by Kanchan Gandhi 1 May 2020
It’s 4pm on a hot and humid day in August, 2019. Sardar Rulda Singh aged 75 is sitting on a chair outside his shop (a tent-house) in Sohana (Figure 1) as he dreamily looks at the high-rise apartments called “The Homeland” (Figure 2) located in Sector 70 of SAS Nagar district of Punjab across the road. I notice that he doesn’t have a smartphone. He is chatting on an old mobile phone. I wait for him to finish his conversation. I take permission to ask him about the transformation of Sohana from a village to a town. He smiles and assents. He tells me that he was born and brought up in Sohana and has lived his whole life here. He belongs to the Ravidasia (a lower caste) community of Sikhs and his family never owned any agricultural land in the village.
Singh tells me that he lived an impoverished life. He was employed as an electrician in the Chandigarh High Court and used to walk 32 kilometres to and from work every day when he was employed. He saw the landscape changing very fast from rural to urban after land was acquired in Sohana for urbanisation. He believes that the late Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi was instrumental in the urbanisation of Mohali (or SAS Nagar district as it is officially known). “She visited in 1975 and paved the path for the urbanisation of Mohali” he informs me.
The agricultural fields were acquired by the state for developing urban sectors – in this case Sectors 69, 70 and 71 of SAS Nagar. The settlement area (enclosed in what is called the phirni boundary in Punjab) remained unchanged. The community however disintegrated due to the acquisition of agricultural land, he explains. Some families left Sohana and moved to the neighbouring districts to buy land. Others bought houses in the urbanised sectors of Mohali and gave their houses in Sohana for rentals to migrants. Some of them opened businesses and shops in Sohana.
Sohana is a lucrative destination for low-income migrants coming to work in the Chandigarh city-region providing affordable rental housing. The Gurudwara, Singh Shahida provides free food (langar) from their community kitchen on a daily basis. It is a historical Gurudwara which receives thousands of devotees from the far interiors of rural and urban Punjab on a monthly basis.
Due to the rapid influx of migrants Sohana grew in size and was listed as a census town in the 2011 census. It had a population of 9306 people back then. It was declared a statutory town in the year 2015 and was brought into the fold of the Municipal Corporation of Mohali for the purpose of governance. According to a discussion with a Municipal Councilor of Sohana, the present population of Sohana is around 20,000 people.
Rent seeking is the main source of income for house owners in Sohana. Most of them have extended floors above their homes to use them to earn rental incomes.
Singh explains that urbanisation has been perilous for Sohana. It has led to the increased inequality, degradation of environment and a disintegration of the community. Additionally, there has been some hazardous decision-making by the local government. He explains, for example, that the level of the road flanking one side of the Sohana that connects it to another town Landra was raised above the level of the settlement. This led to the repeated flooding of the settlement after every downpour. The result, explains Singh, was that 90% of the houses crumbled and people had to rebuild them at raised levels. He points to the raised threshold of his own shop. Sewerage lines were laid in the settlement in the year 2011. Congestion has been increasing in Sohana with each passing year.
Singh says that inequalities rose after the urbanisation of Sohana. People became “lazy” and “complacent” after receiving huge amounts of money as compensation for their agricultural land. The landed bought huge cars, SUVs to flaunt their status. Some drowned in alcoholism and died due to it. Landless people like him continued to work hard to earn a living.
I asked him if it was better before or now? “Of course before” he remarks. “Earlier there was animal husbandry and we got fresh milk, now all of that is banned. We had corn, bajra, wheat, chole and mah from the fields. All of that is gone now”. Sohana is now a burgeoning market for furniture, household items and electronics (see Figure 4).
I say goodbye to Mr Rulda Singh and venture deeper into the lanes of Sohana. There are mixed housing types in the settlement. Flatted developments are coming up long with the older plotted ones. Landlords in Sohana are catering to different housing needs of all income category migrants. The more skilled professionals are able to afford the newly constructed flats, while the lower income families are huddled in single room tenements.
I stumble upon a house that has several rooms lined adjacent to each other (Figure 5). An auto full of children is parked outside and a man is sitting on the driver’s seat. I click a picture of the house from outside. A group of women, who live in the house come towards me. They are concerned about my photography. I show them my identity card and explain to them the purpose of my visit. I tell them that I am trying to understand and document their lives in Sohana. Minnie who is the most vocal among these women, shares their experiences of being migrants in “pardes” (foreign land as she puts it).
Toiling away in Pardes
Minnie says that life is tough as a distressed migrant. There are over 10 families that inhabit the housing compound. They all hail from Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh who migrated around a decade ago. There are a large number of migrants from Moradabad in the Chandigarh-Mohali city region due to the collapse of agriculture in the district.
“Who wants to live in pardes didi?” she asks me. “We only came because there is no work back home. Most of us work as domestic helpers in the Sectors. I am working in an apartment in the Homeland condominiums. The employers exploit our labour and underpay us. Most of our husbands work as auto-drivers in the Chandigarh tri-city region. Life is hard here” she explains.
Minnie tells me that they pay Rs 2500/- as rent per family for a single room accommodation. There’s no kitchen and all the women cook in the courtyard. There are common toilets for all. Additionally, they pay around Rs 1000-2000/- for electricity per month per family.
“So the savings are very little. Every month we have to send some money back to our families in Moradabad. Our parents live there” she continues.
“We pay for our children’s schooling too”
I ask Minnie if there’s an Anganwadi in Sohana.
“Yes there is, but it is defunct” She explains.
“There’s no food or education given to our children in Anganwadi; basically we are migrants and do not have any rights in this place. Everything is for the local people” she laments.
Indeed, domestic helpers and auto-drivers form a part of India’s huge informal economy that do not have social security like the formal sector employees. Through their labour, these low-income migrants contribute significantly to the economy of the tri-city region of Chandigarh-Panchkula-Mohali and yet live precarious lives with minimum governmental entitlements. The local governments use them as vote-banks in the time of elections but do not give them socio-economic rights.
Sohana and other urban villages in the periphery of Chandigarh reflect similar patterns of development. There are huge populations of migrants in these villages who live in rental housing here. It is through their labour and incomes that the villages in the periphery are booming as lucrative real-estate sites and are turning into statutory towns. If only the migrant-poor can get a share of the profits that the landowners are making can these towns become inclusive and sustainable cities of tomorrow.
*Kanchan Gandhi is a postdoctoral fellow at IISER, Mohali. Her research interests lie in identity-politics, urban studies and disaster and climate change studies.
The author would like to thank Dr Anu Sabhlok from IISER, Mohali for her support and encouragement of this research work.