By day Subhash Kanojia works as a guard at a city housing complex and by night he drives a three-wheeled taxi. "I came to the city to make money," said the middle-aged, uneducated man who left his village in the eastern state of Bihar to make it big in India's financial and entertainment hub Mumbai.
"So I work hard. Let's see how long I can carry on this double job." Kanojia is among millions of Indians for whom migrating to cities is the only way they can hope to participate in the urban-centric economic boom that has so far bypassed most of the country's 600,000 villages.
And for the cities this has meant coping with new challenges: strained resources, competition for land, a battle for jobs and huge pressures on infrastructure. According to a UNESCO study, by 2015 three of the world's 12 largest cities will be in India. Much of the demographic growth in cities will likely be spurred by rural migrants like Kanojia.
Mumbai embodies the dreams of millions of strivers, the first of whom started arriving over a century ago to work in its cotton mills, India's first modern industry. The city, a dumbbell-shaped island that juts into the Arabian Sea, is paying a price -- every day an estimated 1,500 newcomers move to the 438 square kilometres (169 square miles) of land already packed with more than 17 million people.
The result: the roads are chaos, the suburban train service carries some six million passengers a day -- nearly three times its capacity -- there are water riots, and infrastructure projects are stalled because squatters can't be moved. With a population density of around 29,000 people per square kilometre, Mumbai is one of the most crowded cities in the world.
More than half of its residents live in shanty colonies and on pavements. The situation has become so acute that officials now measure progress not in terms of new housing but to the extent to which slums can be "regularised" -- squatters' rights recognised and basic amenities provided, including public water taps, community toilets and paved walkways with open sewers. Plans to build alternative housing in the suburbs are inadequate to meet ever-growing needs, officials admit.
They are also irrelevant to the poorest of the migrants, who cannot afford to buy an apartment miles from the city centre and pay for transportation every day. To such a city Kanojia arrived six years ago, finding his way to a shantytown perched on the edge of a stinking sewer and garbage heap bang in the middle of Mumbai.
Shoehorned into a job as a security guard by a relative from his native village, he was soon earning 1,000 rupees ($22) a month, a better-than-average wage. Now with two jobs, his income has increased almost 25 times to the equivalent of around $550 a month.
India's four megalopolises - New Delhi in the north, Kolkata in the east, Mumbai to the west and Chennai in the south - have long been a lightening rod for the poor. But in the past five years the services-driven economies of smaller cities have also attracted migrants.
"Back in our village, I'm respected because I work in Mumbai. It's a big thing," said Kanojia, whose son goes to school and who is about to marry off one of his daughters. "I am not rich but I send money to my parents and my younger brother so that he can farm," he explained. The money-order economy that the likes of Kanojia have created is remoulding life back home.
For many rural families, having someone working in a city is protection against the vagaries of weather or crops. It may also mean enough money for a substantially better life. In 1991, India had 23 cities with one million or more people. A decade later it had 35.
Today at least 28 percent of India's population already lives in cities and millions more travel there every day for temporary work. But compared with China, whose rural population is also moving to the cities, India's urbanisation has been slow and haphazard. Economists say this is partly because four decades of India's quasi-socialist economic policies crimped manufacturing, a sector that has spurred China's growth.
Manufacturing makes up only 27 percent of the economy and the demand by workers for factory jobs in cities far outstrips supply. Many migrants eke out a living as street vendors or day labourers. Inevitably urban poverty has risen. According to India's 2001 census, 31 percent of the urban population is poor.
But, good jobs or not, migrants still come -- stretching cities' resources and adding to the shambles. Every month 25-30 people leave Kanojia's village, most headed for Kolkata, he said. "What will they do in the village? he asked. "The crop is uncertain. Prices are unstable." "At this rate, one day our villages will be empty."
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