By Pankaj Yadav, KUNA,
New Delhi : For more than two decades, India has witnessed unprecedented construction activity, where hectares of what was once lush-green agricultural fields have turned into concrete jungles with skyscrapers kissing the blue sky above.
In this process, a small number of people — farmers and private developers — turned millionaires, where farmers received ten million rupees in compensations for their agricultural lands acquired by the successive governments and private developers.
Private developers, in turn, multiplied their wealth by selling off the developed flats, houses and plots.
Cities like Gurgaon (located on the outskirts of New Delhi) and others changed their outlook over the years and now wear an ultra-modern look with shopping malls, cine-multiplexes, five-star hotels and golf courses, attracting the VIPs of India, as well as Bollywood and sports stars.
Civic authorities boast of the cleanliness in these cities, but heaps of garbage and ever-spreading slums are a common sight here. The slums are abodes for maids, cooks, and scavengers who are primarily the poor and downtrodden.
These slum clusters and heaps of garbage can be easily seen through the windows of the skyscrapers housing the multi-millionaires and the uppermost strata of the society. The slums have mushroomed inside the villages like Chakkarpur, Sikanderpur, Nathupur, Sirhol, Dundahera and Sukhrali.
Ironically, those living in dwellings worth tens of millions of rupees find these slums a thing of necessity for them. The reason: the maids and servants living in these slums help the “busy-class” people in handling the household chores like cooking, washing clothes and sweeping floors.
In almost 90 percent of the plush houses here, both husband and wife work for long hours in nearby multi-national companies. After a day of tiring work, they are left with no energy and zeal to cook or do other household chores, and the only option left for them is to solely depend on the dwellers of the nearby slum clusters.
Rajiv Malhotra and his wife Jagjit, both software professionals living and working in Gurgaon, say that it is really hard to do both office work and household chores.
“We need someone to help, who can take care of our house and kids when we are away to work, and also help in day-to-day work like cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and sweeping floors.” To utter surprise, most of the non-Indian nationals who originally came to India as refugees, are now over-staying their period of stay and are living at these slums.
However, these illegal immigrants have proved to be a boon both for the villagers and the upper class people. The villagers rent out small rooms to them at monthly cost of as much as 3500 rupees (approximately USD 70) per month for room no bigger than eight by eight feet.
An average villager earns anything between 25,000-50,000 rupees (USD 500-1, 000) a month through rent from the illegal immigrants living in these slums. Hence, these slum dwellers have proved to be one of major sources of income for the villagers who were rendered jobless after their agricultural lands were acquired.
The Malhotras add, “We don’t know about the actual nationality of the maids or servants who work in our residential colony, but they always introduce themselves as hailing from India’s eastern state of West Bengal.” They noted that it was the duty of the police and government to ascertain the nationality of these people, and if their visas had expired or they were found to be illegal immigrants, they should be turned out of the country.
However, they said that the fact remained that most of the households in their neighbourhood solely depend on these slum dwellers.
KUNA spoke to local police officials who acknowledged the presence of illegal immigrants in such cities, but said that the number is not that high as was reported.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Gurgaon-East) Satender Kumar Gupta said, “There is a mix of people who work in Gurgaon as maids, cooks and servants, and mainly comprise of migrants from Indian states like Assam, Jharkhand, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.” He said that it was commonly known to authorities that illegal refugees also lived there, adding that these areas were regularly inspected, but neither the administration nor the police were aware of the exact number of such illegal immigrants in Gurgaon.