Noida: Migrants leave rented houses, shift to slums amid lockdown 2.0

Anticipating another extension of the lockdown, migrant labourers consider the slum a better choice, even as they compromise on hygiene, water and electricity and live in fear of being shooed away by the administration.

Working as a construction labourer in Noida, despite being a Delhi University commerce graduate, Pawan Ahirwar says life and survival have become all the more tougher during the lockdown.

According to the officials, people have an option to stay at shelter homes until the situation returns to normal. There are over 20 such facilities across the district that offer food, accommodation and medical facilities. (Sunil Ghosh/ HT file photo)

With no work or income, the stranded migrant from Chhatarpur, Madhya Pradesh, who once aspired for a job suited for a DU graduate, can no longer afford even the one-room apartment in Noida’s industrial sector where he lived. Abhishek had no other option but to shift to a slum cluster at Sector 66 with his family.

“The lockdown might just be extended again and there is no guarantee of work. I have a wife to look after, and I belong to a landless farming family. What other option do I have? Shifting to a slum will cut my costs. At least I’m spared the tension of paying rent for my apartment at Sector 67,” Ahirwar, who got his BCom degree from PGDAV College, DU, last year, said.

With his meagre savings, Ahirwar has to look after his parents in the village and also support the education of his wife Vineeta who is pursuing her BEd from a private college in Greater Noida.

Pawan is not alone in facing such adversity, as almost every slum cluster around the industrial area comprising sectors 63, 62, 66, 67 and others is seeing such new shanties or jhuggis being constructed by stranded families from MP, Bihar, Jharkhand and even the remotest villages of Uttar Pradesh.

Some of these families had earlier left slums to move to comparatively cleaner and better localities, however, they had to return as the lockdown changed their priorities from ‘quality life’ to ‘sustenance’.

Anticipating another extension of the lockdown, migrant labourers consider the slum a better choice, even as they compromise on hygiene, water and electricity and live in fear of being shooed away by the administration.

“I had been renting a room for ₹3,500 a month in Garhi Chaukhadi where I live with my wife. I did not get the salary for March and the chances look bleak for April as well. Our landlord waived the rent for March, but who knows how long the lockdown will continue? Do you think he will keep waiving rent as long as the lockdown continues? My wife and I had to shift back here last week as we had lived here a few years ago, but the circumstances have changed,” Abhishek Singh, a migrant worker from Nawabganj, Farukhabad district, who made a tenement at a cluster in Sector 67, and worked at a garment factory in Sector 63, said.

Sarlaya Kumar, another migrant daily wager who hails from Khaddipur village in Hardoi district, moved to a slum cluster in Sector 67 from Khanpur, Delhi, where he used to rent a two-room house he shared with another family. While the other family went back home during the exodus, he preferred to shift to this slum.

“The jhuggi I’m living in now belonged to a friend who left for his village. The family I lived with and the friend had some land as well as the promise of work during the harvest season; I didn’t. So, I had to stay back and made affordable living arrangements,” Kumar, who manages to make ₹150 to ₹350 on a normal day, said.

According to the officials, people have an option to stay at shelter homes until the situation returns to normal. There are over 20 such facilities across the district that offer food, accommodation and medical facilities.

“We will look into the matter; people don’t have to leave their houses. There are facilities for shelter homes, and anyone in crisis can go there as those facilities are meant for them,” Praveen Mishra, additional chief executive officer, Noida authority, said.