There is an unwritten geography to Greater Calcutta that reveals itself best around eight in the morning along a major arterial road. On one side, past the glass-and-steel
façades of Newtown’s Action Area I and II, the daily commute is a flurry of app cabs, corporate buses, and tech professionals heading into 12-hour shifts. For those of
us who moved to the city from states like Bihar where sprawling, multi-generational households are still the default norm, this corner of Calcutta feels fast, modern
and futuristic.
Yet, step across the service lanes toward the older, leafier blocks of Salt Lake
and a very different social reality takes over. Here, two-storied family houses sit behind quiet iron gates, their upper floors dark for months at a time. The children who grew up in these rooms are in Bengaluru, Mumbai, the US, London, or working in Newtown’s IT towers. What remains is a generation living in quiet solitude, and an invisible, unorganised army of workers holding the structure together.
Every morning, hundreds of women step off overcrowded minibuses and shared autos along the E.M. Bypass, arriving from Rajarhat, Bhangar, and the rural stretches of South 24 Parganas. They are not merely arriving to sweep floors or cook meals. They are stepping in as surrogate family.
Walk into any home housing an octogenarian, and you will see how urban survival currently operates: a local caregiver hired through informal neighbourhood
ayah centres, local brokers or through WhatsApp groups. She measures blood pressure, manages complex pill organisers, assists with daily mobility, and provides companionship to a generation left behind by rapid youth migration.
What has emerged in urban Bengal is a precarious, hyper-informal care economy. It is an arrangement born of necessity, yet defined by acute fragility.
For elderly residents living alone with frail health, bringing an unverified worker into their home requires an immense leap of faith. For the caregiver, the reality is equally vulnerable. Operating without formal training, health insurance, or basic safety nets, they earn erratic daily wages and are located at the absolute margins of the city’s economy.
Addressing this does not require a cumbersome State machinery or heavy-handed regulation. It requires the recognition that care work is integral to the urban social infrastructure.
Models across the country show how this transition can happen naturally. In
Bihar, the Jeevika rural livelihoods mission demonstrated that organising women into local collectives offering basic vocational skills and providing institutional backing transforms informal domestic labour into a dignified, recognised profession. Similarly, Kerala’s Kudumbashree network proved that community micro-enterprises can seamlessly deliver essential eldercare services at the municipal level, bridging the gap between local governance and vulnerable households.
For satellite townships like Newtown and older municipal areas across Calcutta, the lesson is clear. Local ward offices and township authorities could facilitate simple, community-based care-giving certification drives for neighbourhood workers. Coupled with basic municipal recognition, elderly citizens gain security and peace of mind, while caregivers secure recognised skills, fairer wages, and dignity of labour.
Newtown and Salt Lake continue to expand. But Calcutta’s long-term health will not be measured by the scale of its skyline. It will be measured by how humanely it protects its oldest residents.