Comfort, Control, Career: A Peek Into Tamil Nadu’s Thozhi Working Women’s Hostels
In Tamil Nadu, migrant working women struggle to find safe and affordable accommodation in cities. The state-run Thozhi hostel chain offers an alternative but there just are not enough of them
For Mariamal Ganesan, 27, Chennai proved to be a portal to an independent world. But finding a home in it had not been an easy task.
The IT professional had to shift seven paying guest and hostel accommodations between 2020 to 2023, darting across the city’s map – from Saidapet to St Thomas Mount, Porur and Maduranthakam to Ayappanthangal. It cost her between Rs 5000 to Rs 6000 a month in these places to share a dormitory with five to six beds.
Remote work meant that all Mariamal needed was a home with Wifi, conveniences, and solace. But she found that windows, cupboards, space, light, and ventilation were luxuries in most working women’s hostels.
“In Chennai, you get cheap paying guest accommodations and hostels but there’s no comfort. The room is like a godown with six to seven beds cramped in one room,” she says. She now lives in a state-run Thozhi (translatable as woman friend) – a hostel chain administered by the Tamil Nadu Working Women’s Hostels Corporation (TNWWHCL) – in the green suburbs of Guduvanchery.
Comfort has finally found her, she says and there is even a window by her bed. She has to share a room with four others and the monthly rent is Rs 4000 but she feels happy and liberated, she says.
“Here, I can travel independently, nobody will question me. In my hometown in Tirunelveli, I need to ask my brother to step out of home. And to reach the nearest bus facility, we have to travel 10-20 minutes by bike or walk because we are in an SC village where no bus comes,” she says. Garbage vans don’t enter her town, there are only a few private schools, and residents go to nearby towns to access amenities.
The Guduvanchery suburban train station on the other hand is just 100 m from Thozhi and there is an auto and bus stand. “I learn so much by being independent and alone,” she says. Here, there is also the possibility of navigating the city alone or with female comrades forged outside family. For Mariamal, a bonus is the nearby cinema hall to catch the latest mass masala film.
Tamil Nadu is known for its high number of women in the workforce – the women’s labour participation in the state for the 15 and above age group is 43.2% as opposed to the national average of 41.7%, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey, in 2023-24.
“But there is a lack of enabling infrastructure that will allow women to seek decent employment. One important infrastructure would be public transport and another would be providing residential spaces close to work that can draw women from smaller villages and surrounding smaller towns,” says Kalpana Karunakaran, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology — Madras.
In Chennai alone, estimates report there are 4,000 hostels and paying guest accommodations with rent anywhere between Rs 6,000 to Rs 15,000 per month.
We found in our interviews that there is a perennial shortage of rooms in the chain, with supply far outstripping demand. As we detail later, Thozhi hostels do not necessarily come cheap – the monthly rent can be anywhere between Rs 2000 and Rs 10,000 depending on the kind of advantages each offers. This excludes a vast population of women who hold low paying jobs – in the unorganised sector for instance – and need to migrate for work.
T Valarmathi, the joint Secretary of the Social Welfare and Women Empowerment Department, that oversees the running of the hostels, says the shortages facing women seeking accommodation in Thozhi can be traced to a resource crunch.
“The initial payments for the hostels were made by the state and it is 60:40 ratio, with the Union covering 60%. We have applied under the Sakhi Niwas and Nirbhaya Fund to recover the money but have yet to do so,” she says. (The Sakhi Niwas Scheme under the overarching central Mission Shakti promotes the creation of accommodation for working women. The Nirbhaya Fund aims to implement initiatives to enhance the safety and security for women.)
Activist Shalin Maria Lawrence highlights the need for these hostels to be affordable and uniform in costs across districts, especially for women from marginalised communities. “The state government gets a 60% subsidy for this scheme from the Centre. If it costs more than a private entity despite this, what is the use? It is more like a business entity than a welfare entity. It should be free or minimally priced,” she points out, adding that as a government-run hostel, Thozhi must prioritise affordability and access for applicants from economically-backward communities. As for students from marginalised backgrounds who seek an education in the city, she believes state-run lodging spaces should be free.
High Demand, Low Vacancy
For all the challenges, for women who come to alien cities in search of a livelihood, hostel camaraderie can be energising and supportive, says Kalpana.
“This space also would be a whole new universe that opens up with the opportunity to live away from home, and family. There is the possibility of being able to afford things you might want to buy, and have small adventures in the company of other hostel mates. For a young woman who has lived with her family till this point, it will give a taste of mobility, capacity, and explore a new city or living space by herself,” she says.
Inaugurated in 2023, the Thozhi hostel chain was marketed as one such place, a ‘home away from home’. These hostels aimed to “address the accommodation needs of working women who travel from different Districts and States for employment, training and on official visit”.
There are currently 13 hostels in the chain, and the state government has announced 10 more in districts including Kanchipuram, Erode, Karur, and Ranipet at an estimated cost of Rs 77 crore. According to NewsMinute, three more hostels will be established in Chennai, Madurai, and Coimbatore with priority given to women from SC, ST, MBC, OBC, and religious minority communities. In the 2024 budget, the state had allocated Rs 26 crore for the Thozhi scheme.
These government-run hostels also contain amenities like creche services, lifts, entry with biometrics, and Wifi services, geysers, and so on. In Chennai, BehanBox found the hostels were mostly occupied, with no vacancies except for the newest one in Ayanambakkam. In Tiruchi, working women have demanded more hostels, flagging lack of vacancy and high demand but in Vellore, lack of awareness left the rooms empty.
A monthly stay in Thozhi could cost anywhere between Rs 2,000 to Rs 10,000, not including food expenses. This variation is determined by location, the choice between a dormitory and a room, the number of inmates sharing a room, and amenities such as ACs and beds. For instance, as per the Thozhi website, the most affordable stay is at Villupuram, where an non AC four-bed dormitory costs Rs 2000. The most expensive lodging is at Tambaram where a twin-sharing AC room comes at a rent of Rs 10,620.
Across districts, the amenities – lifts, airconditioning, creche – varies. In Ayanambakkam and Coimbatore, the only options are four bunkbed non-AC dormitories at Rs 3500. One meal costs Rs 40 to Rs 60 a day, which may come up to Rs 4000 a month on food expenses.
There are short-stay options, for say 15 days, but then the rent is high — between Rs 350 to Rs 1,200 a day. For the latter, a woman could end up paying Rs 18000 for 15 days. “This fare does not include food and can be a burden for someone coming from the districts in search of employment in the city or for one working as a grey collar worker,” flags a report in The Hindu.
Kalpana argues for subsidies for those who cannot afford Thozhi’s rents. “For those who are desperately seeking the space and can’t afford it, the government needs to consider some subsidy,” she says.
Currently, Valarmathi says, Tambaram and Tirunelveli are the most occupied with 461 out of 473 beds occupied for the former, and 100% occupancy in the 60-bed hostel for the latter. “In Ayanmbakkam, there are issues of low occupancy owing to connectivity, and in Villlupuram and Vellore, it is due to being set in tier-two cities,” adds the bureaucrat.
Places Of Safety But Also Tyranny
Working women’s hostels first started coming up in India in the 1970s, when an attempt was being made to address the “problem of lack of safe accommodation and security,” according to a paper by Ambedkar University scholar Pooja Satyogi titled ‘Working Women’s Hostels in India: A Short History’. It highlights how the sixth five-year plan, 1980-85, was envisaged with a thrust on Women-in-Development (WID) paradigm, soon after the declaration of 1975-95 as the UN decade for Women.
“The WID approach was premised on integrating women in the development process and that as a human resource, there was a need for better utilization of their capabilities for economic development. WID approach carried with it the goals of education, employment, equality, and empowerment; in the Indian context it was the first two that received immediate attention in the eighties, with an explicit focus on the removal of poverty as the government’s flagship programme,” says the paper.
Valarmathi says that working women’s hostels in Tamil Nadu too go back to the 1970s. They were then run by the social welfare department. “Back then, the rent was Rs 200. They weren’t properly maintained, and often inaccessible in terms of connectivity to the city and public transport,” says Valarmathi. Taken over by Thozhi, some of these older buildings were retrofitted, and upgraded such as the ones in Adyar, Pudukottai, Thoothukudi districts.
While boosting women’s employment and economic development, housing also has implications for their shelter and safety. “From birth to the time of marriage, a woman’s security and shelter are considered to be the responsibility of her natal family. Once married, she secures housing through her husband, as a new member of the conjugal family,” writes Josephine Varghese in ‘Negotiating Discourses of Womanhood in India: An Ethnographic Study of Young Women in a Chennai Hostel’. Yet, as most working women know all too well, challenges pepper their pursuit for safe housing spaces, outside of family.
Academics Rama Melkote and Susie J Tharu investigated the protests erupting in working women’s hostels in the early 1980s. The agitation was against the arbitrary eviction of hostelers, and to seek better food, facilities, repairs, and the resignation of “tyrannical” wardens.
As Josephine writes, women were expected to settle for the basic minimum at hostels in exchange for “protection”, the overarching concern of families and communities. “For a woman, marriage offers status, security, shelter and, above all, a certain virtue. A single woman, however, has to prove her virtue constantly, to struggle for shelter and security. And it is this social and physical security that the working women’s hostels are supposed to provide. What a hostel resident pays for, therefore not really food and board but the respectability the institution provides her. A good hostel is not so much one where the living conditions are good but one that is impeccably respectable. Once this protection is provided, the hostel management assumes that the residents will have to put up with whatever physical conditions exist,”.
Hostels can also be spaces of tyranny, protest, arbitrary evictions, bad living conditions, inadequate food, obsolete rules, and maltreatment by hostel management. While the TN Hostels and Homes for Women and Children (Regulation) Act asks owners to ensure sanitation and safety, many hostels have reportedly failed to comply. These hostels lacked basic medical kits, hygienic spaces, CCTV cameras, quality food and some lacked licenses, say news reports.
In Thozhi, women who spoke to BehanBox said they would choose this accommodation over others because it offered what seemed like a world luxury compared to PG accommodations. Many reported that their parents and guardians felt more comfortable about them living away from home after being assured that there are CCTVs and biometrics to regulate visitors into the hostels.
Leisure, Joy and Camaraderie
For Bangalore-based Kruthika P, venturing to Chennai meant leaving home for the first time. It was her pursuit of a PhD in oral cancer – which runs in her family – that led her to a university in the city and the dream of a career in teaching.
Over the past eight months, Mariamal and Kruthika’s friendship has cemented and grown deeper with conversations around work, the need to take care of oneself, and loneliness. Outside the campus, their evenings are spent feeding biscuits to the six-odd stray dogs in the area.
Solitude, space and self-refection become their everyday lives. “As a PhD student, I come to the hostel with a lot of questions about myself and my work. I sit on the second-floor balcony with a cup of coffee and rethink everything. It gives me personal space and moments of self-realisation. I also need fresh air to beat the summer heat,” Krutika says.
Meenakshi, 27, who stays at the Adyar Thozhi hostels, revels in the solitude offered by the banyan trees in the courtyard. It is here that she watches people, takes a moment off and breathes. “Beyond work hours, we need a peaceful space to return to, sleep well so we can return to work the next day. Here, I don’t need to depend on anyone. Back home, there is a lot of housework and emotional work,” she says.
To aid autonomy, Thozhi also has monthly meetings, and the chance to express dissatisfaction to wardens, says Meenakshi. In Ayanbakkam, complaints were made regarding the lack of street lights just outside the campus, and the corporation will soon fix this issue, said the warden and residents. In Adyar, the food vendors were changed following complaints, and several women have urged the authorities for an AC to deal with the city’s heat. Valarmathi counters that some old buildings lack the facility to set up ACs.
With amenities like security, biometrics, and CCTVs on each floor, most women expressed safety, one described it as “a fortress”. For Mariamal, this is the safest place where “nobody can enter. if you stayed on other PGs, you would have seen plumbers come in and open doors and come inside without even saying anything. Here, the warden informs one hour in advance and people ring the bell and ask permission.”
What about excessive surveillance, we asked. “Hostels can become spaces of surveillance. We have to be context dependent as the question of what looks like safety and not surveillance will vary depending on who is answering questions, the women’s experiences, and locality, says Kalpana. “The space must be sensitively defined and [they must] understand that these women are adults and can make up their minds about what goes on in their lives. These are also democratic spaces where we don’t feel we have to keep them safe, lock them up, or cage them.”
It’s a thin line to tread, she admits.
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