Dignified Housing: A Broken Dream for India’s Labour Migrants

By Nivedita Jayaram, Centre for Migration and Labour Solutions

India’s cities rely on a large and growing number of rural labour migrants to power their expanding industrial and infrastructural development. Without official count or identity in the cities, this large and floating community provides flexible and cheap labour while being stripped of its rights, including to dignified housing.

Earning less than a living wage, migrant workers cannot afford to live in urban slums, resorting instead to deplorable informal settlements—open spaces including under flyovers, near railway tracks and on pavements; in unhygienic, crammed shared rooms or within their worksites. The nature of these living arrangements intensifies the exploitation that migrant workers face in informal labour markets, where they perform risky and strenuous manual labour.

Surat: Several thousands of loom workers, mainly migrants from Ganjam district in Odisha, live in poorly ventilated, crowded mess rooms located a few metres away from the loom units in the country’s textile capital. The high-decibel khat-khat sound of the machines is audible even as they lie on their makeshift beds after a gruelling 12-hour shift. (Photo Courtesy: Aajeevika Bureau, Surat)

Mumbai: Against the promise of being provided “free accommodation” in the city, several labourers travel thousands of kilometres to work in the booming recycling and manufacturing industry. However, little do they know that home would mean a corner under heavy machinery, a spot on the tin roof or a table after the shutters have been downed. (Photo Courtesy: Nisha Bharti)

Ahmedabad: Earning less than a living wage, migrant workers employed in Ahmedabad’s construction sector, resort to living in the open, in shared and cramped rented rooms, or within the workplace. There is no line between their work and personal lives. (Photo Courtesy: Tathya Makwaan)

Due to their transient relationship with the city, and the complex mobility and informality that inform their presence there, government housing schemes centred around permanent housing are not feasible for migrant labourers. Their needs and expectations from housing remain focused on spaces where they can achieve peace and rest after backbreaking work in the labour market, without having to spend additional hours seeking out basic needs such as water and sanitation.

As such, migrant workers benefit from housing that is separate from their workplace, so that they can leave the worksite after work hours. In cases where workers live on the worksite, they are susceptible to longer hours of work and constant exploitation by their employers or contractors. They prefer living with their communities so that they may recreate their villages within the hostile and alien city, and use their social networks to survive in an environment that constantly excludes them.

Despite the specific needs of 140 million migrant workers, however, urban policies remain fixated on the idea of home as a permanent and final product to be purchased in the market, or on slum redevelopment efforts, leaving them out of the imagination of India’s cities.