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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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