Cities, Rural Migrants and the Urban Poor: Issues of Violence and Social Justice Research Briefs with Policy Implications Published by: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group GC-45, Sector-III, First Floor Salt Lake City Kolkata-700106 India Web: http://www.mcrg.ac.in Printed by: Graphic Image New Market, New Complex, West Block 2nd Floor, Room No. 115, Kolkata-87 The publication is a part of the project 'Cities, Rural Migrants and the Urban Poor'. We thank all the researchers, discussants and others who participated in the project and in the project related events. We also thank the MCRG team for their support. The support of the Ford Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. Content Introduction 1 Part One: Research Briefs Section I: Kolkata 5 • Taking Refuge in the City: Migrant Population and Urban Management in Post-Partition Calcutta by Kaustubh Mani Sengupta • Urban Planning, Settlement Practices and Issues of Justice in Contemporary Kolkata by Iman Kumar Mitra • Migrant Workers and Informality in Contemporary Kolkata by Iman Kumar Mitra • A Study of Women and Children Migrants in Calcutta by Debarati Bagchi and Sabir Ahmed • Migration and Care-giving in Kolkata in the Age of Globalization by Madhurilata Basu Section II: Delhi 25 • The Capital City: Discursive Dissonance of Law and Policy by Amit Prakash • Terra Firma of Sovereignty: Land, Acquisition and Making of Migrant Labour by Mithilesh Kumar • ‘Transient’ forms of Work and Lives of Migrant Workers in ‘Service’ Villages of Delhi by Ishita Dey Section III: Mumbai 35 • Homeless Migrants in Mumbai: Life and Labour in Urban Space by Manish K. Jha and Pushpendra • The Emergence of the Migrant as a Problem Figure in Contemporary Mumbai: Chronicles of Violence and Issues of Justice by Simpreet Singh • Labouring Dangerously: Death and Old Age in the Informal Economy in Mumbai City by Mouleshri Vyas • Migrants, Vigilants and Violence: A Study of Security Guards in Mumbai by Ritambhara Hebbar and Mahuya Bandyopadhyay Section IV: Siliguri and the Kosi Region of Bihar 50 • A Transit Town in North Bengal: Siliguri in the Time of Globalization by Samir Kumar Das • From Kosi to Delhi: Life and Labour of the Migrants by Pushpendra and Manish K. Jha Part Two: List of Acts and Policies Studied 58 Part Three: Programmes 59 a. Public Lectures b. Workshops Part Four: Researchers and Participants 86 Cities, Rural Migrants and the Urban Poor: Issues of Violence & Social Justice Introduction Over the last two years, the Calcutta Research Group (CRG) is doing research on the conditions of rural migrants as the core of the urban poor in India, the attending dynamics of urbanization, and the relevant issues of social justice and protection from violence. The title of the project is ‘Cities, Rural Migrants, and the Urban Poor: Issues of Violence and Social Justice.’ Primarily, the study is based on practices and experiences of migration in Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai, Siliguri, a small town in West Bengal, and the Kosi region of Bihar, one of the most cited sources of migration to the Indian metropolises. This research brief provides a snippet view of these studies with a specific focus on the various urban policies and polices regarding labour migration in the Indian cities. The brief is divided in to four sections: the first three will respectively include short essays on Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai. The fourth section, on the other hand, will consist of two essays on the making of the frontiers of migration, namely the small town and a flood-ridden source of migrant labour. The essays on big cities will focus on interlinks between urban policy, governance, forms of labour, migration, urban rent, and neoliberalism as the political ideology of urbanization in India. The fourth section, with details from the frontiers of extraction and accumulation, will explore the dynamics of how spatial and non-spatial considerations (including political and environmental catastrophes like partition and flood) help making and unmaking of both the sources and destinations of migration. The conceptualization of the project, and subsequently that of the research brief, is propelled by the knowledge that India’s story is not one of seamless hyper-urbanization, although the impact of urbanization in terms of resource transfer and perceivable increase in employment opportunities (particularly in the unorganized sectors) is far greater than what the official figures suggest. There is also a deep-seated contradiction between the two images of the city as an engine of economic growth and as an inadequate civic space for interaction among its inhabitants. The paradox is all the more stark today as the Indian cities are beginning to appear as sites of continuous fragmentation and gentrification after the outbreak of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s. Proposing to bring out a research brief of this kind has three purposes: first to reinforce the point that the migrant sits at the heart of the city in the neo-liberal time; second to suggest a provisional theoretical framework that can accommodate the figure of the migrant labourer as a critical element in the transformation of the city to a rental outlet, at the same time a site of extraction. The third purpose is to emphasize what we consider an important issue – the invisibility of the migrant in both the official and other discourses on urban development in contemporary times. As one would notice, most of the essays uncover a bitter truth that the figure of the migrant, their participation in the urban workforce, their settlements, life and work conditions, etc. are categorically neglected in the various policies undertaken by the government in the last few years. Not only that, there has been a continuous attempt to sidestep these issues in order to maintain a sanitized, gentrified, aestheticized vision of the city. One may argue that this attitude reflects on the relationship between labour and urban space, the fundamental problematic in the emergence of the neo-liberal city. It also points to the hidden processes of the shift of the modern city as a site of industrial production to a site of knowledge based economy, which requires besides localized concentrations of human capital, a complex of place-based services to support the knowledge-based economy. The theorists of urbanization (Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Saskia Sassen, to name the most Page 1 Research Briefs with Policy Implications influential) seem to focus mainly on the various practices of space making and architectural planning characterized and endorsed by state policies and programmes of urbanization, seldom taking account of the production side of these spatial exercises. On the other hand, the studies on new and emerging forms of labour (Kalyan Sanyal’s Rethinking Capitalist Development as one of the latest intervention in this field) often bypass the impact of these space making exercises and get caught in the binary of formal and informal economies, leading to imaginings of a ‘pure’ outside of capital. Even the most erudite of these studies fail to look into the connections between zoning practices, policy interventions, and informalization of labour in the cities. By foregrounding the material conditions of spatial and labour reproduction and highlighting their connection with specific issues like old age, rent, wage forms, and precarity, the studies in this research brief reveal that the phenomenon of migration remains at the core of these material practices and emerges as a fundamental operative principle in the instances of contemporary urbanization. As it stands, the movement of labour force cannot be studied in isolation with the statist impetus of neoliberal policy interventions; and, at the same time, the representational dynamics of space making must be linked with the material conditions of production and circulation of urban and semi-urban infrastructure. The first segment on Kolkata (also referred to as Calcutta) includes five studies. The first study by Kaustubh Mani Sengupta connects the history of rehabilitation of the refugees from East Pakistan after the partition of British India and that of development of the city of Calcutta in the initial decades after India’s independence in 1947. In the course of the study, he makes an appraisal of the rehabilitation schemes of the government focusing on the way the refugees were categorised according to their background and previous occupation and what was the consequence of such a practice. The second study by Iman Mitra focuses on the phenomenon of urbanization and that of rural-to-urban migration in contemporary Kolkata and investigates the location of the category of ‘migrant worker’ in the broader and adjacent discourses of urbanization. Mitra shows how the category of the ‘migrant’ itself is produced in and through the various deliberations at the level of urban planning and policy making, especially in the context of laws and policies regarding the bustee (slum) settlements – in the last few decades. The third study – again by Mitra – makes an attempt to explore the lives of workers in the waste management sector and the construction industry in Kolkata. Locating his study at the conjuncture of neoliberalism and large scale urbanization, Mitra shows how workers in these two sectors contribute to the production of a rental economy of space making, in spite of facing various obstacles in the form of displacement from their impermanent settlements, absence of job security and other social benefits, and humiliation and berating from