Mumbai and Malegaon may be 300 kilometres apart, but in many ways the two urban entities — the prosperous megapolis, on the one hand, and the straggly, impoverished town, on the other — share a common destiny. The train bombs of Mumbai transmogrifying into the bicycle bombs of Malegaon are only a small part of this story. What happens in Mumbai has invariably and inevitably had an impact on Malegaon.

Perhaps Mumbai ensures this. Larger than the state it is situated in, the city alone accounts for 23 per cent of the state’s gross domestic product. It is Mumbai’s evolution from being a manufacturing hub in the 1960s to a global financial and services centre today that has helped to mould peripheral urban clusters like Bhiwandi, Malegaon, Echaklakaranji and Madhavpur. They reflected, in a microcosm, the more brutal aspects of the megapolis. The one big event in this trajectory was the Bombay textile strike of the early eighties. Dutch sociologist H. van Wersch, in his book Bombay Textile Strike 1982-83, observed how the share of handlooms and powerlooms in export earnings gradually increased at the expense of the mill sector. Powerlooms, which had accounted for only 1 per cent of the exports in 1975, shot up to corner 6 per cent of exports by 1983, and Maharashtra itself emerged as the powerloom centre of the country. Today a little less than half of India’s registered powerlooms are located in the state.

Throughout the Bombay textile strike the availability of cloth in the market remained relatively unaffected because production was increasingly sub-contracted to the powerloom owners located in what came to be known as the powerloom towns of Maharashtra. The boom in these small towns — perhaps it could be termed a redistribution of manufacturing capacity — created by the textile strike also provided employment opportunities on an unprecedented scale. But the jobs came at a price. The powerloom owners invariably transferred the problems and risks inherent in their operations to their workers. According to van Wersch, a visit to Bhiwandi reminded him of the beginning of the industrial revolution: “Thousands of persons sleeping in or next to numberless ramshackle sheds in which the deafening sound of looms is heard 24 hours of the day, no ventilation, no proper light, children doing tedious work for long hours, dust and dirt everywhere. The situation is such that employers do not even make the pretence of hiding the total lack of proper working conditions.”

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