Delhi’s working poor call parking lots home

Some live for decades in pop-up motels where bed is 60 cents a night

NEW DELHI— There is almost no movement in the pre-dawn cold, when the winter fog sits low over the old city and the only light comes from distant street lamps. The parking lot is silent, except for the occasional hacking cough.

So it takes a while to realize there are nearly 100 people in the square of dirt on the edge of the cottonsellers’ district in the Indian capital. All are asleep in handmade wooden cots jammed one against the other. Dozens more people sleep around a battered empty fountain nearby.

In a few hours, workers will haul away the cots and Meena Bazaar Park No. 2 will fill with cars. By 9 a.m., the overnight community will have disappeared. Its residents will carry their meagre possessions in plastic shopping bags until nightfall, when the lot once again becomes a makeshift outdoor motel. This is home. Some stay for one night. Others remain for decades, raising children who in turn raise their own children here. For thousands of people struggling at the bottom of India’s working class, this bleak vision and the handful of places like it scattered across New Delhi are 60-cent-anight refuges. Every day, thousands of new residents arrive in this constantly growing city, part of a nationwide wave of urbanization bringing tens of millions of migrants from India’s poorest states. In New Delhi, most of the new arrivals go into the city’s sprawling slums, or into the maze of crumbling concrete neighbourhoods where rents are cheap. But many come here. Even a tin shanty can cost upward of $75 a month in New Delhi, an amount that would take many of the parking lot’s residents weeks to earn. Few of them hold regular jobs, or earn more than $4 a day. The people asleep in the parking lot are day labourers, professional beggars, itinerant peddlers, rural dreamers looking for better lives, and illegal immigrants.

While most residents are men, there are also babies and old people and a litter of puppies huddled in a blanket. They warm up by burning garbage, and the stench of charred plastic clings to their clothes.

Eventually, the lucky find better places to live. But no matter how many people move out, there are always more ready to move in.

KEVIN FRAYER/AP A worker carries a pile of blankets rented by Indian squatters early in the morning at Park No. 2 in New Delhi. Hours later, cars reoccupy the park.