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By Root 1607 0

lifelong jobs backed by a few low-paying service jobs. Now, this world has exploded into small constellations of permanent employees dwarfed by a galaxy of informal work: small, unlicensed shops or street-vending sites; services, including domestic work and transportation; or short-term work in building and small manufacturing. The informal economy, previously considered a parasitic irrelevance on the edge of the “main” industrial economy, now represents a quarter of all jobs in post-communist countries, a third in North Africa, half in Latin America, 70 percent in India, and more than 90 percent in the poorest African countries.2 It is a form of labor that is often less secure and that offers none of the social-security benefits or long-term guarantees of industrial work—but, to its immense benefit, it is a form of work that is available to almost everyone who comes to the city. On the whole, it appears that the informal, self-employed economy, even though it is more chaotic and often untaxed, is providing better livelihoods for rural migrants than the old lifetime-job economy. Self-employment, the starting-point of the arrival city, has become the global norm.3

“In my grandfather’s time, you got a job,” says Sanjay. “Now, you get some work.”

Sanjay is now the family’s major source of cash income: He sends home 1,500 rupees a month ($32), three-quarters of his tea-shop salary. That pays for kerosene, wood, electricity, kitchen supplies, cattle feed, schoolbooks, medicine—all of which are considered necessities now. It keeps his two sisters in school. Over two years, he was able to save enough to build a cowshed, increasing the family’s rural income. He visits once or twice a year, at harvest and holidays, heartsick for the place, and once a month he walks to the phone shop in his Mumbai neighborhood and calls the family, who visit a neighbor next door who has a land line. He is saving to buy a mobile phone, something that seven or eight people in their village already possess. In a world dominated by informal jobs and makeshift shops scattered all over the city, the mobile phone has become, like kerosene, almost a necessity of life for the very poor of the world.

Despite almost 60 years of urban life and work, the Solkar family remain subsistence peasant farmers, and proudly so. Mumbai labor has allowed them to increase the productivity of their tiny rice farm somewhat (though not to the point that they produce more than they can eat) and to have heat and light and schooling, a radio, and access to a nearby television. As the economist Deepa Narayan has observed, the rural poor of the developing world thrive by building “joint portfolios” of farming, business, and migration remittances, to hedge economic risk across several platforms.4 The city begins as one among many tools, though its culture and customs soon “urbanize” the village. The men of Sanjay’s family are, culturally, urbanites: they speak the Hindi-laced Marathi slang of Mumbai, talk of urban politics and Bollywood intrigues, have social networks in the village consisting of other sometime urbanites. But, despite decades on the fringe of the arrival city, none has considered moving permanently. Sanjay may well be the first. For there has been an imperceptible but important change between grandfather and grandson: Before, the work in the city was a begrudged way to support the village. Now, for Sanjay, the village has begun to serve as a supportive backstop and safety net for his emerging career in the city. Urban arrival has shifted into the foreground.

On his day off, Sanjay sails across Mumbai, clinging to the outside of the Suburban Railway train as it traverses the peninsula, enjoying the prospect of visiting someone from his village. The young migrants of Kolhewadi have not yet congealed together in a common neighborhood. Many of them, perhaps half, will end their lives back in the village. For most of his village neighbors, the move to Mumbai for work is an enormous shift into an alien world, one that will take them away from the village, except for