Yelelo Ailasa - Hauling up the moottais!

Again, a post about what happens right around us. Why do construction workers in Chennai, and I presume also other parts of India, (especially women, often with no slippers) climb many many stories carrying loads and loads of bricks and sand in baands? (for those who don't know chaste urban thamizh, baand = a concave metallic carrier instrument used for transporting building materials like cement and sand).

Why can't they use a pulley (which is a primitive iron age tool) from the top of the building to pull these loads? Is it to generate employment and use the excess unskilled human capital that India has in abundance? Nope. Surely, the building contractors don't give two hoots about such stuff. Then is it that pulleys are costlier than manual labour in India? Negative, again. This certainly can't be the case. Has the thought not occurred to the construction guys till now? Nobelium, yet again! After employing all those limited probability skills at my disposal, taking into consideration 5000 years of India's civilisation, over 1.2 billion brains inhabiting it at present, this seems highly improbable.

What then is the reason, I wonder. I can't figure out the reason. May be I'm again being that ignorant superficial onlooker who doesn't really understand why things work the way they do. But I was relieved to see that such a machine (do forgive me for my lack of imagination in civil/mech. engineering terms), obviously more advanced than a pulley, was employed in the premises of the Anna Centenary Library. I managed to get a snap of it in operation, though it meant waiting for some minutes and enduring some awkward glances.

But what didn't change was this.