Every workday morning, milkman D.T. Walkar faithfully comes to Worli Dairy to not deliver milk.
Most days, he and his fellow drivers at the government dairy sign in, then move to the rest area. While others read the paper, nap or play rummy, Walkar likes to do the Sudoku puzzle in the Maharashtra Times, unless someone else has gotten to it first. He then wanders around the complex and talks to friends. The last delivery trucks were sold last year. “The trucks are all gone so we just sit around and talk,” says Walkar, 50. “We’re bored.”
Once respected civil servants, Walkar and his 300-odd fellow drivers have been left in a strange limbo. Milk sales at their dairy have plummeted as the state government lost its monopoly on milk and consumer tastes changed. But because Indian work rules strictly protect government workers from layoffs, the delivery men show up for work each morning for eight-hour shifts, as they always did, then proceed to do nothing all day. They rarely, if ever, leave the plant.
Milk is India’s lifeblood. Not only is it a critical ingredient for sweets and spicy curries, it is also used in religious rituals. Milk or yogurt is poured over statues of deities and bodies are anointed with purified butter before cremation.
So, when the cities began suffering chronic milk shortages soon after independence in 1947, Maharashtra responded by nationalizing the milk industry, consolidating city dairies in one place.
Back when the state as well as the state-sanctioned dairy cooperatives had a monopoly on the milk market, it was good to be a milkman in Mumbai. In the 1980s and 1990s people used to wait in lines 50 deep to greet Walkar on his early morning rounds. Occasionally, they invited him to tea or their children’s weddings.
Milkmen—90% of the dairy workers and all the drivers are men—lived in government housing near work, retired with a pension and often passed their jobs to their sons. “We enjoyed doing our work because it was a public service,” Walkar says of his nearly 25 years of deliveries.
The dairy’s demise was brought about by two trends that have defined the expansion of modern India, yet hit hard those in many parts of government service.
In 2001, the government started opening the dairy market in the state to competition. Private carriers with higher quality milk swiftly won customers by delivering milk to doorsteps. The government milkmen have always been restricted to delivering mostly to curbside milk stalls so they could cover a greater area.
Customers swiftly deserted. Many switched to heat-treated milk in sealed packages that resist spoiling. Some ditched the government’s former best sellers of sweet pineapple milk and spicy masala milk for Coca-Cola and Sprite as tastes Westernized. Others never found the milk stands appealing—they can be dingy and the milk sometimes bad.
Sandra Melwani, a 42-year-old food writer who lives near the Worli Dairy, grew up on government milk, but now buys sealed packs of Nestle skim milk from the new neighbourhood grocery store. “Even as a kid I used to cringe when I looked at the government booths,” she says.
All around, the milkmen are reminders of their lost prestige. The Worli Dairy’s entrance is adorned with a huge mosaic of milk bottling machines, a chandelier of milk bottles and plaques marking visits from top politicians.
In the good old days, the dairy threw big events with dancing, live bands, food, photographers and boxes full of sweets to take home. Now, there are only small gatherings to observe religious holidays and to congratulate another retiree. After a hiring freeze of two decades, the average age of employees is close to 50. The dairy used to deliver around 250,000 gallons (950,000 litres) of milk each morning. Now it sends less than a quarter of that, delivered by private carriers since the milk trucks were sold. Rusting bottling machines stand unused. Most of the 24 huge storage tanks on the second floor of the dairy are empty. The machines that still function often break down. Women in uniforms of blue saris sit cross-legged on towers of milk crates, checking for chips in the bottles as they whiz by. To save money, the dairy now packages most of its milk in sealed plastic bags. The bags come cascading down a slide from a stainless-steel machine which makes a loud coughing sound as it fills and seals them.
Most of the delivery men, plus around 4,000 other workers statewide from Maharashtra’s dairy development department, are on what the government here calls the “surplus list”, a roster of govern- ment employees technically available for work in other departments because they have so little to do in their own.
Other government branches, however, also have surpluses. The list is more than 25,000 long in Maharashtra alone as the state has removed itself from many areas of the economy. So, jobs elsewhere for the milkmen rarely come up. Sometimes, they drive the dairy’s officers around, but drivers outnumber officers by more than 10:1.
So, the milkmen spend much of the day talking about what should be done to revive the place. Their suggestions: new equipment, new employees and new advertising.
“We want work. Just give us something to do and we will work for 10 hours a day instead of eight,” says Walkar.
Some drivers have left for jobs in the private sector. Walkar and others say they can’t because they need government housing and can’t afford to move to private digs. Walkar says he has little option but to hang around for another eight years until retirement. The milkmen are also becoming increasingly aware that their salaries— Walkar makes less than $150 (Rs6,015) a month—are tiny compared with the wealth of India’s booming middle class. The parking lot in the dairy is empty because few can afford cars. And the new malls, movie theatres and condominiums sprouting up around the dairy are out of their reach.
“I can’t go to the mall,” says Walkar nodding his head towards the new one that opened two blocks from his home. “Not with what I have in my pockets.”
wsj@livemint.com
Tariq Engineer contributed to this story.