16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The Urban Poor During the 1971 census there were nearly fifty thousand people in the city who could not even afford the luxury of such a slum shelter. The ugly and brutalised tragedy that we all see everyday on the pavements is not anything unreal and detached from our life and society. In one word they are the unfortunate victims of diverse kinds^ of physical and social crisis amidst our rural and urban societies. The overwhelming majority of them come from the rural areas and the reasons for their migration to the city are also known to us. We will have to go to the roots of our agrarian crisis—the rapid impoverishment of the peasantry because of higher land-man ratio, the growing landlessness, the perennial drought and flood conditions., the low productivity of the soil and all kinds of natural and socio-economic vagaries of rural life.etc.are the major factors that force the peasants to leave their hearth and homes to seek a miserable life on the pavements of Calcutta.8 A survey of the CMDA4 revealed that the highest percentage of the city's pavement dwellers were casual day labourers(21.2 percent) followed by beggars (20 5 percent), thelawalas, maid servants.rickshaw pullers vegetable or food sellers, hawkers, rag pickers and so op. Thus most of these lowest grade citizens are not superfluous people living on charity but earn their right to stay in the city the hard way. The city needs them. According to the authority of the Relief and Rehabilitation Department, Government of West Bengal, the number of present displaced population within the Corporation area can be safely estimated at seven lakhs.6 The Metropolitan District will have this number multiplied several times over. A vast majority of these people who came in waves since the partition of the country in 1947, fall in the lowest 85 percent we have referred to earlier. Only a handful have been fortunate enough to lift themselves to the upper crust of society. Calcutta is a poor man's haven. One can live here even by picking rags from overflowing garbage heaps. And there are thousands ofmisn,,, women and children who do it for a living. The petty trade in rags, old nails, broken glass, torn cloth and waste paper flourishes without shop,, without licence and without landlord to avoid dissipation and death. Then there are rickshaw-pullers, thelawalas^ maid servants, taxi c^k drivers, hawkers and thousands and thousands of workers of both sexes belonging to the unorganised sector. According to one calculation, there may be about 30,000 pushers of registered handcarts, 15,000 pullers of registered rickshaws and nearly 30,000 workers engaged in running trams, state and private buses within the city. The number of people employed in unregistered handcarts and rickshaws may be anybody's guess. The 1971 census puts the total number of workers in transport, storage and communications at one and a half lakhs. Estimates of maid