Nobody Wants to Be Here

Tomorrow morning when you step out — on your two-wheeler, in your car, in the bus — do one small thing. Look around you.

Look at the goods vehicle standing next to you at the signal. The open tempo, the small truck, the vehicle that was built to carry cement and is carrying people instead. Ten of them. Fifteen. Sitting on their haunches, holding the rails, one arm around a bag. They are going to a construction site. Some days you will see children in there too.

Now look at their faces. Not the way we usually look — quickly, and then away. Look properly.

Why they are here at all#

You will notice something. These are not people who have nothing. That is the first thing we get wrong. They have families. Most of them have a small piece of land somewhere. They have a house, a village, a name that people there know. They came from the districts of Karnataka, or from further — Bihar, Odisha, Bengal, Assam. Husband and wife together, sometimes the whole family, sometimes an entire hamlet.

So here is the question I keep coming back to. Why are they here?

Ask them. Most of us have already spoken to them at some point — the mason, the helper, the man who paints your compound wall. Ask him whether he wants to be in Bengaluru.

I have never met one who said yes.

I am a Bengalurean. I write about Bengaluru because it is the city I know. But you can put any city's name in this sentence and it will still be true. The flower seller at the corner. The vegetable vendor with his cart. The boy who washes your car at six in the morning. The one who serves you in the restaurant. The one who brings your groceries in ten minutes. The porter carrying your suitcase. Ask any of them. Almost none of them want to be here.

They are here because they were pushed. The crop did not come. The rain came at the wrong time, or did not come at all. There was a loan — from a bank, or worse, from a moneylender in the next village — and the harvest that was supposed to repay it did not arrive. The loan does not wait. It grows. And so a man who owns land goes to a city where he owns nothing, to earn the money to keep the land.

That is not migration. That is evacuation.

What the exchange actually costs#

Let us do the arithmetic honestly, the way he must be doing it in his head.

He leaves behind clean air. He leaves behind water he could drink without thinking. He leaves behind food that came from soil he knows. He leaves behind sleep — because at home he slept in a house, and here he sleeps in a shed, or on the floor of a half-built flat, or on the pavement. He leaves behind rest. He leaves behind whatever peace of mind he had.

And what does he get in exchange? Ten thousand rupees. Fifteen. Twenty if the work is good and the contractor is decent.

Sources: Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, Tackling Labor Exploitation in the Construction Sector in India, January 2023, reporting a Population Council survey conducted June–August 2022 · Karnataka minimum wage notification for Building and Other Construction Works, Zone 1, FY 2025–26 · Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Performance Audit on Welfare of Building and Other Construction Workers in Karnataka, Report No. 2 of 2025 · Ministry of Labour & Employment reply in the Rajya Sabha, cess position as on 31 March 2024. The man's own estimate and the survey agree. Both sit well below the wage the state has notified for him.

Most of it goes straight back home. To the loan. To the interest. To the fees. Whatever is left is what he lives on.

He has not moved up. He has not prospered. He is not building anything for himself. He is running — hard, every single day — to stay exactly where he already was.

That is the part I want you to sit with. Not the poverty. The invisibility. In our city, a person can work for ten years, build four buildings with his own hands, and remain completely unknown to everybody who lives in them. He has no permanent address. He has no stable place. Nobody will notice if he is not there tomorrow.

So they build their own protection. Have you seen how they cluster? Same district, same language, same village, all in one corner. That is not because they don't want to mix with us. That is because a group of your own people is the only safety net available to a person the city has not accounted for. During the day, the city gives him work. At night, the city gives him nothing — and then only his own people stand between him and whatever happens.

And the children they leave behind#

Most of them have left their children behind.

The children are with the grandparents. Or with the women of the family who could not move. Somebody in the village is raising them, and their parents see them twice a year, if the work allows.

And when the family does come together — when you see the children in that tempo, or playing in the mud outside the site — then the question becomes worse, not better. Because what is that child's school? What is that child's future going to look like?

We are, quietly and without anybody deciding it, producing the next generation of exactly the same thing.

Purchasing power, or opportunity?#

Here is what I actually want to ask, and I want to ask it plainly.

Should education be a matter of purchasing power, or a matter of opportunity? Should healthcare? Should a safe place to sleep? Should the basic dignity of not having to worry, every single day, about survival?

Please understand what I am not saying. I am not asking that everything be given free to everybody. I am not asking for a system where people receive their needs and never have to work. That is not respect. That is a different kind of insult.

I am asking for something else. I am asking for systems in which a person can be a respectable participant. Where he works, earns, contributes, raises his children, and is treated as a partner — not as a problem to be managed, and not as a cost to be minimised.

Is that not the bare minimum a system owes the people who live inside it?

The system is not only the government#

When I say "system," everybody immediately hears "government." And yes — government is the biggest part of it. The most important part.

But it is not the whole of it.

There is another system, and I think it has failed us more quietly and more completely. The education system.

Our education system was supposed to produce people. Instead it produced candidates. We taught marks. We taught ranks. We taught how to get a seat, then a job, then a promotion. What we did not teach — at all — is how to notice another human being's difficulty and feel something about it. We did not teach responsibility. We did not teach sensitivity. We did not teach how to stay standing when life goes wrong.

And service was never part of it. Service, in our upbringing, became something you do out of your surplus. Once you are settled. Once you have extra. It was never taught as a normal, ordinary part of being alive.

Now the harder part#

I know the objection, because I have heard it, and honestly, I have thought it.

"That fellow in the shed drinks. He spends on his addiction. His family suffers because of his own habits. Why should I involve myself? Why should I care about his family when he himself does not care about his family?"

All right. Let us be fair, then. Let us apply the same standard to ourselves.

How many times today did you pick up your phone knowing you should not have? How long did you scroll? You knew. You knew while you were doing it. Did you stop?

What are the things you do, regularly, that you know are not good for you? Not one or two. Make an honest list.

I am not saying these are the same thing. They are not. His habit destroys his family and mine only wastes my evening. But that difference is not because I have more character than him. That difference is because I have a soft life with soft consequences, and he does not.

Because look at where the addiction comes from. Almost always, it is an exit. It is a way of not being present for a problem that has no solution in front of you. And then, after some time, the exit itself becomes the problem, and now he has two.

Was he ever taught how to face difficulty without running? Was he ever taught anything at all about how to hold himself together? No. Neither were we. We simply had less to hold together.

So it comes back to the same place. Education. Have we built people who can stand in front of difficulty? Or have we only built people who can pass examinations?

About Karnataka's welfare schemes — honestly#

I want to say something that may surprise people who assume I am against welfare.

I am not.

The Shakti scheme, under which women travel free on the ordinary government buses anywhere in Karnataka. Gruha Lakshmi, the two thousand rupees a month to the woman who heads the household. Gruha Jyothi, the free electricity. Anna Bhagya, the rice. Whatever people argue about the economics of it — and people will argue, endlessly — I have seen what that money and that bus pass actually do in a household that is barely holding on. It keeps a family standing. That is not a small thing. That is a real thing, and it is good in itself.

My problem is not that we give. My problem is what happens after.

Because if a family receives that support for five years, and ten years, and fifteen years, and at the end of it their situation is exactly what it was on day one — then something has failed. Not them. The design.

And I want to put this carefully, because it is easy to say it wrongly. I am not saying the poor must prove themselves worthy of help. I am saying the opposite. I am saying the system owes them more than survival.

That is what welfare should be. Not an endpoint. A perpetually progressing, perpetually value-creating cycle, where today's beneficiary becomes tomorrow's contributor, and the whole thing keeps moving forward.

Welfare is the responsibility of the state. Absolutely. But the welfare of people is also a commitment that we, as citizens, have to carry. I will not call it an obligation — we pay tax on everything, and we have every right to expect delivery. But what the government is doing is not enough. It cannot be enough. And to stand around blaming the government while the suffering is right there in front of us, on our own street — that is not citizenship. That is not even decent.

So what can I actually do?#

Let me be concrete, because "reflect on it" is not an answer.

I might have money. I might spend on my luxuries, and there is nothing wrong with that — I earned it. But when I walk out of a restaurant having spent five or ten thousand rupees on dinner for four, and there is somebody outside selling a five-rupee pen because that is tonight's food — I am not responsible for his poverty. Let me say that clearly. I did not cause it.

But it should make me uncomfortable. If it does not make me uncomfortable, something in me has gone quiet that should not have gone quiet.

And discomfort is only useful if it turns into something. So:

1. Know who is around you. Who lives in the shed next to your building? What is his name? Where is he from? Are his children with him or somewhere else? You cannot help a person you have not bothered to know.
2. Talk to somebody who looks lost. That costs nothing. It is not charity. It is just treating a person as a person.
3. Send a fruit across. It is not that they cannot afford fruit. It is that they will not buy it, because every rupee is already promised to somebody back home. They cut themselves first, always. A small thing arriving from outside that arithmetic matters more than you think.
4. Take on one family. One hundred rupees a month. Two hundred. Whatever you can, consistently — and here is the condition: without first listing out their hundred mistakes. Not "he drinks, so no." Not "why did they have three children." Just support, without the audit.
5. Do it in your own capacity, in your own time, within your own means. Nobody is asking you to change your life. I am asking that service stop being something you do from surplus and start being something you do as a matter of course.

Which is why we started ARISE#

Everything I have written above is why the Rebuild India Foundation exists, and why we run a movement inside it called ARISE — the Association to Rebuild India through Service and Entrepreneurship.

The whole idea sits in one line: vyaktinirmaan se rashtranirmaan. The nation is rebuilt by rebuilding its people. Not by fixing the country from the top. By building the person — one at a time, and then together.

So ARISE works in the simplest possible way. Young people form a club — on their college campus, in their own area — and they meet every week to do three things: learn, serve, and earn. Nobody pays anything to take part, ever. And out of those clubs come Nurture Centres — free learning centres for children in classes six to ten, run by the club members themselves.

I want you to notice what that last part actually is. It is a direct answer to the question I raised earlier in this piece. Whose children are those Nurture Centres for? They are for exactly the children we were talking about — the ones left in the village, the ones in the shed next to your building, the ones nobody has planned a future for. And they are taught by young people who are learning, in the act of teaching them, the one thing our education system forgot to give any of us: the habit of service as a normal part of a life.

That is also my honest answer to the welfare problem. A boy comes to a Nurture Centre as someone being helped. A few years later he is in a club, teaching the next one. Beneficiary to contributor — not because we demanded it of him, but because the thing was built that way from the beginning.

We are not in politics. We are not looking for a fight with anybody, any party, any government. There is no need for it. These are not political matters. These are human matters, and they belong to all of us regardless of who we vote for.

And I will say this to whoever is in government, this party or that: I believe governments want to do good. The problem is not intention. The problem is that we have handed over every single problem in the country to the government and then sat back to grade their performance. Think about how much money the state spends on problems that would not exist if people took responsibility for their own lives and their own surroundings. That is not the government's failure. That is ours.

So the invitation is simple. Take charge of your own life. Take responsibility for the people immediately around you. Come together as small, cooperative, collaborative groups of citizens who look after their own patch and the people in it.

That is not a theory. Since 2021 it has meant this:

It is small. I know it is small against the size of what I described at the beginning of this article. But it is real, and it was built by ordinary people who decided to stop waiting.

Do that, and government works better — automatically, whoever is in charge. Do that, and we will have more health, more wealth, more happiness. Everybody survives. And more than surviving, everybody lives with dignity and with respect.

Is that not something that should be basic to everybody's existence?

I am not complaining. I am not blaming anybody. I am not putting any of this out as right and wrong. These are just things I see around me, and thoughts about what we have become while we were busy becoming successful.

But I do believe one thing without any doubt: all of us are duty-bound to work towards solutions, and not just to discuss the problems.

Think on these lines.

Come and see#

If any of this sat with you even a little, don't let it stop at a good feeling. Go and look.

Read it, and then decide. But decide something.