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Transcript of Settlements of the Un-Sedentary - · PDF fileSettlements of the Un-Sedentary ... Seasonal...
AAJEEVIKA BUREAU
Settlements of the Un-Sedentary
A study on the living conditions of seasonal labour migrants in Ahmedabad city.
Investigators: Nivedita Jayaram, Sangeeth S
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Introduction: Context and Background
Seasonal migrants by their very nature are a highly mobile and floating population. So in
this study, “Settlements of the Un-sedentary”, we look at understanding the settlements
and living conditions of seasonal migrants in the city of Ahmedabad who are basically
unsettled. Focus would be to try to understand how their informal settlements have
developed organically overtime. As we all know Ahmedabad is one of the fastest growing
cities not just in India, but in the entire world. But one of the things which is least talked
about is the fact that this kind of growth engine is built on the cheap labour offered by
seasonal migrants. According to Aajeevika Bureau’s informal estimates, there are around
1.3 million seasonal migrants in the city. Interestingly, Ahmedabad is in the centre of a sea
of poverty surrounded by the tribal belts of Southern Rajasthan, Western M.P. and Eastern
Gujarat. So this huge tribal population forms a reserve army of cheap labour feeding into
the construction sector of the city. Ahmedabad also has migrants coming in from faraway
places like Bihar, U.P. and Odisha. The geographical span of the study is restricted to the
operational areas where Aajeevika Bureau works in Ahmedabad. We have two field centres
in Ahmedabad, with one in Paldi and the other in Narol. Paldi covers all the inner parts of
the city with a high concentration of construction workers, hotel workers and head-
loaders. Narol is in the peripheries of the city with a high density of factory workers.
Seasonal migrant workers lack adequate housing in the city and they live in sub-optimal
conditions. They live in a variety of living arrangements in Ahmedabad ranging from
squatting on pavements, settling in temporary shelters, to living on the shop floor inside
factories etc. In all these living arrangements, basic parameters of security and wellbeing
are unmet. But this issue of paramount importance is not getting attention either from
urban planners or from civil society.
Literature Review
Internal migrants, throughout India, live in sub-optimal, cramped and unhygienic living
arrangements at their destination cities. According to Vyas (2016), the poor condition of
housing available to migrant workers in India’s cities is an extension of the exploitative
nature of their integration into the informal labour market. She argues that the precarious
nature of internal migration goes beyond their ‘work and wages’, to include the alienated
lives that they lead in the cities, both in terms of access to basic services and infrastructure,
as well as a lack of social networks, and support systems leading to social and cultural
exclusion from the city.
Samaddar (2016) articulates that migrant workers are indispensible to the economic
growth of neo-liberal cities, which have intensified internal migration flows in the country.
However, the city finds it difficult to accommodate these migrants. He states that, ‘the
relationship between labour and urban space’ is ‘the fundamental problematic in the
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emergence of the neo-liberal city’ (2017:52), with both the state and the local population
viewing labour migrants as a group that can neither be settled nor dispensed with.
The housing situation of migrants in India’s large and growing cities, can be understood
through Samaddar’s understanding of the city as site of extraction. The abysmal living
condition of migrant labour is a form of capitalist accumulation, which reflects the
exploitative and accumulative tendencies of the informal labour market. On the one hand,
physical labour and the bodies of migrant labour is extracted, for very low returns, through
informal labour markets. At the same time, the denial of decent living arrangements, and
exclusion from the social, cultural, physical and political life of the city becomes another
form of extraction. The city – the state, employers and the public not only gain from
extracting the labour of migrant workers, but evade the responsibility of investing in
improved living conditions for this group.
In speaking of slum populations in Mumbai, where the large majority are migrant workers,
Bhide (2017:76) invokes the Agamben’s concept of the ‘camp’ to describe them as “spaces
of exception where the rights of urban citizens are not seen to apply and the state denies
the residents the agency to determine their well-being”. It has been repeatedly argued
(Bhide et al, 2017; Samaddar, 2015; Pushpendra and Jha, n.d.) that migrant labourers are
constantly exposed to violence in the city, not only in the form of physical violence, but as
structural violence. Such violence involves a denial of fundamental human needs to a
section of the population.
While the topic of housing for economically disadvantaged and homeless groups in cities
has come to the forefront of the development discourse in India, Kamath and Joseph (2015)
argue that housing policies and programmes envisioned by the government fail to
adequately address the issue. This is because housing policies are largely based on ‘static
development plans’ that do not factor in the lived experiences of people. According to Naik
and Mehta (2014), the most labour migrants largely engage in incremental housing, or
auto-constructed homes. However, government policies and programmes do not provide
any form of support to these living arrangements. For instance, as Mahadevia (2012)
points out while the urban poor largely inhabit informal settlements, the land and tenure
policies of the government, which does not allow to acquire titles to this land, prevents
them from adequately investing in these spaces and transform them into dignified living
arrangements. All research indicates that these policies are unable to differentiate between
different categories of urban poor – for instance homeless populations and labour
migrants, and therefore provide universal solutions to their differential needs. Kumar
(2016) argues that almost one-tenth of the country’s population lives in rental
accomodation, and rental housing is an important stage in a migrant’s progression from
squatter settlements to more permanent forms of housing in the city. Yet, policy action to
ensure affordable and fair rental housing in the cities has not materialized.
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Vaddiraju (2016) argues that the city can respond to the housing needs of migrants only
when the larger question of ‘rights to the city’ has been touched upon. This concept was
first introduced by Lefebvre in 1968 has been summarized by David Harvey (2008) as:
“... far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is
a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a
common rather than an individual right since this transformation
inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to
reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and
remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most
precious yet most neglected of our human rights”.
According to Vaddiraju, city planning, policy and governance have to take into account the
rights of poor internal labour migrants to the city. This signifies not only access to basic
resources, but also the idea that, “people, particularly the marginalised, not only have a
right to inhabit a city, but also the right to design, reshape and transform it” (2016: 21).
Housing for migrants can only be addressed when the urban governance adopts a bottom-
up approach, and takes into account the needs of different groups of people that inhabit the
city. Bhide et al (2017) also call for urban planning to be a more participatory process
where those households that inhabit urban spaces actively engage and become agents of
change.This represents a very different imagination of the city from its current form, where
it has been described as a site of contention marked by people belonging to different
groups fighting for space, resources, power, rights and justice.
State Housing Policies and Migrants
Now let us look at how state led housing policies are being played out in the context of
Ahmedabad. The dominant paradigm of urban poverty is restricted to slums. But seasonal
migrants as a population don’t have an entry into slums. Living in a slum is like a dream
come true for them. According to Kundu (2015), schemes like Smart Cities, AMRIT and
Prime Minister Awaas Yojana employ seasonal migrants, but they are completely ignored
as its beneficiaries. And one of the buzz-words when you talk about housing for seasonal
migrants is the “Rain Basera”. According to Bhide (2009), Rain Basera at the policy level
was designed as night shelters for the homeless and it was not designed keeping in mind
working populations like labour migrants. In our informal mapping we realized that only
26 among 44 rain baseras in Ahmedabad are operational and only 4 of them are being used
by seasonal labour migrants. Even in these 4 rain baseras, it is through a contractor having
networks with the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, that migrants are able to access this
5
facility. So workers who work with a contractor having good networks will only get into a
rain basera. So majority of the migrants who are women and have migrated with families,
didn’t even get access to these spaces. And many of the rules are also subverted in these
places. So in the rain baseras where migrants are there, they are allowed to keep their stuff
inside when they go for work, but at the policy level this is not accepted. So the policy and
design of rain basera is not tweaked according to the needs of seasonal migrants.
The Gujarat Building and other Construction Workers Welfare Board has also tried out
some pilot housing projects for seasonal migrants. One of them was the distribution of tent-
houses to people living in temporary shelters besides the railway track. But this project
didn’t take off because it was poorly designed and people living in temporary shelters had
better houses than these tent-houses. Their temporary shelters were constructed in a way
that they are airtight from below, preventing entry of animals from outside. But the tent
houses distributed by the Gujarat BoCW were open from below. This pilot housing project
failed completely as it didn’t take into account the community’s pattern of space usage
while designing the housing intervention.
Research Objective and Questions
The larger research objective of this study is to understand and engage with the living
condition of labour migrants in the city of Ahmedabad, so that we will be able to intervene
in a robust manner for improved safety and security in the living conditions of seasonal
labour migrants in Ahmedabad. The following will be the key research questions:
1. What are the types of migrant habitats that have evolved in the city?
2. What kind of informal relationships, systems, processes and lived experiences shape
these living arrangements?
3. What can we learn from these informal settlements about the met and unmet needs
of migrants, which have implications for both policy and practice?
Methodology
The methodology we followed was broadly that of Action Research. But because this was a
highly experimental study, we don’t really have a concrete blue print of the methodology.
What we really did do is divide our field teams into 3 different action research groups, each
of which spent time with migrants living in different settlements and what we did was go
into the community and spent some time, observe, collect data, come back and observe.
Over the period of these months, we have pretty much done many cycles of this. While we
started the study, we had the full intention of making it participatory, but it was very hard
to get migrants time to engage them over a longer period of time.
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Findings and Reflections:
The first question that came into our minds when we started out with this study is what are
the different informal arrangements in which migrants live in the city. While we wanted to
have a very official estimation of this, we weren’t able to do so. So we have relied on
informal estimates that our team came up with based on their observations and field
experiences of over 10 years in Ahmedabad. The following are the three major informal
living arrangements where migrants live in the city:
Type of Settlement No. of Settlements Concentrated Pockets
Main Characteristics
Open Spaces 36 Vasna • Under flyovers, near pavements, railway tracks and open grounds (public or private land)
• Family based migration in groups from surrounding Adivasi belts (construction naka workers and headloaders)
Rented Rooms 91 Shahpur, Raipur • Rooms rented by
labourers through social networks or arranged by contractor; largely single male migrants.
• About 2700 rooms; average 15 migrants per room in peak season.
On-site 85 Narol & Outskirts of
the city. • Live on factory floor,
labour colonies, construction sites or on-site worker dormitories.
• Largely single male migrants except in construction and boiler factories.
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• Biggest, but highly invisible group – very difficult to map because of restricted access.
Open spaces:
Of all the open spaces groups in Ahmedabad, we decided to work with the group living on
pavement outside the Vasna Garden. We had a long term engagement with this group over
8 to 10 months. Now let us understand Vasna Garden spatially. So there is a pavement
which is 100 metres long outside the garden which is a kind of a very congested space with
around 40 to 50 families living there. It means there are around 200 people stuffed in that
small place. Basic necessities of this group are widely met in the local eco-system. So there
are local vendors selling tea and there is tobacco and they take drinking water from the
garden and nearby apartments. There are ration stores nearby and buses are stationed
there which take the workers directly back to their villages. And you can also see a gate
close to the middle of the pavement, which is intriguing in the sense that it separates
families from two different villages and they hardly talk to each other.
Now let us look at the background of these migrants and see who they are. They are all
from Dahod district, a tribal district in Gujarat. And they have been migrating to the same
space, the pavements for the last 20 to 25 years. They are all construction labour, largely
Naka workers. One interesting thing about the group is their high mobility. On an average
they go to the village once in a month. In the agricultural season it goes even high like they
go to village once a week. So any housing solution has to factor in this aspect of high
mobility. And it is this high mobility and the kind of flexibility that open space provides, are
the two reported reasons why this group prefers to stay in the open spaces.
So if you go to this community, either early in the morning or late in the evening when
people are around, this place is full of social life. Basically these are people from the same
village, same extended family. So you can see men sitting there, smoking beedi, talking to
each other and women cooking food and sharing jokes. It is completely a social space. This
space has enabled them to recreate their community life in the village to some extent. And
there are separate carved out spaces for performing different functions of the family. So
there is space for women to cook, children to play and there is separate space to keep stuff,
sit and relax. There are also some norms at play around separation and sharing which are
very important to avoid or restrict potential conflicts within the group. So this pavement is
sort of divided among families and there is different cooking space for each family and
every family has their own cooking vessels. This group has reported to us that these norms
are very important for them to maintain harmonious relationship among the members
8
within the community. It is understandable considering the fact that social networks are
very important for this group to make their living easier in the city space.
Now let us look at how they manage their daily lives in the city. They have a very basic
minimalistic living in the city with basic assets like basic kitchen set, linen (used both as
blanket and towel), plastic sheet, 3 to 4 plastic cans for water storage and 3 to 4 sets of
clothes. This kind of frugal living has a great impact on women’s labour. As they lack
avenues of safe-keeping, women have to buy ration in small quantities. So this has immense
labour pressure on women to kind of manage the family, cook food and feed everyone
within this frugal existence. One of the main reasons behind this frugal existence is
constant evictions and harassments by Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). AMC
authorities come once in a while, they evict them and takes their stuff away. These people
because of their fear and lack of economic resources, forsake their stuff. This kind of
insecurity creates in them a sense of impermanence in the city. Even after migrating for 20
to 25 years, they still feel like they are temporary visitors to the city.
At the same time you can also see in them a sense of rootedness to the village. In this
community, all households across different income groups, sends back more than 60
percentage of their monthly income back to their source villages. During our source visit,
we could also see that a lot of people are actually investing for better housing options at the
source. So there is a demand for better housing at the source, but it is not there at the
destination.
This is especially so because of the kind of systematic exclusion they face in the city. Other
than political exclusion, there is social and cultural exclusion operating at different levels.
They don’t go out for recreation in the city. Even when they go back to their villages, they
don’t buy anything from the city. Because they feel the shop owners will overprice things
and cheat them. They don’t celebrate any of their festivals in the city and they don’t have a
cultural life in the city. And their mobility in the city for other than work is restricted to less
than 1 square kilometer. That is there life in the entire city.
Now let us see how the local actors like vendors and apartment residents look at them.
Contrary to our expectations, these people have a positive view of these migrants. They
said things like these migrants are very hardworking people, they are not dependent on
anyone else, they maintain cleanliness in the space and they don’t create nuisance for
others. What we understood from these reactions was that the migrants have actually
projected an image of being the “Virtuous Poor” in this context. Because maintaining good
relations with the surrounding actors is very important for them to navigate this unknown
space of the city. The nearby ration store owner and the firewood vendor also have a
positive opinion about these migrants, as they are economically benefitting from them. But
these relations are not just economic in nature, there are elements of trust in it, elements of
9
familiarity in it. And these are the migrant community’s first point of contact in times of
emergency and crisis in the city of Ahmedabad.
Now let us see the gendered experiences of women living in these spaces. Initially we had
the impression that it would be horrible for women to live in the open space. But when we
spoke to them we realized that construction sites are the most horrifying spaces for women
in the city. Because the contractors constantly harass them there. And there is a whole
shadow of sexual harassments which follows women through domestic violence at home,
sexual harassment during transit in the buses and the constant sexual harassments
happening at construction sites. Interestingly, the incidence of domestic violence is sort of
less at the destination, because these people live under public gaze here on the pavement.
And sanitation is one thing they pointed out as an important issue they face at the
destination. Because they don’t have sanitation facilities both at the work space and living
space in the city. As the only option they have is to access pay and use toilets in the city,
they restrict using it to only once in a day. This has huge implication during menstruation
and women seem to have issues of fungal infection and this is having a detrimental impact
on their reproductive health.
So working with this group for a longer period of time, now we try to put in our key
insights as responses to the research questions. As a civil society organization, one thing we
can do to make their lives a bit more comfortable at the destination is to work on accessible
and affordable sanitation facilities for women in their living space. This has come as a
demand from the community and this can have positive impact on the reproductive health
of women. Living on the pavement is sub-optimal for sure. But this community displays
ingenuous ways of living and an embeddedness in the local ecosystem which they have
developed over a period of time. Reducing the state violence of evictions and harassments
would play a major role in reducing the precarity of their existing living arrangement. At
the same time it is also important to create alternative dignified housing option for these
groups. The recent HUPA document talks about alternative housing solutions like Workers
Hostels, Subsidized Rented Rooms. But these solutions will only work if it is contextualized
to the needs of these groups where families prefer community living, they would want to
maintain relations and informal systems to make life feasible in the city. So for instance
migrating in groups, ensuring that there are no frictions within the group and maintaining
a cordial relationship with surrounding actors are essential for these kinds of tribal-
migrant families to sustain in the city.
Rented Rooms:
With this we come to the group living in rented rooms. So Ramlal ka Khaddah is a
neighbourhood where we have been working in for a long period of time. And our team
members knew that most of the workers living there are from Ghatol block in Banswara
10
district of Rajasthan. But what we realized over the course of our study is that all the
workers living here are actually from Ghatol, causing our team members to nickname this
place as the “Mini-Ghatol” of Ahmedabad.
Ramlal ka Khaddah looks like a very small neighbourhood and it has two “Chalis” in which
there are around 50 rooms. But while this is a small neighbourhood, what you realize is
that if twenty migrants can live in one room during peak season, this place can hold upto
1000 migrants during peak migration season. And there is an informal local economy
developed around this area catering solely to these migrants and relying on from providing
to these migrants. There are also locals living along with these migrants and they have a
good relationship with these migrants.
When you come to the rooms at Ramlal ka Khaddah, you realize that the most premium of
these rooms are 12x8 feet in size and the slightly smaller ones are 10x6 feet in size. The
smallest rooms which are around 15 to 20 in number are 8x6 feet in size. During peak
season of migration when around 15 to 20 migrants stay inside these crammed rooms,
workers sleep in two parallel rows with their legs on top of each other’s, because of lack of
space. And if more people is to come into this room, as there is no cap on the number of
people who can stay in a room, they actually end up sleeping in the hollows in the walls
which is meant to store stuff or on the roof of the room. There is no space for any other
kind of function within this room.
For instance, cooking is actually performed in a corner and because this room is already
crammed and there is no ventilation with absolutely no windows and cooking is performed
in firewood, what happens is that there is extreme suffocation in the room. There is no
space for bathing. There is no space for going to the toilets, which is actually done in an
open ground behind this neighbourhood. There is no electricity in one chali and in the
other chali which does have electricity it is cut for 12 hours. When these migrants have to
perform some activity once they are back from work, they have to use flash lights in their
phones.
So we were very curious to know what the history of Ramlal ka Khaddah is. We started by
asking who is Ramlal, although we couldn’t find out the answer to it. We realized that
Ramlal ka Khaddah was developed in 1986 by a person called Valji Bhai who is from the
cattle-rearing Rabari community. And he used to use these migrants to help rear cattle in
their spare time and he set up one room near his house and let these migrants live there.
Over a period of time, seeing the economic opportunity this provided, he started creating
more rooms on what appears to be public land, basically a municipal dumpyard. And this
property kind of grew over time and when his son took over, he stopped the cattle rearing
business completely and went into solely renting out rooms to these migrants and started a
11
ration shop for these migrants. Soon other chali developed and other landlords came into
being seeing how big an economic opportunity this kind of an informal market provides.
Coming to the landlords in Ramlal ka Khaddah, the main landlord who owns more than 25
rooms is Ranchod Bhai who is thought of very much as the “Benevolent Landlord”, because
he has very close relationship with all these migrants and helps them out in crisis and
keeps their money safe, he gives them money on credit and he personally manages all the
rooms, as this is his sole source of income. In fact the entire personal interest he takes with
these migrants is because his business is completely dependent on them. He himself says
they are like gods to him. With respect to the other landlords who are around 5 or 6, rent is
not their sole source of income. So basically it looks like an important supplementary
income. Adding to it, all the ration shops in the area are also owned by these landlords. It
looks like if the migrant has to have a good relationship with the landlord, he has to buy
from these shops.
Other landlords for whom income from rental business is supplementary; they usually
have an arrangement with a middlemen who is also a tenant. So instead of taking Rs.300 to
Rs.500 from each migrant for staying in room, these landlords actually rent out the room to
one tenant for around Rs.3500. So as many migrants come into the room, this middleman is
allowed to keep the margins and he also has to make up for the losses when there is a lean
season.
Now that we have understood the market response to the housing needs of migrants, let us
look at the nature of this response. Firstly, over the years, there has been a very high and
erratic kind of inflation in rent. Because in 1986 it was around Rs.80 for an entire room, but
today it is over Rs.6500 and in fact over the last 2 years, the rent has been increasing in 100
Rupees per year. And there has also been a kind of shift in the pricing systems, it meant
that initially when it started, the entire room was charged a particular amount of rent and
the rent was shared among the tenants. But now rent is charged on a per head basis, wher
each person has to pay Rs.500 irrespective of the number of people staying in a room and
irrespective of whether they are staying for one day or for a month.
And this is kind of justified by the landlord and the middlemen as a buffer against the risk
of high mobility. But when we really think about it, what cost is the landlord bearing.
Because he has only invested in that built structure which he neither upkeeps or invests in
maintenance of. And even the land is not his own. In fact these migrants are also forced
Rs.80 each for electricity, which is anyways cut for 12 hours a day. As you can see the
migrants themselves believe that the facilities they get are not simply commensurate with
the rent as you can see from these photos here. But they continue living there as it is just
not feasible to find alternatives in the city and here any number of people can stay in one
room.
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So what are the key insights we get from this experience? We realize that while market
based responses can be popular, unregulated market responses can’t be any less
exploitative than the example we saw here. And the need here is for having some kind of
policy regulation. While we have not really thought about what really it could be. We feel
that there should be cap on the number of people, who are allowed to stay in a particular
space as well as some basic facilities that have to come with a certain payment. Until this
policy shifts, what are the alternatives we have. These migrants are from a very strong
social network and they form a very strong social support group, and the landlords and
middlemen see these migrants as legitimate customers and a business opportunity.
Mobilizing these workers to bargain with both the landlords and middlemen and sort of
pressurize the landlords to come on to the negotiating table for creating more balanced
terms and conditions of rent might be something that could be successful. Especially
because this was quite successful when we experimented it in a different context in Idar,
where we were able to mobilize sharecroppers for more balanced terms and conditions of
work. In the short run, what we feel is we could improve access to facilities. Especially the
first thing we noticed when we entered Ramlal ka Khaddah was the intense suffocation
inside the rooms because of cooking been performed through firewood. And in spaces
where we have actually created Community Kitchens and used gas based stoves, we see a
significant difference and we feel that scaling this up would make significant difference to
these people’s lives.
Worksites:
Now we will move on to these groups of workers who live on-sites. While we wanted to
work with different groups of workers, what we ended up doing was work with workers
living in Narol’s Garments factories. Looking at Narol’s Garments industry, there are more
than 2000 units in Narol alone, of which only 35 are big factories. Large number of them is
small to medium factories with 10 to 50 workers and all of them are unregistered, informal
units. Each unit is confined to some specific, small, marginal and low end activity like raw
material refining, stitching, washing, dyeing etc. And they are also part of the large national
supply chain. They supply eventually to the national market and they all do contract work.
So what does it really mean to work and live in the same space, especially in a small
garments factory on the peripheries of the city, having your life confined to that space? We
tried to understand it through two cases. One is the Cotton Garments Factory, where 20
labour migrants live and they come from Barmer in Rajasthan. What we realized was that
the factory doesn’t have spaces for connecting the different activities one do in your living
space like sleeping, cooking, bathing and all of them are performed between machines here.
And as you live within your workspace, your normal work hour is 12 hours a day for a
wage of Rs.300 and overtime is usually under paid or not paid at all. And in high demand
season, these migrants even work for more than 18 hours. Because of this, they end up
13
having a lot of health concerns like sleeplessness, exhaustion and even chemicals start
entering their food and water.
There is even an open drain inside the factory right next to where they live. They are
always subjected to workplace hazards, because there is a family living near to the boiler
and their children face the risk of falling into the boiler anytime. The second factory had
more of a heterogeneous mix of workers from U.P., Rajasthan, Odisha and West Bengal.
What we saw there was a high degree of cultural friction. Not only that the Odiya and
Bengali workers be discriminated against in getting the worst kind of work, but also they
end up staying in the worst kind of spaces within the factory. And they also reported that
landlords wouldn’t even rent out rooms to them outside forcing them to live on the factory
shop floor.
So what did we understand about working and living in the same space. Looking at the
design of factories in Narol, we realized that the fundamental design and nature of this
space is not meant for living and living spaces are actually carved out of work space, which
means all the kind of inconveniences that comes from lack of facilities at the workspace
gets reproduced in the living space. And the larger issue is that, your work starts co-opting
your entire life. The fine line you have between your work life and personal life becomes
very blurry. And when you work for more than 18 hours and when the owner makes you
work at the middle of night, the worker no more sees it as an invasion of his basic rights
and it becomes extremely normalized.
This kind of living also exacerbates your occupational health hazards and workplace
hazards, as you are not just exposed to it during work hours, but for 24x7. And this group
also didn’t have the kind of community life or security other groups enjoy. In fact they lived
a reduced form of atomized life with complete invisibility from the state and public space.
When we spoke to a small producer to try and understand how can we work with him in
improving the living arrangements of these workers. What we realized is this small
producer is not even a producer, he is a labourer who has turned into a contract worker
and he faces a high level of competition within this Narol area. While he is getting raw
materials from the person he is taking the contract from, he is bearing the entire cost
including the cost of production as well as labour. And as he is completely dependent on
this kind of contract based work, his profits or margins is completely variable, it might
move from Rs.50,000 in lean season to Rs.2,50,000 in high demand season. And being part
of this heavily sub-contracted value chain which is characteristic of this industry, these
small employers are only able to make small profits, whereas the huge chunks of profit are
eaten by larger players in the national market.
What we understood about factories is that these small employers themselves face
precarious livelihoods and the entire cost of production is borne by them which they finally
14
shift to workers in terms of long work hours and intense extraction. And working with
these employers may not be a feasible idea and actually working on improving facilities
within factories is not a feasible idea because we as a civil society organization wouldn’t be
able to work with a lot of factories. So what we felt here as the main thrust is that we have
to ensure that the workplace does not remain the living space and any sort of alternative
housing should be cross subsidized by the principal employer who is performing this kind
of extraction through the value chain. Any sort of alternative housing would not just be
about improved housing in terms of providing concrete structures, but it should actually
increase the visibility of these hidden populations. It should reduce their complete reliance
on employers as they live on work spaces, which would actually help in reducing the
extraction that comes as part of their work conditions.
Concluding Thoughts:
What we realize is that although market based solutions are popular, our experiences have
suggested that they are fundamentally exploitative, unless regulated. Migrants can’t be
expected to purchase dignified housing from the market, because they simply can’t afford
to do so. The real need here is to promote public housing for migrants. This has to be well-
designed; it has to be contextualized to the needs and relationships of these migrants. And
it has to be cross-subsidized both by the state and the principal employer who is
completely reliant on extracting the hard labour of this people. Actually intervening in
work conditions of migrants might be difficult because of the industrial structure. So we
feel that housing is an area that provides scope and greater potential for intervention to
make their living conditions more safe and secure.
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