No Place In A City That Migrants Can Call ‘Home'

Housing for workers was overlooked in the post-liberalisation era. Absence of a home has compounded their alienation

- Narendar Pani

CITIZEN

Pandemics have a way of bringing out uncomfortable, even cruel, truths. And COVID-19 is no exception. It has brought to the forefront the fragility of India’s urbanisation, a fragility where millions of migrants into cities who form the backbone of low-skilled urban workers are suddenly uprooted. From serenading India’s march towards a $5 trillion economy, the national narrative has shifted to that of hapless workers walking hundreds of kilometres to return home.

In one sense there should be no surprise over this tragedy. In the much-maligned decades after Independence care was taken to ensure that as workers moved from agriculture to industry they were given a sense of having found a new home. This was sometimes within the townships of public sector units, and later, in state-supported housing programmes. Indeed, through those years the process of urbanisation was largely seen as the responsibility of ministries of housing. The 1990s brought a much-needed widening of this perspective to ensure that cities were recognised as larger economic entities, as engines of growth. Unfortunately, as often happens in India, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. The post-liberalisation era has seen such a preoccupation with growth, that issues like housing for workers have been largely abandoned in state policy.

No room for families