Staying afloat in unforgiving Delhi
DOWN, NOT OUT More than 1.7 million people, drawn by promise of a secure livelihood and better life, live below the poverty line in the National Capital. A peek into how they get by
Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh. His mother died when he was a toddler, his father remarried, his maternal uncle adopted him, and the uncle died when Prem Chand was still a child.
“I could never go to school, though I wanted to. At 15, I first came to Delhi to find work. I stayed with a relative, but within a few days, he asked me to leave,” says Prem Chand.
Over the next few years, Prem Chand would come to Delhi , do odd jobs, and return after making some money. But ten years back, he decided to stay on, and has since pulled a rickshaw and, worked at construction sites as a casual labourer. “I don’t earn enough to rent a place and sleep on the rat and dirt-infested footpath at Bara Tooti,” he says showing a hand full of mosquito bites. “At night, ruffians steal my money.” So why does he not open a bank account? “I have no address, no identity card, so why will they open an account for me?”
Prem Chand says that when he first came to Delhi, he was pretty hopeful, had dreams of starting a small business, and marry. “But look where I have ended up. My only possessions are the clothes I am wearing; I wash and wear them every day. Now I think of survival, not success,” says Prem Chand, who eats at the Gurdwara Sis Ganj on the days he does not have work. “This city has no empathy for people like us.”
Talking of his life as a homeless labourer, he says there are times when he gets fever and doctors advise rest. “But can I rest? I keep working even when I am sick. We at Bara Tooti push our body to its limits every day,” he says. “A lot of people in Delhi believe we are all drunkards, but many like me drink not to get drunk, but to relieve the pain. The footpath is not the place to sleep when you are sick and have worked hard through the day.”
Delhi, Prem Chand says, is a ‘city of deceptions’. “Many people come to Delhi, young and hopeful. But their hopes are dashed sooner than they expected; they get old and die here on the footpath, unclaimed,” says Prem Chand. “I know in 15 years, I will meet the same fate.” sights; I thought I had come to the right place.”
But 25 years on, he has a different opinion. “This city, like all big cities, is very good at enticing you; it seems to offer many possibilities, but they never become a reality for most poor like me,” says Ansari who has worked as roadside tailor since he arrived in the capital. “I have ended up as a much soughtafter tailor of rickshaw pullers,” he laughs.
Ansari works at Mirdard Marg in central Delhi, where he comes every day with his sewing machine, and lives in a jhuggi in front of Mata Sundri college. He makes about ₹150 to ₹200 a day, saves and sends about ₹3,500 every month to his family back in his village — wife, two sons, aged 12 and 8, who go to a government school. He also has a married daughter. “It is so hard to save even ₹100 a day here. I live with eight other people in a 7 x 7 ft jhuggi, which is horribly hot these days. Each one of us contributes ₹300 towards the rent. My wife has a hard time running the house with the money I send her,” he says.
Most of his customers, he says, are causal labourers and rickshaw pullers looking to have their clothes altered. “I charge ₹10 to 20, and sometimes they cannot afford even that much. Young rickshwallahs buy their clothes, jeans and T-shirts at the roadside markets. If these do not fit, I help them. They no longer want to wear-ill-fitting clothes,” says Ansari showing us a satchel full of old and new pairs of jeans. “But the older ones want me to keep mending their clothes till those are beyond repair. On certain clothes I have worked 20 times in two years, altering, stitching, over and over again,” says Ansari. “But I cannot alter their wretched lives; nor mine, for that matter,” he flashes his character smile once again. the banks of the Yamuna in east Delhi. But like Pal, most live in penury. His hut has a few utensils, a cot, a few clothes and a trunk.
“I pay about ₹75,000 annually for the 12 bighas that I have rented, but I am lucky if I earn ₹70,000 to ₹80,000 in a year,” says Pal. “Yesterday, I had to borrow ₹500 from a neighbour.”
Pal says like farmers everywhere, he is exposed to the vagaries of the market, the weather, and an indifferent government. “Unlike rural farmers, who at least get some minimum support price for their crop from the government, we get nothing. During Holi, the price of the cauliflower dropped dramatically and I had to sell my crop at ₹3 per kilo and sustained heavy losses,” says Pal.
In 2013, Pal says he lost his entire crop and his hut to floods, and had to live, for over a month, on the Mayur Vihar-noida link road in east Delhi. “We lived on the edge of the road, and I was afraid that my children might get crushed by the fast-moving vehicles,” says Pal. This year too, as the Yamuna swelled, he, like other Yamuna farmers, were asked by the authorities to leave.
“But I only moved a box with our important belongings to a camp. We stayed put here; it is not easy to live on the road with school-going children.”
Pal says not just floods, his family also lives with the fear of his huts being demolished by the government. He has no idea whether the patch of land he cultivates belongs to the man he pays the rent, or to the Delhi Development Authority, which, he says, wants hundreds of families on the Yamuna floodplains to move elsewhere.
His hut has been bulldozed a few times in the past by the authorities. “I have nowhere to go, and nothing else to do. In a big city like Delhi, farmers have no identity and respect,” said Pal, “The only benefits is that sometimes I go and sell my produce directly to people on cart, making about ₹300 a day , but it is just not enough to run a family of five and meet farm-related expenses.”
Pal has no electricity, water or gas connection . This is another India in the heart of the city — from his hut one can see the soaring skyline of Noida. As we talk to Pal, his son Vijay comes and tells him that he wishes to celebrate his birthday in school (Both the father and son are not quite sure when it is), but the father instantly shoots down the idea. “These are the useless rituals meant for the rich.”