Communities of Care: Urban Solidarities and Migrant Health Seeking in New Delhi, India

Cities of the global south are increasingly characterised as anti-poor and anti-im/migrant spaces, rapidly ‘developing’ under exclusionary neoliberal forces. Structural violence against the urban poor seems embedded in the very nature of the urban in many contexts, like that of India. The images of the internal migrants walking back to their homes in the village for over hundreds of miles during the pandemic, expelled from the urban, became a matter of global attention and criticism. Despite the dire and unfavourable situations which persist, cities attract migrants with the hope of more employment, increased wages, better living conditions and dignified life as they escape caste and gender barriers, extremely dominant and rigid in rural India. The everyday life of the migrant in the city, is then, embroiled in negotiating these structures and spaces of violence and exclusion. This paper explores everyday urban solidarities which make migrant life in the city a possibility, facilitating access, inclusion and assimilation into the complex rubric of the urban of the global south. Through an ethnographic study of health-seeking of low-income migrant communities across New Delhi, the paper focuses on access to healthcare as an essential aspect of the urban experience, and delves into the ways in which the urban community, both migrant and local, facilitate access through information, financial support, psychosocial guidance among many other informal engagements with the migrant and his or her family. The informal organisation of care through migrant social networks, political networks and the community comes often as a response to the absence of formal arrangements of Care in the city- from the State, the market and the city-zens.