How a city’s working class is driven to the margins and made invisible

Before a story is to take shape through conversations with a part of the city’s population, which the city itself only passively interacts with, it is discussed in a Monday pitch meeting where reporters and editors sit. Once approved, a familiar question follows — “Where will we find these people?”

I encountered this question before working on two separate stories on informal waste workers, and workers who commute by cycle. In both cases, the question did not hold for long. What first sounded like an inquiry about access, over the course of the reporting, began to feel like an assumption that these people are difficult to locate; almost external to the city.

For ‘finding’ people who cycle to work in Delhi, I reached out to Professor Rahul Goel from IIT Delhi, whose work over the years has focused on commuting patterns and mobility. When I asked him, “Where will I find them?”, he directed me to the city’s busiest intersections, where roads from the peripheries meet industrial areas and affluent localities, where many of them work as daily wage labourers, security guards, and helpers. 

I met Sandeep at one of those busy intersections on a humid April evening, when he was returning home from his sales job. Aged 23, he had been working for eight years. The break from school to contribute to his household became permanent after COVID-19 hit. Before getting back on his bicycle to ride 8 kilometres more, he said, “Humlog dikhte nahi hain (We are invisible).” He said that a cycling network sounds like a fantasy in a city that still doesn’t have footpaths everywhere. The draft Master Plan of Delhi 2041 notes that this “unequal distribution of roads” makes it non-conducive for cycling.

By the time I filed the story, curiosity had begun to feel like ignorance. I started seeing cyclists everywhere — at every intersection, at every signal. They kept to the kerb, and when traffic swelled, even that space was taken over as motorists pushed forward to gain ground. A car owner I spoke to said, “They slow the traffic down, such a nuisance.” Cyclists are registered only when their presence creates friction. 

Similarly, a waste picker becomes visible only when their access to gated colonies is debated. Most residents encounter them every day. They collect garbage from homes and do the work that reduces the burden on municipal systems without formal recognition or integration into the waste economy. They continue to speak of restricted access, allegations of theft, and the absence of dedicated workspaces.

To write about the workforce that sorts much of the city’s waste in March, I first travelled to a jhuggi cluster in Bhalswa, in northwest Delhi, a few kilometres from the towering landfill. Days later, while walking to a Metro station in south Delhi, I noticed a large sack of waste stacked beside a road, similar to the one I had seen in Bhalswa. It led me to a corner of my own neighbourhood that I realised I had never seen before. There, too, people were sorting waste sharing similar stories of migration and precarious work. By the time I finished the story, I had met waste workers across the city. Sameer Ali, whom I had never seen before January, moved in the same lanes around 9 pm with his bicycle cart carrying a stack of cardboard. People that our stories set out to look for, unlike responses from government authorities, are not hard to find. They are everywhere, for all to see.

It is tempting to think invisibility is simply a failure to notice. But invisibility is rarely accidental. When a city invests heavily in roads for cars while cycling infrastructure remains largely absent, cyclists do not disappear. A worker rehabilitated to the margins of Delhi, 40-50 kilometres away from the place where she works, is moved away from the corridors of visibility so that her problems with transport or healthcare become easier to overlook.

These workers state that recognition in government policies would give them a life of dignity and respect.