Smart city workers’ kids face bleak future

NT Correspondent
Bengaluru

While Bengaluru’s smart city project aims to improve the city’s infrastructure, the workers who toil day and night, braving the heat and rains, to make this happen live in inhospitable conditions. Many of them are migrant workers, and they live with their families in small tenements that lack even basic facilities. Reeta lives in a tin sheeted house in Ashok Nagar with her two children. She says that her children are always sick due to unhygienic living conditions and lack of nutritious food. Her children, Sonu and Monu, don’t go to school and spend most of their days in that unventilated tin house.

This is an everyday story for hundreds of children of migrant workers who are working for Bengaluru’s smart city project. Reports suggest that over Rs 2,500 crore has been spent on the project. The project is jointly funded by the Centre and State governments and aims to provide better infrastructure to Bengaluru’s citizens. But the planners have overlooked the plight of the workers deployed to carry out these tasks.

Reeta came to Bengaluru in 2019 from Bihar with her husband and two children. Since then, her family is barely surviving on the minimum wage. “I came to this city in search of a job. I thought my children would have a better life in a metropolitan city. But here, my kids are barely surviving. They don’t have enough to eat. We can’t afford milk or ghee for them. When they fall sick, we just wait for them to recover naturally. We can’t afford expensive hospitals,” she said. Her husband Ranjan complains about the terrible sanitation facility in the area. “Before coming here, the contractor promised us everything would be good. Now, we have to live in this hell hole to make Rs 500 a day; how can children grow in such a terrible environment,” he said.

Another migrant labourer Ajoy from West Bengal, says he cannot send his children to school. “I earn so less that feeding them becomes a huge task. How will I send them to school? Instead of going to school, they can learn some work to help the family financially,” he said.

A report by the NGO Mobile Creches, named ‘Children on construction sites’, pointed out that about 70 per cent of the children living on construction sites suffer from malnutrition. However, the Assistant Engineer of the Bengaluru Smart city project, G. Reddy, said, “We provide living containers to all the workers. We have even provided them with food and groceries to feed their children.” Advocate Nagesh, a lawyer at Karnataka High Court, said, “The law states that migrant workers should be provided free accommodation within the working site with proper water and sanitation facilities. This is mandated under Section 34 of the Building and Construction Act.” But unfortunately, the contractors provide shabby accommodations without proper facilities and don’t follow the provisions of the Act, he added.