Circular Migrant Workers and Housing in Indian Cities: A View from Ahmedabad

Circular labour migrants in the construction sector in Ahmedabad inhabit four typologies of living spaces. Workers recruited from the city’s labour chowks live predominantly in informal rental housing, squatter settlements and homeless settlements, while those recruited as part of labour gangs in villages live predominantly in temporary employer-provided labour colonies, aka worksite housing. The article discusses the living conditions in these four typologies, and uses three lenses to analyse this housing. The first lens is of urban policy, planning and governance regimes vis-a-vis the housing of and for the urban poor. This reveals how the state’s differentiated politics vis-à-vis housing informalities and the urban poor, which is manifested in its policies, programmes, and planning and governance practices, creates uneven welfarist inclusions as well as differentiated possibilities for claims-making by different groups of the urban poor. This results in specific inadequacies of shelter, basic services and tenure security in the different typologies of living spaces of circular migrant workers. The second lens of policy and governance regimes vis-à-vis labour reveals how the provisions of shelter and basic services in worksite housing are shaped by the regulation of employers under labour laws, and the mode of provisioning by employers and job contractors in this context. The third lens is of migrants’ agency in shaping their housing in the city in the context of urban policy, planning and governance regimes as well as their own multilocal lives across village and city. This lens reveals the relationships that migrants from nearby tribal districts have to their village, and how their practices around housing in the city are shaped by these relationships alongside the constraints and possibilities they face in the city given their vulnerabilities as poor, informal workers and circular migrants. The article concludes with recommendations for urban policy, planning and governance that would improve the informal housing of circular migrant construction workers, and create new formal housing that is relevant for these migrant workers.