Street life in Kolkata

Street workers from second-hand clothes sellers to rickshaw drivers say they are mostly left undisturbed, too poor to afford a home of their own.

Workers, many of whom moved to the city from states including Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha, say that being left to sleep outside by local authorities gives them a measure of security.

“We have no shelter,” said Nizamuddin, 60, who works in a wholesale market. Bikash Tati, a 39-year-old labourer, is unperturbed by life on the streets. "We have food and we can sleep peacefully at night," he said.

Nizamuddin, whose duties at his workplace include pouring cooking oil into tins and weighing them, uses plastic sheets to take shelter from rains and the chill in winter. He wishes there were night shelters for workers like him.

The poor and homeless in Mumbai and Delhi are often disturbed at night, workers in Kolkata said over and over. The lower cost of living in Kolkata also allows migrant workers to put a little aside to send to families who stayed at home, they said.

In Kolkata, whose poverty Mother Teresa embraced, cycle rickshaw drivers sleep in their vehicles at night, while workers in a vegetable market call their place of work home too.

Men wash at municipal taps in the streets. Here, a man brushes his teeth with a neem twig early in the morning next to a row of hand-pulled rickshaws.

Mohammad Afroze, 15, plays soccer in an alley as used pairs of jeans are hung to dry before they are sold in a second-hand clothes market.

Some have set their sights on life goals early on. Rahul Shaw, 10, reads a textbook in his father's rickshaw before he goes to a government-run school that gives him free meals. His ambition: to become a doctor and treat people for free.