Waiting for OTP

No political party has successfully addressed the quotidian concerns of Delhi's migrant community

- Raunaq Saraswat

VINITA Devi and Jyoti Kumari are sisters-in-law. They walk into the Help Centre of Janpahal in Shakarpur in East Delhi on a Saturday evening, soliciting their registration as a voter of Delhi—a first for either, after having arrived in the capital from Bihar over a decade ago. At the centre, they know what they've come for, but are unsure how it will be done. At least twice, there is confusion about who amongst the two of their husbands has to share the OTP. They hover in the vicinity of the monitor as the facilitator navigates the website of the Election Commission; eager to share what they know or must remember. A series of scans, images, signs and print-outs ensues, and both Devi and Kumari's identity receive an A4 paper each, that will precede their pehchaan patra—(Voter ID), translating literally to a proof of identity, that will reify their being in the city. If a migrant's road to feeling at home in the city of Delhi is unending and fraught, this half-an-hour of registration invokes a significant stretch of anxiety for the two women as well.

The last Census in 2011 pegged the percentage of migrants in Delhi to around 40; implying that every four out of ten people in the city were migrants. Amongst these, the electoral agency of migrant labourers vacillates between their inability to return to their home states for voting, and their exclusion from the voting lists in the destination city. Corrections to this include interventions by NGOs, sometimes a quid pro quo between a party and a worker, and in other cases, years of enumerating oneself in the city.