Overview
Livelihood research on urban poverty has a tendency toward snapshot logic: a survey captures a household at one moment, categorises it by primary income source, and moves on. The reality of low-income urban life is considerably more dynamic — households stack multiple income sources, shift between them seasonally, send members into circular migration, and constantly negotiate between the city and the village.
Urban Livelihoods was an eighteen-month community-embedded documentation project in four low-income neighbourhoods in Delhi — Sanjay Colony (Okhla), Savda Ghevra (Rohini), Bawana, and Sangam Vihar. The project prioritised depth over breadth: a small number of households tracked closely over time, with regular visits, rather than a large-sample cross-sectional survey.
Approach
We worked with 60 households across the four sites, selected through community organisation introductions to include diversity in origin state, primary livelihood, household structure, and tenure (owned jhuggi, rented, slum resettlement colony flat).
Research associates — three of whom were residents of study neighbourhoods — conducted monthly visits over eighteen months. Visit records combined structured data collection (income and expenditure logs, employment changes, migration movements) with open-ended conversation and ethnographic observation.
We supplemented household tracking with neighbourhood-level interviews of employers, contractors, moneylenders, shopkeepers, and community leaders to understand the supply side of the livelihood ecosystem.
The Neighbourhoods
Sanjay Colony: A mixed settlement with long-established residents and newer arrivals, close to the Okhla industrial area. Livelihood diversity was high — garment work, construction, domestic work, small trade, and factory employment all present. Proximity to employment meant lower circular migration than the other sites.
Savda Ghevra: A resettlement colony for households relocated from across Delhi under earlier slum clearance. Residents described a sharp deterioration in livelihood access after relocation — their previous networks, employers, and customers were no longer reachable by affordable public transport. Many had informally moved back to more central locations, leaving the allocated flat with relatives.
Bawana: Adjacent to an industrial zone on Delhi’s northern periphery. Male-headed households were heavily dependent on factory employment; female household members were more likely to be engaged in home-based piece-rate work for garment and leather goods contractors. Seasonal migration to Punjab’s agricultural regions was common among younger men.
Sangam Vihar: A large unauthorised colony in South Delhi with heterogeneous livelihoods. Notable for its density of small enterprises — repair workshops, food processing, tailoring — that employed neighbourhood residents and created livelihood interdependence within the settlement.
Key Patterns
Income stacking: 73% of households drew income from three or more sources at some point during the eighteen months. No household survived on a single income source for the entire period.
Seasonal migration: 38% of tracked households had at least one member engaged in seasonal migration to agricultural regions (primarily Punjab for wheat harvest, UP for sugarcane). Migration decisions were household-level negotiations, often triggered by local income shortfalls rather than agricultural opportunity.
Debt as livelihood instrument: 91% of households were indebted to at least one source. Moneylenders remained significant despite microfinance penetration — their speed and absence of documentation requirements made them preferred for emergency borrowing. Debt was not merely a distress indicator; several households used moneylender credit to fund migration journeys or to bridge gaps between piece-rate payment cycles.
Social capital geography: Reciprocal support networks were geographically compact — concentrated within 200–300 metres of residence. Resettlement colony residents showed significantly thinner local networks than organically settled households, a function of the disruption of origin-based community ties.
The village connection: Remittances flowed both ways. Urban households sent money to village relatives; village families sent food, labour support during emergencies, and functioned as a social insurance fallback. For many households, the village was not a place of origin left behind, but an active resource and relationship.
Documentation Format
Beyond the tracking data, we produced a set of extended household portraits — detailed accounts of individual households’ livelihood strategies, decisions, and setbacks over the eighteen months. These portraits, lightly edited for privacy, formed the core of a documentation report shared with urban planning researchers, NGOs, and government housing departments.
We also produced a series of community-facing resources — visual income calendars, neighbourhood resource maps — that were printed and distributed in each study site. Community organisations used these materials in ward-level budget consultations.
Pandemic Interruption
The project ran from March 2019 to August 2020. The final three months overlapped with the COVID-19 lockdown, which produced one of the most acute livelihood crises in recent urban history. We documented the first phase of the crisis in real time: employment collapse, return migration, food insecurity, and the rapid improvisation of household coping strategies.
An emergency supplement to the project report — When the City Stops: Livelihood Collapse and Recovery in Four Delhi Neighbourhoods — was published in October 2020 and has been widely cited in pandemic recovery research.
Project led by Anshu Jha with a team of six researchers including three community-based research associates. Supported by the Ford Foundation’s India Cities programme.