Tippa Hanumanta Badami
Remembering Pune’s Construction workers
Tippa Hanumanta Badami's parents left Karnataka after a drought struck their village. They found work as manual labourers on drainage and irrigation works in Mumbai and Pune. This gave Tippa Badami the chance to enrol in city schools.
When the Panshet dam burst in 1961, Tippa Badami had just completed his 5th Standard. Since his school was repurposed to house flood victims he dropped school as a young teenager and started construction work. He found work as a bar bender because he was literate and knew how to read drawings. Six days a week, he manually shaped steel reinforcement bars on a ‘thia’ (worktable) with a ‘dar’ (handtool). He worked on municipal housing schemes and for the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation.
In 1973, Tippa Badami obtained his first job as a subcontractor (mukkadam) to a public works contractor and employed four bar-bending workers. A year later, he supervised and managed 40 benders on a building site for the Maharashtra State Electricity Board. When he was about thirty, Tippa Badami started working on apartment buildings for private real estate developers. By then, he procured all materials himself and oversaw the entire concreting process: making the formwork, and placing the steel and concrete.
In 1985 he registered a company under the name Ganesh Constructions and undertook general contracting work from excavation to finishes. Until his son joined him in the business, Tippa Badami himself used to keep a muster roll of all the workers and pay them each Saturday evening. The rate was commensurate with their perceived skill; a bigari worker earned less than a bar bender. Was this always sufficient? Sometimes workers asked for and received advance payments. "Just like we have this need at times, they also do.”' Tippa Badami says.
Follow us as we gear up to learn more about Wadarwadi's construction workers in our workshop this week.
Image credits: Marryat E. L., P. W. D. Handbook Bombay, 1950. P.403 ; color photo by Prasad Angre.