By Sonal Sharma and Eesha Kunduri

Sitting by the doorstep of her one-room house in Ghazipur village in East Delhi, on a hot summer afternoon, Anju Sinha is busy putting threads into bookmarks for the online shopping portal flipkart. Beginning around ten in the morning, she continues to do this work till about five or six in the evening. While she is aware that the bookmarks are from one of the printing presses in the Patparganj industrial area nearby, she does not know from which factory exactly. A contractor comes to deliver the bookmarks and threads to her roughly around two to three times a month. She has neither visited the estate, nor has intentions of working there, as the work she is undertaking currently can be managed alongside her domestic responsibilities. More importantly, the work arrangement allows her to be around and take care of her adolescent daughter, who cannot be left alone in an ‘unsafe atmoshphere’ (‘kharab mahual’) like that of Delhi, she remarks. She hails from Nalanda district in the state of Bihar, and came to Delhi about seven years ago with her husband, since back in the village, income from agriculture was not enough to sustain the family. In the beginning, she worked in a tube light manufacturing factory nearby the settlement where she used to live earlier, but quit after a few months due to low wages. She started working as a home-based worker two years ago, and earlier undertook work that involved sewing on the sides of jeans to give them a particular design. She shares that she left that work, since she felt ‘uncomfortable’ going to the workshop to obtain the materials, as it was dominated by male workers. She acknowledges that while the income from her current work is not stable, and fluctuates depending on the work at the printing press, it allows her to sail through times of crisis, and not depend entirely on her husband for money.