By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications
At a recent CISA talk, journalist-author Neha Dixit spoke about the lived experience of poor rural Indians who emigrate to Delhi for work, only to end up living in near-permanent economic precarity.
UCLA International Institute, May 18, 2026 — In a fascinating lecture hosted by the UCLA Center for India and South Asia in April, award-winning independent investigative journalist Neha Dixit explained the numerous ways in which the urban poor in India experience the interlocking challenges of labor exploitation, socio-economic exclusion, police harassment and disadvantages in interacting with the Indian state.
Her talk, “Stories the State Tries to Erase,” focused specifically on the lived experience of poor rural Indians who emigrate to New Delhi, only to end up living in near-permanent economic precarity without hope of improvement. The protagonist of her first book, “The Many Lives of Seyda X” (2024), embodies this experience.
Based on nine years of research, the book follows the trajectory of Syeda, a Muslim woman who migrated to North East Delhi with her family in 1995. “[For over] 30 years,” recounted Dixit, “she did 50 jobs, working from 12 to 16 hours a day, but never managing to make more than one-fifth of the daily wage. And [just] so you know, 82% of Indian women are employed in the informal sector.
“The things that Syeda made in these 30 years were cycle brake wires, pressure cooker parts, door knobs, door hinges, stationery, festival goodies, plumbing material, carpentry material, garments — every possible thing we can think of.”
Dixit’s book has been published in four versions: two English versions, for
South Asia and for the UK, and separate Telegu and Hindi versions. The book
won Book of the Year 2024 by The Hindu and Deccan Herald, the Ramnath
Goenka Sahitya Samman and Kalinga Best Debut Award and Special
Jury Mention by the CG Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing (UK).
Photo: Neha Dixit Instagram post.
Marginalization of migrant women workers in the informal sector
Around the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, Dixit began spending time in the industrial areas of Delhi, where she met Syeda. “This was a time when the markets opened up [and industry became] more market-focused and export-focused,” she said.
Syeda had previously lived in Varanasi (Benares) and worked in her family profession as a weaver of Banarasi brocade. Her husband was a master weaver who was periodically able to make an expensive weaving that would be sold off for a very high price. Their lives would change as the rise of Hindu right-wing nationalism gained traction in the 1990s.
“There was a lot of polarization then, and that eventually led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid Mosque [in Ahodya; the mosque was destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992]. That triggered lots of riots in the country; Syeda’s loom was brought down in those riots,” explained the journalist. She noted that anti-Muslim riots in 2013 had helped the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, come to power nationally.
By the time Syeda, her husband and three children moved to North East Delhi in 1995, the cost of imported yarn had already made Baranasi brocade weaving uncompetitive. The district is served by major bus and rail arteries that connect the district with Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal and bring many migrants to the capital.
“Bigger industrial units were ruled out from Delhi’s master plan because it’s an administrative city,” noted Dixit. “But over the years… [the city] has become one of the biggest manufacturing centers in Asia for a lot of things, [including] automobile parts, stationery and electronics.
“In the 1970s and 1980s, we know that a lot of global corporations started shifting their manufacturing to the poorer parts of the world, where there was cheaper labor,” said Dixit. “What happened [here] was that instead of setting up a factory floor, paying a proper wage and providing proper conditions, the work was outsourced.”
The majority of the urban poor working in the informal sector in North East Delhi are women with no labor protections. Most of these women do home-based work, which in the winter months generally means shelling almonds. “[T]he almonds are grown in California, exported to India, then it goes to wholesale markets, where there are suppliers,” said the journalist. “The suppliers give it to the contractors, the contractors give it to the subcontractors, and sometimes there are sub-subcontractors.”
“Workplaces” are not factories, but rooms set up in the housing of a subcontractor, where the space is divided between women doing different piece-meal tasks: some may be putting together cycle brake wires, other making locks, others pasting colored stickers.
“Now… we know that some 60% of the urban poor in India live in a space which is smaller than the ideal prison setting — that’s the space you’re talking about. Subcontractors also do not have a toilet in their houses,” said Dixit.
Districts of Delhi, India. (Graphic: Open Street Map via WikiCommons; cropped and color adjusted. CC BY -SA 2.0.)
Women workers in the district generally work a 12-hour shift, from 2:00 a.m. in the morning to 2:00 p.m. in the evening. The start time indicates that the arrangement is surreptitious, with all apartment doors shut for the same reason. When the women shell almonds, the lack of air circulation leads to considerable almond shell dust in the air, which leads to lung ailments.
In order to make shelling easier, explained Dixit, the shells are often softened with acid or chemicals to make the process easier, which over time causes the women’s fingertips to corrode. Eventually they can no longer eat with their bare hands, a cultural custom.
The cheap female labor economy exists for two reasons, said the journalist. “One is … ideas of patriarchal honor… A lot of times women are told they can’t go out, so they have to find work in their vicinity,” she noted. “Because there is so much pressure to put food on the table for the children, it continues to happen,” she added.
The second reason is that in a situation where there are no official workplaces and the women working in subcontractor’s small rooms are typically making different things, unionization is problematic.
Poor migrant women workers and their families also frequently face harassment and surveillance by the state. Every once in a while, if something happens in the area, the police will come arrest Syeda’s sons, related Dixit. This has also happened when Indian Mujahideen have committed acts of terrorism in other cities of India.
Migrant families are also at risk of direct mob violence. The 2020 Delhi Riots, for example, took place in Syeda’s district of North East Delhi, when many Muslims were brutalized, killed and their properties burned. Sexual violence against women is frequently a part of such riots.
“Every once in a while, the state also has these various ways of marginalizing [migrants], or punishing them,” said Dixit. Here she cited the Indian government’s decision to issue everyone digital I.D.s in order to access government services, including food aid.
Women attempt to get such cards, but because many have lost some of their fingerprints because of the chemicals they use in shelling almonds. It is complicated to resolve this problem, requiring the women to receive a text message from a government office. Yet, Dixit pointed out, only 53% of Indian women have phones.
“Which means that a lot of times you don’t end up getting any rations… We’ve seen that this has been the reason for starvation deaths in many places,” she said.
The intersectional nature of migrant worker exclusion in modern India
Backsliding on democracy and pluralism in India has accompanied the political rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has pursued both neoliberal economic and Hindu nationalist policies for 12 years. The BJP has grown to have the largest party representation in both the national parliament and the legislatures of India’s 28 states.
Many people like herself, said Dixit, have felt the need “to speak about pluralism and the backsliding that’s happening in India, but I feel that if this conversation on pluralism does not marry questions of caste, class and gender, it’s just going to be a discourse of the elite.
“It is tempting to look at Syeda’s story as a Muslim, or as a woman, or just as a worker. But actually, these silos are not really going to help because it’s not just a numbers story, it’s not just a communalism story, it’s not just a general story.”
As her talk made clear, multidimensional barriers — whether lack of media visibility, labor protections, violence, state surveillance or lack of means to secure the documentation needed to navigate the Indian state — reinforce one another to create the systemic marginalization of urban migrant workers.
Published: Monday, May 18, 2026
