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http://news.yahoo.com/working-poor-india-home-parking-lot-05380
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To some working poor in India, home is parking lot
By TIM SULLIVAN | Associated Press – 20 hrs ago.
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NEW DELHI (AP) — 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 cotton-sellers' 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 meager possessions in plastic shopping bags
until nightfall, when the lot once again will turn into 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-a-night 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
neighborhoods 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.
Then there are the identity documents that police demand in regular sweeps
through the slums. Anyone without proper paperwork, whether an illegal
immigrant from Bangladesh or an Indian with excessively tattered documents,
faces constant demands for bribes.
The police rarely bother with Meena Bazaar Park No. 2, a place so cheap it
largely operates off the legal radar.
The people asleep in the parking lot are day laborers, professional beggars
and itinerant peddlers who sell costume jewelry from vinyl suitcases. They
are rural dreamers looking for better lives, illegal immigrants from
Bangladesh and small-town boys who fled their homes after falling in love
with the wrong girls. There are pious Muslims and once-proud men stumbling
into opium addiction.
While most residents are men, there are also babies and old people and a
litter of puppies huddled in one man's blanket. They warm up by burning
piles of garbage, and the stench of charred plastic clings to their clothes.
"I need this place," said Satpal Singh, a 24-year-old who earns $3 a day as
a waiter during the city's tumultuous wedding season. "Where am I going to
find a house in this city?"
The son of a tenant farmer, Singh came to New Delhi 10 years ago because he
couldn't find work in his home village, in a poverty-ravaged area about 100
miles (160 kilometers) away. Like many residents, he spends part of the year
in New Delhi, working when he can, and goes back to his home village when
the jobs trail off.
If the parking lot doesn't seem much like a home, Singh insisted it's not
that bad. "I've been here for a long time, so I'm used to it," he said. Plus
It was a cold morning, and Singh spoke with just his head poking out from
beneath a thick, cotton quilt. He was strangely oblivious to the cigarette
smoke drifting from under the quilt at the foot of the cot.
Eventually, another man's head appeared, the hair greasy and mussed, and a
cheap cigarette held between his lips.
It was Mohammed Rasheed, also 24. The two longtime friends share an easy
camaraderie, as well as a bed on the coldest nights. It keeps them warmer,
and cuts the cost to just 30 cents a person.
It's how things work in the community of migrants.
"I know these people," Singh said, nodding toward the beds around him. "We
eat food together. We sleep here together. We know each others' stories."
But few people would choose to live here if they had another choice,
particularly the families. Parents have to take young children with them to
work, often leaving them to play on construction sites or in alleyways. If
there is no money for school, children are often sent to work before they
even reach adolescence.
"This is not a place for a family," said Mohammad Muzaffar, who came to the
parking lot 15 or 20 years ago — he's not sure how long it's been — and is
now raising two toddlers there with his wife, Reshma. But Muzaffar, who
works as a wedding-season waiter and a rickshaw driver, has no identity
papers. He sees no way to get his family into an apartment.
"We are poor people," Reshma said, explaining why their children will grow
up there. "We don't have anything."
No one seems to know how long these outdoor motels have been around. Many of
the city's housing advocates do not even know they exist, given the way
they disappear after daybreak.
But their need is essential.
With India's surging economy drawing ever more rural residents to its cities
, the country's housing shortage has become critical.
A 2010 study by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that India then
faced a shortage of 25 million urban households, a number that could leap to
38 million by 2030. More than 8 million people — or about half of New
Delhi's 16.7 million people — are believed to live in slums.
"There isn't a mechanism to house the people who are coming," Ajit Mohan,
one of the report's authors, said in an interview. "You have to plan for
something like this five, 10 or 15 years in advance, and that's not going on
."
Government officials, he said, "haven't embraced affordable housing as
something they have to deliver."
So places like the Meena Bazaar camp have sprung up to feed the demand.
In summer, thousands of people crowd New Delhi's outdoor motels. In winter
— New Delhi winters get surprisingly cold for such a hot climate, with
temperatures sometimes falling to just above freezing — the crowds thin out
as people return to their home villages or find warmer places to sleep.
Eventually, the lucky find better places to live. But no matter how many
people move out, there are always more ready to move in. |
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