Parikshit Nirbhay
Almora (Uttarakhand): Sushma Devi, sitting outside a kutcha hut tucked in the shadows of Central Vista Project in the heart of New Delhi, rued that the hills are ‘not the same anymore’.
“We had to leave because there was nothing left for us there. And here in this city, there is still nothing for us,” she said.
Sushma migrated to Delhi from Pipalikoti village in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district 11 years ago, with her two sons and Rs 5,000, which were borrowed from the village head.
Today, she lives in a makeshift settlement with two sons, two daughters-in-law and three grandchildren — a family of eight surrounded by scaffolding and construction material, which will soon become houses for Members of Parliament.
“We build these fancy homes, while we live under tin roofs that trap heat and leak in the rain,” Sushma lamented.
Inside her makeshift dwelling, temperatures often soar 2-3°C higher than the already blistering heat outside.
Her hut is one of many huddled behind the Central Vista project — some made of mud and plastic sheets, others cobbled together from discarded tyres, iron rods, broken wooden doors, and rusted drums. A few look as if they are held together by sheer will, with only sheets of metal precariously propped up as walls.
Sushma and her family earn around Rs 30,000 a month as daily-wage labourers at construction sites across Delhi, building homes they can never afford to live in. Over the past decade, they have moved across the city for work — Mandawali, Mayur Vihar Phase 1, Ashoka Road in Lutyens’ Delhi. Before settling here, the family had worked on the redevelopment of Kartavya Path.
“Wherever the contractor sends us we go,” she said.
But nothing in Delhi has felt like home.
“No one wants to leave the mountains and come here. But poverty left us with no choice,” Sushma said. The losses, however, that pushed her family out of Uttarakhand were not just economic, they were also ecological.
“I was born in Pipalikoti, got married there and had hoped to die there as well,” Sushma said.
She and her husband Ramveer worked in others’ fields, hoping to one day build a home of their own. But in 2008, Ramveer died of a heart attack, and the entire responsibility of the family fell on Sushma. Her two sons had to drop out of school.
“Even then, we were managing somehow. In 2013, there was a hailstorm followed by three or four days of heavy rain, the kind I had never seen before in my life. It destroyed everything: the crops, the homes, everything was gone,” she recalled.
To recover from the damage, families across the village took loans. Sushma borrowed Rs 2 lakh, a loan she was never able to repay. Over the next few years, her debt stacked up to Rs 12 lakh. One bigha land, their only asset, also had to be sold to repay the loan.
The crisis wasn’t hers alone. As erratic weather events became more frequent, others in the village also began to suffer agricultural losses. “The people we worked for stopped having work for us. They had no money to pay our wages,” she said.
This cycle of debt and crop failure continued until 2016. With no work, no income, and no support left, the family had no choice but to leave.
Dr Poorvi Patel, a researcher on climate displacement, calls families like Sushma’s “climate migrants” — people who are pushed out not by a single flood or drought but by the slow violence of repeated environmental shocks.
Grief for home
The story is the same for many in Sushma’s settlement, who come from different parts of the country, all longing for home.
“This city has everything — metros, lifts, even stairs that move on their own. But I miss my village — the air, the sunshine, the greenery. Even the fear of tiger roars at night was better than this,” Sushma’s son Lakhanvir said.
There’s little left of that old life now. Most of the families from their village have migrated. The house Sushma’s family owned and their farmland is long gone.
The idea of returning crosses their minds often. “But then what?” he asked.
“There’s nothing there now that can sustain a whole family. The hills are still there, but the life we knew has disappeared.”
Abandoned by facilities
“There are no schools and no hospitals for people like us here,” said Sumit Karki, a daily wage labourer from Uttarakhand’s Almora district.
“My wife and two daughters still live back in the village. I can’t even think of bringing them here. The money the contractor pays is barely enough for one person to survive, let alone a family.”
Sumit shares a cramped 15×15 foot room with 11 other workers, five of whom work night shifts. “I know other families from Uttarakhand who have settled here, but their condition isn’t better,” he said.
The thin-roofed room resembles a metal box, suffocating in the summer heat. Inside, there’s just enough space for a wooden bed where seven people sleep side by side.
“There are no windows or even a door for ventilation.”
Above the plank, a small battery-operated fan — a makeshift arrangement — whirs weakly. Beneath it, utensils and cooking supplies are crammed in. A lone water bottle sits outside the shed, surrounded by dirt and stagnant water.
“And if we fall sick,” Sumit added, “we spend an entire day queuing at the government hospital. That means we lose a full day’s wages too.”
The cost of life
“I’ve been here for eight years now. It’s much harder to work in Delhi compared to other places. In winter, pollution gets so bad that work stops for days. That means no daily wages,” Sumit explained.
Summer brings its own challenges. “Last year, a co-worker from Pauri Garhwal died of a heatstroke while we were working near Karol Bagh. It was so hot that day, we couldn’t even stand in the sun,” Sumit recalled.
“He was taken to Dr Ram Manohar Lohia (RML) Hospital, but the doctors declared him dead after a few hours.”
Dr Amalendu Yadav from RML Hospital confirmed that nearly all their heatstroke patients are migrants, mostly daily-wage workers exposed to direct sun. It hasn’t been officially documented yet, he added.
“In 2024 alone, we treated 70 heat stroke patients. Four of them died. The rest still have to visit the OPD for treatment due to organ damage,” he said.
Dr Yadav also spoke of Sumit’s friend, who collapsed while working outdoors. “When he was brought in, his temperature was between 108°F and 110°F. It was the highest I’d ever seen. I checked the machine three times because I couldn’t believe it.”
Ugly side of Uttarakhand
Behind the postcard beauty of Uttarakhand lies a troubling reality: large-scale migration from its hill regions, especially remote rural areas.
Many villages in Uttarakhand now stand abandoned. According to the 2011 Census, 1,048 villages have zero population, and another 44 are down to fewer than 10 people. Residents are steadily moving either to the plains within the state or to big cities in search of work and stability.
Professor MPS Bisht of Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University explained that in recent years, the socio-economic and geographical gap between the hills and the plains has widened. “Declining agricultural opportunities, rapid urbanisation, and weakening community ties in rural areas are pushing people out of the hills,” he said.
One of the key drivers behind this shift is climate change. A joint study by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) warns that climate stress is making high-altitude farming increasingly unviable. As rainfall patterns change and temperatures rise, farming families are being forced to migrate, leaving behind fallow land and hollowed-out villages — a trend projected to intensify over the next three decades.
Between 1911 and 2011, Uttarakhand’s average annual temperature rose by 0.46°C. While lower than the global average rise between 2006 and 2015 (0.87°C), the state’s hill districts — including Uttarkashi, Chamoli, Rudraprayag, and Pithoragarh — are experiencing the sharpest increases in temperature. Meanwhile, the plains districts like Haridwar, Dehradun and Pauri Garhwal remain relatively cooler.
This warming is already reshaping the state’s ecology and economy.
TERI researcher Saurabh Bhardwaj said that average annual maximum temperatures are expected to rise by 1.6°C to 1.9°C in the coming decades (2021-2050), depending on the emissions scenario.
“Average rainfall is also projected to increase by 6-8%, especially in the southern districts like Udham Singh Nagar, Nainital, Champawat, and Pauri Garhwal,” he said.
“These shifts in temperature and rainfall have already disrupted traditional farming cycles. Small-scale farmers are the hardest hit and for many, migration becomes the only option,” Bhardwaj explained.
Pushed out by the hills, Sushma still sits outside her makeshift hut in Delhi — waiting for the city to finally let her in.
(Parikshit Nirbhay is a freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters)
