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In June 2021, the Abhayudaan Foundation team visited the marginalized migrant worker settlement of Paldi Kankaj, Ahmedabad, home to 15–20 underserved families. These families, largely migrants from Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh, survive on seasonal labor—selling flowers, toys, and small goods on city footpaths. This grassroots-level field engagement wasn’t about delivering aid. It was about building empathy, listening without judgment, and laying the groundwork for dignified, long-term support.
This campaign is a living example of our core belief: real change begins by showing up.
Brief Overview
Behind the colorful roadside stalls of Ahmedabad are families living with silent strength. This project explored the lives of migrant laborers, their daily challenges, and their unvoiced struggles. With no access to education, healthcare, or identity documents, these communities live between visibility and neglect.
Why Did We Do This?
Abhayudaan Foundation believes that every act of service must begin with deep understanding. We did not want to assume what these communities need—we wanted to ask. Our goal was to witness, document, and connect—with empathy and intent.
What Did We Do?
We identified a pocket of urban migrants in Paldi Kankaj where families had settled in makeshift homes without sanitation, documentation, or public assistance. Instead of a top-down distribution model, we initiated a bottom-up dialogue: sitting with women, children, and men to understand their lives firsthand.
How Did We Do It?
Led by Tajagna Vyas and Meet Makhania, our field team spent over 4 hours with the community. We conducted direct interviews, made observational notes, and recorded stories of survival, informal employment, emotional health, and social exclusion. We listened without offering solutions—and in doing so, earned genuine insight and trust.
We documented major gaps: children lacking birth certificates, youth dropping out of school, and women working unprotected in unsafe conditions. Families spoke of being displaced from their home states due to drought, unemployment, and seasonal crisis.
We were especially struck by the resilience of women, who play the dual role of earning and caregiving, while still being invisible in social data. We found unregistered vendors, multi-generational migration patterns, and zero access to primary healthcare.
Most importantly, we left with more than stories—we left with responsibility. This is no longer their problem. It’s ours to share.
The purpose of this initiative was to gain unfiltered insight into the lives of urban migrant families, evaluate the depth of exclusion they face, and inform Abhayudaan’s mission-based programs to design more impactful, human-centered interventions.
Strategic Objectives
- Understand real-life conditions of migrant worker families in informal settlements.
- Build human trust and relationship through ethical listening.
- Identify gaps in documentation, schooling, and healthcare.
- Observe gender-specific vulnerabilities in economic and domestic labor.
- Evaluate living conditions and access to sanitation and water.
- Recognize emotional and mental wellness indicators.
- Study informal trade behaviors among women and children.
- Collect firsthand migration stories to guide future research.
- Train field volunteers in compassionate, non-transactional outreach.
- Record legal and identity-related challenges affecting access to benefits.
- Prepare ground for documentation camps and mobile education kits.
- Connect with children and identify interest in learning.
- Build rapport for long-term engagement under Mission Sahyog.
- Understand how systemic poverty sustains generational exclusion.
- Create a replicable model of field engagement based on empathy and depth.
- Location: Paldi Kankaj, Ahmedabad
- Families Reached: 15–20
- Team Members:
- Tajagna Vyas – Founder
- Meet Makhania – Core Volunteer
- Visit Duration: 4+ Hours
- States Represented: Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh
- Top Issues Identified:
- No birth certificates or Aadhaar for children
- No school linkage or early dropout risk
- Informal vending without legal protection
- Poor living and health conditions
- Lack of access to safe water or sanitation
This project helped us connect with over 20 individuals living at the margins. The community’s trust allowed us to see beyond what reports or surveys can show. We didn’t walk in with checklists—we walked in with curiosity and left with clarity.
We learned how families live without any documentation, unable to access government schemes or medical services. Young children work beside their mothers because they’ve never been enrolled in school. No health center is nearby, and no official record even marks their existence. This project has influenced the direction of Mission Sahyog (our mission for responsive care) and Mission Swayam (self-reliance and daily habit change). We’re now planning documentation support drives, mini-campaigns for child learning kits, and mobile health checkups in collaboration with local partners. We also saw the emotional impact of exclusion—hopelessness in parents, resignation in women, and silence in children. These are not people in need of charity. They are people in need of recognition and access. Internally, this visit has trained our volunteers in grounded field engagement. More than anything, it reminded us that impact is not in what we give—it’s in how we connect.Enhance user experience with Advanced Tabs, allowing seamless content navigation. Organize information efficiently while keeping the interface clean and interactive. Perfect for FAQs, product details, or multi-section content.
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