An employee of a foundry in Howrah works without basic safety for long hours every day at a temperature of 635 degrees Celsius. Picture by Sanat Kumar Sinha

A shop floor of 500 sq ft, half of which is taken up by two huge furnaces spewing fire from 8am to 6pm at 635 degrees Celsius. Beside them are four big iron-cutters. The rest of the space is shared by chunks of iron and 20-odd workers.

The workers, all men, spend more than 10 hours a day in the workshop at 39 Girish Ghosh Road, in Liluah, cutting and moulding iron to make axes.

This is one of the 400-odd foundry units in Howrah that are crying out for modernisation, where men and women toil without the basic safety gear against a pittance.

“We spend more then 10 hours inside this room. At times, the heat becomes unbearable. Most of us are daily-wagers,” says Ram Dayal, working barefoot, a cloth wrapped around his face to protect it from the furnace heat. His job is to put chunks of iron inside the furnace and take them out.

Dayal is, however, grateful to his employer, who he said pays for the treatment of the workers whenever they fall ill or are injured during work.

Shakti Industries, at 51 Benaras Road, is another unit in the foundry belt. It came into news after the The Telegraph reproduced a New York Times report on Tuesday, depicting how its workers are subjected to inhuman conditions “like something from the Middle Ages”.

The unit supplies manhole covers to New York.

As on Tuesday, the gates of Shakti Industries were shut on Wednesday, too. “We have orders from our director Sunil Modi not to open the gates for anybody,” said a guard, whose eyes were only visible through a small net on the gates.

The report has failed to jolt the authorities from their slumber. “I don’t know what exactly is happening. I will get in touch with the officer-in-charge of the area and seek a report from him,” said the chief inspector of factories, R.P. Chakravarty.

The foundry units in Howrah are among the oldest and largest in the country, accounting for around 20 per cent of the castings produced nationally.

The growth of the foundry industry in and around Howrah in the 1940s and 1950s can be attributed to the concentration of jute, sugar, textile and engineering units in the region.

And the current decline can be linked to unavailability of quality raw material, shortage of power, poor infrastructure and trade unionism.