"How Bengaluru’s migrant workers pay with their lives for climate change and corruption,"

In Bengaluru, a mix of intense rainfall and real estate corruption had a deadly result last month...

Socially marginalised groups and the working classes suffer disproportionately as a result of extreme weather disasters. Because workers toil outdoors or in poorly ventilated workshops and live in informal slums or labour camps without adequate shade, drainage or infrastructure, they are vulnerable to extreme heat and rainfall. In the Babusapalya case, there was the added culprit of corruption and substandard materials deployed in the construction of the building...

Our interviews with the workers and other migrants in brickmaking, ragpicking, and construction sectors in eastern and northeast Bengaluru reveal that those who are among the most economically and socially marginalised – who are caste, class, linguistically, and/or religiously marginalised – leave their villages amidst debt, landlessness, unpredictable rains (both droughts and floods), and widespread unemployment...

Once in the city, migrant workers are housed in inhumane conditions, without proper accommodations, toilets, or other facilities, making them all the more susceptible to extreme weather. On Babusapalya and other sites that employ migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, workers sleep on the site itself, either in makeshift tents or in the partly-finished building...

Climate change has serious effects on unorganised or casualised workers in the construction, brickmaking, sanitation, and app delivery sectors, among others. Erratic, unpredictable monsoons in South Asia are one sign of climate change. So is extreme heat...

It is clear that accountability is lacking on multiple levels. Regular surveys of illegal constructions by engineers would enhance accountability and place more checks and balances on real estate construction...