making keychains

For the past couple of days, I have been shadowing Muna Apa, a social worker with the organization Apnalaya (meaning 'our house' in Marathi).  Apnalaya is really involved with the issue of ration cards, so I'm getting a good look at how this part of Mumbai's identification system works, in theory and in practice.  I basically follow Muna Apa around as she makes house visits in the slums and goes to the ration card office to help people with their applications.  She is really good about explaining the minutae of things to me.  She herself has lived in a Govandi slum-- Shanti Nagar-- for decades, and she has been working with Apnalaya for like 15 years.  So she has an insider's view of things.

These pictures are from one of the house visits we made... Muna Apa was there to help one of the children get admission to a school.  The grandmother of the household was assembling keychains.  It was a five or six step process of putting together a very cheap little plastic bug that makes a clicking noise when you squeeze it.   She had large burlap sacks full of plastic pieces to put together. 

For making 12 dozen keychains, she gets 1 rupee  (roughly 40 rupees = $1).  At first, I thought she meant to say one dozen.  So I asked again:  you get 1 rupee for making 12 of these things?  She clarified, 12 dozen.  One hundred forty-four.  She is able to make about Rs. 15 per day doing this work. 

We had to sit around and wait for about 15 minutes while one of the parents found some documentation Muna Apa had asked for, so in the meantime, I tried my hand at keychain assembly. I used a pair of pliers to fix black beads into eye sockets. As we were sitting around making keychains together, the grandmother gave me a really good interview about her thoughts on voting and politics!