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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | 'Housing for All' Means Nothing for India's Migrant Workers -Sangeeth Sugathan and Nivedita Jayaram

'Housing for All' Means Nothing for India's Migrant Workers -Sangeeth Sugathan and Nivedita Jayaram

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published Published on Feb 12, 2018   modified Modified on Feb 12, 2018
-TheWire.in

Earning less than a living wage, migrant workers resort to living in the open, in shared and cramped rented rooms, or within the workplace.

The Union Budget, announced on February 1, has committed to provide assistance for building 3.7 million houses in urban areas in 2018-19 under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY). However, this does little to resolve India’s urban housing crisis, which affects the poorest and most marginalised populations in cities.

“I have never seen Ahmedabad city outside the factory. My body and mind always revolves around these machines,” said Gangaram, a migrant worker who hails from Barmer district in Rajasthan. He works in a garments processing unit in Ahmedabad, where 20 workers live inside their workplace. They sleep, cook, bathe and spend their free time in the spaces between the machines, on the shop floor.

For these workers, there is no line between their work and personal lives. They are not only constantly exposed to workplace hazards, but also face a higher degree of exploitation from the employer. They often work 18-20 hours a day during peak demand season, receive no holidays unless the machine stops working and are made to work even in the odd hours of the night, because they have nowhere to go after the workday.

Millions of migrant workers in Indian cities face a similar plight. Pushed to the peripheries of the city, both spatially as well as in the imaginations of urban planners, they slip through the cracks in the patchwork of grandiose urban development and housing policies. These policies remain disconnected from the country’s socio-economic reality of growing rural-urban migration, where 100 million, or one in ten, Indians are seasonal and circular labour migrants.

These mobile and floating populations of labourers are in a state of constant flux, moving between their home villages and different urban work destinations. Earning less than a living wage, they are unable to afford housing even in slum settlements, resorting instead to living in the open, in shared rented rooms in deplorable conditions or within the workplace.

Ahmedabad, recognised as one of the fastest-growing cities internationally, presents a perfect example of the systematic exclusion of a large section of its population. It is one of the largest destinations for migrant workers coming from the adjoining tribal belts of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, or from the poorer states of Bihar, UP and Odisha.

The estimated 1.3 million migrant workers in the city form an overwhelming one-sixth of its population, and provide the cheap labour which fuels the remarkable growth of its manufacturing, hotel and construction sector. Yet, they remain excluded from the ambitious slogan of ‘Housing for All’.

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 11 February, 2018, https://thewire.in/222993/housing-for-all-migrant-workers/


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