New Delhi, INDIA – At the edge of Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station, the morning feels heavier than usual. Families cluster along the platform, their belongings packed into cloth bundles and plastic sacks.
Children lie half-asleep in their mothers’ laps as announcements echo overhead. Trains heading toward Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and beyond are running full. Over the past few days, railway workers say, the crowds have grown noticeably thicker. Entire families, most of them daily wage laborers, wait with little more than essentials, as if preparing for a longer absence.
“Something is wrong,” says Ab Rahman, thirty-four, a porter, or coolie, who has spent more than a decade navigating these railway platforms. “For four to five days now, there has been a heavy rush — mostly poor workers. They are going back.”
There are no official announcements explaining the surge. No single event has triggered it.
Across the platform, fragments of conversation point to a quieter pressure of rising costs, shrinking work, and the growing difficulty of sustaining even the most basic routines of life in the city.
For many, the crisis is not just about wages or rent. It is about something more immediate: the ability to cook a meal.
Among those waiting at the platform is twenty-seven-year-old Ramesh Varma, a street vendor from Bihar’s Barwan Kala village. He had returned to Delhi barely fifteen days ago, hoping to rebuild his earnings. Now he is leaving again.
“LPG [liquid petroleum gas] refills were not available on time,” he says, sitting on the platform floor. “We kept waiting, going from one gas agency to another. Even when the gas cylinder comes, the cost is too high.”
For many migrant workers, the inability to cook affordably disrupts the fragile economics of city life, where preparing food at home is often the only way to keep daily expenses under control. Varma’s decision captures a growing reality across India’s working-class neighborhoods: as cooking…
Auteur: Sajad Hameed
