Living off grass blades in the national capital

She is sitting on a big bundle of dry grass amidst a rather appalling scene of destruction. Broken bamboo sticks, torn tarpaulin sheets, plywood planks, rope pieces, crumpled sarees, household utensils, mud-soiled clothes and other everyday items lie in complete disarray. This is the place they called home. It still is. But looks very different a couple of days after the Delhi Development Authority’s bulldozers flattened their makeshift houses. Rita Devi’s was one among the 10 to 15 huts within this settlement in the census town of Chilla Saroda Khadar.

She, however, looks quite unfazed as she holds in one hand a flat, golden-brown leaf blade of grass, about an inch wide, and rips it into two or three thinner strips with a sickle that she is holding in another. A bulldozer at the door is neither new nor any longer scary for her or any of the people in her settlement near the Yamuna Kshetra, where the government plans to develop one of the six biodiversity parks in Delhi. “Yah zameen sarkari hai isliye to zhuggi-vuggi tod deta hai. Patte par zameen yah vahi log saal bhar ke liye lete hai jo kheti karte hai. [The land belongs to the government, so they break our huts. Only those who cultivate take the land on lease for a year.]”

“This happened when we were near Akshardham also,” Rita says. “Someone was cleaning the fish, and a crow took some of the fish waste inside the temple. So, they demolished the entire jhuggi [settlement]. That was in 2015. Then we came to this neighbourhood in Chilla Khadar. Here also 4-5 times the same thing has happened. But we are staying here.” Her family has built a small 8X10 feet room on the land she is renting for 500 rupees a month.

“We give the rent to a Gujjar guy. His is name is Rajveer. He stays in Chilla only. This land was already sold to the government by his grandfather. They even got compensation for it. But he still claims he owns this land. He beats and threatens us poor folk and extracts money,” says Rita. “Tumhara khet, tumhari zameen, tu jaan. Hamara to rahene se matlab hai [Your field, your land, you know better. What do we care? We just want a place to stay]. We never make pucca houses. Who will keep making a new house every time they demolish?” She is tying the strips of grass she cut into one small bundle.

Rita’s family has managed to put back the two side walls of their hut and a plastic roof after the latest demolition drive. Most of the people in the settlement are daily wage migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Rita herself is from Bihar’s Supaul district. She has been in Delhi since 1993 when her parents moved from Baspiti village to Delhi in search of livelihood. About 9.3 million people from Bihar migrate to other states for the same reason, according to the 2011 census. Rita belongs to the Mallah, a fishing community also known as Nishad and Dhimar, now listed as a Scheduled Caste in Bihar.

Many from the settlement are engaged in wage labour or cultivation near the Yamuna riverbed. Others sell fruits, ice cream, sugarcane juice around Mayur Vihar Phase-I. Some work as security guards and domestic workers at the Samachar Apartments. Rita and her family of five make a living off the grass she is cutting into thin strips outside her ramshackle house.

It’s called patera (Typha elephantina, popularly known as elephant grass) she says, speaking in Hindi. “It grows on its own in the forests. You do not need any seeds or manure. All who are in agriculture know of this.” There are many uses of this tropical grass species including, in pest control, paper pulp production, making bio-oil and bio-gas, and feeding livestock. Even Ayurveda claims to put its medicinal properties to use in healing various ailments. But Rita and her family gather and sell this to the farmers and vegetable vendors who use it to tie greens in bundles before taking them to the mandi.

“Patera is used to tie green leafy vegetables like palak [spinach], methi [fenugreek], kalami [water spinach], sarson [mustard leaves], bathua [wild spinach] and all. If you notice carefully while buying these vegetables in the market, you will find that they are tied with patera grass only.

“The grass is long, almost five to seven feet,” Rita explains. “And even while it is found through all seasons, it is of no use to us during monsoon. We get no patera work between Bhado and Ashwini [roughly between August and October] since the plants wilt in the rains.”

Rains bring even more miseries for them living in the low-lying areas in the flood plains of Yamuna. Every monsoon, if she does not go back to her village, she has to shift like others from the settlement, to living under the blue line metro bridge that connects the New Ashok Nagar station to Mayur Vihar – 1 on the main road, about a kilometre away. A 10-15 minutes’ walk from where she lives, life from under this bridge, looks different. Asphalt roads, concrete houses, shops, schools, hotels and malls surround it. And right opposite is the entrance, a rather broad muddy slope leading into a green patch in the middle of this metropolis.

A walk through that opposite lane, crossing the desolate open spaces surrounded by trees all around, and a couple of open drains, eventually leads to the few migrant settlements of Chilla Khadar. They sit at a little distance from each other, separated on regional lines – Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal. Rita lives with people from her state – Bihar. A report published in 2023 by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies says that about 22 per cent out of the total migrant population in Delhi comes from Bihar, the second highest after Uttar Pradesh at 50 per cent.

Rita was really young when she came to Delhi. “I was hardly five,” she says. “Then we used to stay near Akshardham. Then also we lived in makeshift huts.” She does not want to leave this place. “Here there is this open space, there is patera, I get enough firewood, the rent is less. Why would anyone go back? There is nothing back there in my village today.”

She has been doing the same work that her parents did in Delhi. “When my parents came came here, they found out about patera. They brought a sickle and started working. Go where it grows, bring it home, cut it, sell it, go there again…” Now there are five of them doing the same work: Rita, 37, her husband Shambhu, 40, two sons Okil, 20 and Sushil, 18 and her daughter Radha, 16.

“When all of us work together we make about 1,000 rupees in a day,” Rita says. “But rice, pulses, vegetables, everything has become very expensive. And if we eat fish someday, then more money goes into buying it and then spices, oil, gas cylinder – everything adds up. At the end of the day, we hardly save 300 rupees.

“And if you add up each and every expense, you will realise we do not even earn 10,000 rupees in a month. Almost 3,500 of that goes towards milk alone. Add to it tea leaves, sugar, ginger… When you have a family, it [income] seems very little. Clothes, medicine, food every other thing has to be managed from this amount only. We hardly save anything. Even during festivals all of us cannot buy clothes. Aage tu le le, peeche hum le lenge, aaise hi chalata hai [This time you take, I will buy later. That is how we live],” she says.

It is May 27, 2025. Rita is going to the forest to cut patera. Two days earlier, there was unseasonal rain in the capital and today the temperature is soaring. It is around 34 degrees Celsius in the morning, but it feels like 39. A heat alert has been issued by the government regarding the rising temperature and people have been advised to restrict themselves from going out of their homes. Rita knows that none of this is for her because if she does not step out her family will go hungry.

She walks about a kilometre and half in the direction of the forest to cut patera every day, carrying a water bottle in hand. Her daughter Radha, carrying a sickle in her hand, accompanies her. Rita knows that this work is not for a single woman. Most of the time Radha and younger son Sushil help her. Today Sushil has promised to join them later.

Rita has to cross more than one enclosed field to reach the patera growing in the open areas behind. The water in that area looks almost waist-deep after last few days’ rains. Neither the smell, the slush around the area, nor the sight of the turbid water with small insects floating around deter Rita from entering it. She leaves her worn-out sky-blue slippers at the edge and walks inside the water with a tarpaulin sheet in hand.

Radha in the meanwhile has already disappeared among the tall grass and is only seen when she returns with a bundle of cut patera on her head. Sushil arrives in time to help her take the bundle down and spread it on the open field nearby. “The water is always knee deep. The Yamuna water floods this area. Apart from thorny bushes, there are many other things, we wade through it all. You can’t imagine how dirty the water is. What all we do for our stomachs,” says Rita.

Both mother and daughter make multiple trips like this for the next couple of hours. They go inside the waist-deep waters, cutting the patera, carrying it in little bundles of about 10 kilos over their head, and spreading it to dry in the field. After the grass is dry, they make bigger bundles, this time of about 30 to 40 kilos each and come home where they cut the grass into thin strips.

The razor-sharp leaves of patera can cut through your fingers. Rita shows some marks on her hands. “See, all these marks are from those cuts only. If we get cut, we do some home remedy. If it pains a lot, we put some hot oil. It will go. Yamuna mai takes all our wounds and pains away.

“Only when we get high fever, we take an injection or medicine. And we never go to a government one,” says Rita. “We go to a private one in Chilla village itself. There are one or two doctors, jhola chaap [self-proclaimed medical practitioners], who come here. We get our pills from them for 50-100 rupees. I wonder if they just give us those because they think we are poor. Whatever it is, it works for us.”

The dry patera is cut and tied into small bundles. “We sell one bunch for 10 rupees to the farmers.” Every morning Rita’s day begins at 4 a.m. when they tie the cut patera and load it on the cycle rickshaw that her husband Shambhu Mukhiya owns and rides. By 8 o’clock everyone is out. Rita and her children finish the house work and head towards the forest, Shambhu is out to sell the grass. He travels anywhere between 3 to 25 kilometres from Chilla Khadar with 100 kilos of patera on his cart and goes to farms and mandis. And yet not everything gets sold.

"We go all the way to UP and Haryana,” says Shambhu. “If it doesn’t sell, we have to pull it back. Often, we don’t get food on time. We have to go to the city if we want to eat. Now when we go far away to earn 1,000 rupees, and then we spend 500 on food and drink, our earnings are halved. The day we can’t sell, we come back hungry.” He returns home by 10 in the night.

Meanwhile, their existence in this census town is very fragile and yet another demolition can be round the corner at any time. A census town is not notified statutorily nor administered as a town. It is one that meets some urban characteristics such as a minimum population of 5,000; a density of 400 persons per square kilometres; and where at least 75 per cent of male workers are no longer in agriculture.

In the middle of gruelling life circumstances Rita has managed to educate her children. The eldest Okil Kumar has completed Class 12, Sushil dropped out after Class 9, and Radha has studied till Class 8. “I was married when I was 12. Here my youngest brother was born and there I was getting married. These days people get married when they are 20-22, even at 25. I had three children by then. I was very fond of studying but never got a chance,” she says.

Rita’s only encounter with education was through a few women social workers who used to come into the basti to teach children in the afternoons. She studied in that informal way for just six months before she moved to stay with her husband. “But today because of those madams I know how to write my name, the names of my family members, everything. I know!” She hurriedly picks up a diary and a pen to demonstrate it for me.

What I see is a proud smile writ all over her face.

This story was originally reported in Hindi