How to Handle Delhi's Influx of Migrants
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Image: Amit Verma
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THE COMMUTE Ravi Shanker finds Delhi too costly. He takes a train and a bus to travel three hours from Meerut to Delhi for work every day
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n his award-winning documentary Last Train Home, director Lixin Fan draws attention to the plight of migrant Chinese workers living in far-flung industrial cities and the strain they inflict on the country’s infrastructure when some 130 million of them make their annual journey back home for the Chinese New Year. It’s a film that highlights the social costs of the Chinese economic miracle. It’s a film about disillusionment and displacement. It’s a film that could be made just as easily in India.
In the absence of opportunities in rural India, it’s a given that the poor will flock to the cities in search of jobs and a better life. This puts enormous strain on the already fragile infrastructure in these cities. But nowhere is the problem more acute than in Delhi, which has little place left to expand into and attracts migrants from practically the whole of northern India. It’s also becoming prohibitively expensive.
To make ends meet, more and more people are choosing to live in the neighbouring states and travel to Delhi for work. In some cases, the commute is more than 100 km every day. Take the case of Ravi Shanker. Five years ago, Shanker, 35, got a job as an assistant with the tribal affairs ministry. He planned to bring his family to the capital, but found the cost of living extremely high. So, he decided to set up his house in his hometown Meerut and instead travel six hours daily to his workplace.
“It is very demanding but I think it is not viable to live in Delhi and bring up a family. It’s just too expensive,” he says. He may be unaware of it, but Shanker’s ‘art of living’ is advocated by the planners for Delhi who are trying to tackle the alarming rise in migrant population.
More than two lakh people make Delhi their home every year, forcing Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit to recently warn that the city’s population, if unchecked, could touch 1.6 crore in 2021, a significant rise from the 1.3 crore now.
And it’s not like the planners didn’t anticipate the problems. After all, it’s been more than 25 years that they first tried to tackle the issue. They realised that to stem the tide of migrants into Delhi, they needed to develop the National Capital Region, an area surrounding Delhi and covering four states, and develop ‘counter magnet areas’ in neighbouring states so that people looking for jobs would be attracted to them instead. The National Capital Region Planning Board (NCRPB) was formed in 1985 for this purpose.
The NCRPB, which functions under the Union urban development ministry, gives soft loans for projects it recommends. It identified Bareilly, Hissar, Gwalior, Kota, Patiala, Ambala, Kanpur, and Dehradun as the counter magnets. But in the decades since, little has improved. If anything, things have progressively gotten worse.
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