), they are also a form of social segregation:
“It is not just delivery workers who are barred from using the main elevators in large apartment complexes with several lifts. Even domestic workers, who are regular visitors to high-rise apartments, are subjected to the same segregation.
“It is humiliating and hurtful,” said a domestic worker in Lokhandwala Complex. “In the society that I work at, dogs are allowed in the regular elevators, but workers must take the service elevator. Does this mean we’re less than animals?…
In other societies, domestic staff have to take different elevators even when accompanying their employers. “It’s terrible. In my building, the access to the service elevators is further away from the residential elevators,” said Janaki, a resident of Lokhandwala Complex. “When my family is travelling somewhere and they need our domestic staff to help take their bags down, we take the residential elevators, but the staff has to walk further and carry the bags to the service elevator.”””
Ms Minj exposes us to some of the bizarre arguments that are used to justify the existence of Service Lifts:
“One common argument made was that the use of service elevators helped save time. “My building’s society argues that in the morning rush hour, lifts get too crowded with schoolchildren and office workers, so segregating the lifts for workers makes things more efficient,” said Priya, a resident of a 40-storey building in Dadar….
Another argument residents heard was that the use of service elevators was necessary to ensure women’s safety in the building societies.
Janaki, a young woman who lives in a high-rise in Lokhandwala Complex, recounted that members of her society claimed that workers, especially deliverymen, might stare at, or even molest women and children.
“This is definitely about caste and class,” she said.”
Given the evident distress that Service Lifts inflict on the workers who make our lives more comfortable, it is interesting to note that such Lifts are becoming more common:
“Conversations with both workers and residents of the high-rises suggested that the phenomenon of segregating elevators, earlier an exception in Mumbai, is now becoming the norm. As the city goes through a redevelopment boom, numerous old buildings in the city that had a single elevator are being converted into high-rises with several elevators. In these new buildings, workers are increasingly being denied access to common lifts and segregated into service lifts.
“All the new high-rise buildings tend to have separate service lifts,” Sayyed said. Workers in posh neighbourhoods said that between 60% and 70% of the buildings they visited for work had separate elevators for workers.”
Ms. Minj’s article then delves deeper into why we in India love the Service Lift. She begins by interviewing Indians who live in other countries without Service Lifts:
“Indeed, anti-caste scholars and activists who live in the United States, where the modern-day elevator was first invented, said that they have observed that service elevators in residential buildings are mainly used to move large and heavy furniture.
Tejas Harad, a former Mumbaikar and a doctoral candidate studying alternative media and anti-caste movements at the University of Pennsylvania, said that in his two years in the United States, he had never come across a service elevator for workers. He observed that the elevator was “an intimate and enclosed space” that had to be shared by individuals from various social groups.
“So for that brief moment, it’s like you’re on an equal footing,” he said. “Of course, it doesn’t erase people’s locations as workers and residents, but symbolically speaking, there’s a shattering of inequality that occurs there.””
Back in India, Ms. Minj speaks to scholars who specialize in understanding how the caste system works in modern India:
““Most people working as domestic workers or deliverymen come from the Bahujan community,” said a postdoctoral scholar from an Indian Institute of Technology who has conducted research on caste in Mumbai. “Separate lifts are an attempt to create distance from outcaste bodies, as there is a lot of anxiety about spatial density in cities. This is how the spatial segregation from earlier times continues in cities today.”
Harad observed that outside the lift, the only time when rich upper caste people and lower caste individuals came into contact with each other was in contexts when the former were serving the latter.
“In those spaces, the class distinction and relational dynamic is very clear,” he said. “But in the lift, for a very brief moment, class and caste distinction is threatened. Maintaining those boundaries and separation is important for upper-caste groups.”
Said Disha Wadekar, a lawyer, ““Caste is a chimera, it keeps adapting to the times. The spread of segregated service elevators is a prime example of such adaptation.”
Harad added, “What does it say about you that you can’t share space with a lower-caste person even for such a brief period of time? That your caste and class position gets threatened by that brief encounter?””
After understanding the academic point of view on this subject, Ms Minj speaks to the workers who are most impacted by the rise of the Service Lift:
“Several workers said that the segregation of elevators was an attack on their basic rights. “It’s a question of time and dignity,” said Mangala Bavaskar, a former president of the Gharelu Kamgar Vikas Vastistar Sangh, another state domestic workers’ organisation.“If we’re allowed inside their homes to clean and cook their food, then why can’t we use the same lifts as them? Why should we wait longer for separate lifts to go to the same houses?”
Delivery workers also voiced similar ire.
“Those living in high-rise buildings are all crorepatis,” said Abdul Malik, a deliveryman based in Navi Mumbai. “They don’t consider us to be human. Our time and struggle don’t matter. We only exist to serve them.”
Ms Minj ends the article on a positive note which suggests that India’s Nepal-moment is coming:
“Workers recounted that the segregation of elevators began to be particularly stringently enforced during the pandemic. In Thane East, Chaya, a domestic worker, recounted that she and others protested when the building they worked at tried to extend the policy even after the pandemic. “They continued the separation for the lifts for a year later,” Chaya said. “But all of us workers got together and took a stance, so they had to finally stop the segregation.””
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