BehanVox: To Find A Hostel Of One’s Own
This week in BehanVox: women in Kochi's coastal villages contend with tidal flooding, UK parliament votes to decriminalise abortion, and more
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As a Guardian columnist put it pithily, global fates are in the hands of three angry old men who could get us all killed. There is no knowing which way the conflicts ravaging the world are going but we are keeping our fingers crossed that the angry old men will see sense soon and put an end to the endless suffering, death and loss this aggression is costing.
This week we bring you another story on the shortages affecting urban accommodation for single migrant women workers in India. And a look at how women are dealing with the rising instances of tidal flooding in Kochi’s coastal villages.
Story So Far
When they left their home in Kerala to join a Delhi coaching centre, Hiba and Teertha, both 21, knew that the biggest hurdle would be finding a place to stay that their parents approved of. “Until we find a place with full security, you’re not going,” they had been forewarned.
What the two found were mostly depressingly pokey paying guest (PG) rooms that were often cramped, poorly ventilated rooms and packed with three to six beds. It was a college senior who recommended a government-run working women’s hostel near their coaching centre. The place was clean, well-maintained, and livable — and most importantly, it convinced their parents of its safety.
“We’re well taken care of,” Hiba explained. “But we’re also living under a curfew. If we’re late, our guardians get a call—that’s their way of ensuring we’re ‘safe.’”
These stories mirrored almost exactly the experiences of Mariamal and Kruthika, who featured in Archita Raghu’s recent report for BehanBox on the demand supply problem with the TN state-run Thozhi hostel chains. But Anuj Behal and Suchak Patel’s story this week is built around the problem of accommodation for migrant women workers at a national scale.
Working women normally have a far harder time than this when seeking housing. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of women migrating for work in India increased by 101%—more than double the growth rate for men(48.7%). Yet despite this surge, housing in Indian cities remains fundamentally exclusionary because it is primarily designed for families living in apartments, independent homes, or gated housing societies.
In the absence of accessible private accommodation, women often find themselves navigating a deeply biased rental market where prejudices based on caste, religion, regional identity, and sexuality are common. The lack of a reliable support network further compounds the difficulties women face while relocating to unfamiliar cities or industrial clusters for the first time.
According to information received by BehanBox through an RTI response from the Ministry of Women and Child Development in May 2025, India has only 525 government-run Sakhi Niwas shelters, with a total capacity of 42,230 beds for working women—a critical shortfall considering the millions of migrant women across the country.
Read the story here.
Across several low lying coastal villages of Kochi – Kumbalangi, Edavanakkad, Puthenvelikkara, Ezhikkara, Vypin, Edakochi – rising and unexpected tidal floods are disrupting the everyday lives of people, especially women.
One of them is Sandhya, a 46-year-old domestic worker employed in Kochi city. She has to wake up at 4 am to finish her household chores before she leaves for work at 6:30 am. She has no time to clean the debris brought in by the tide in the morning.
“Only after the water recedes can I clean the house. If I wait for it, how will I make it to work?” she asks. As soon as she returns from her exhausting work day, without a moment’s rest, Sandhya dives straight into cleaning her home. It takes her a couple of hours to do this but she knows it is futile effort because the next tide is around the corner.
Geetha, a Dalit resident of Edakochi in Ernakulam, who works as a sweeper in the Kochi Corporation, again has to negotiate the grimy flood waters.
“The road from my house to Aquinas college (500 meters) remains flooded in the morning on most days. I have to hitch up my saree up and walk, else it gets completely wet,” says Geetha. She says can feel the grit and debris of the remnants of last night’s tide that never receded fully swirling around her ankles.
But a kind resident who lives close to her college, puts out a bucket for her to wash her feet. “I have neither seen her nor know her name. But she understands our daily struggle,” says Geetha.
For the past five years, Equinoct, an initiative that designs scientific solutions for climate change, has been working with the women in the flood-prone communities to build solutions and resilience. It trains them to map the tidal floods and how they are rising. Even as the women struggle to cope with the daily crisis that the waters bring, they are beginning to get a measure of exactly how it unfolds and where.
Read the story here.
Talking Point
Facial Recognition Must: It is now mandatory for Anganwadi workers to ensure that beneficiaries of the government’s flagship nutrition and childcare programme are verified using facial recognition technology. The initiative, which is facing resistance from ground-level workers, will apply to young mothers, pregnant women, adolescent girls and children who benefit from mid-day meal schemes.
Decriminilising Abortion: This week the British parliament voted to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales. The existing legislation that dates back to the mid-19th century was being used against a growing number of women for terminating pregnancies, Reuters reported. Abortions have been legal in England and Wales but only up to 24 weeks and with the approval of two doctors. Women could face criminal charges for defying the rule and the offence carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Last Mile: Nina Kuscsik, 86, who campaigned for women’s inclusion in long-distance running in the US, is no more. She won the Boston Marathon the very first year women were officially allowed to enter the race in 1972. According to AP, she was also the first woman to enter the New York race, in 1970, one of the “Six who Sat” – six women who refused to start the ’72 New York City Marathon for 10 minutes to protest an Amateur Athletic Union rule that the women’s race had to be separate from the men’s. She won that year and the next year as well.
Containing ‘Children’: It is bad enough that women are constantly infantilised by people in power, politicians, judges and administrative figures. Now the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Mohan Yadav, has gone and turned married adult couples into “children” who need to be reined in. In the wake of the Raja Raghuvanshi murder case, here is what Yadav had to say, presumably on the couple’s decision to honeymoon in Meghalaya: “When two families come together through marriage, things need to be thought through very minutely. Letting children go so far also needs to be thought about.”
BehanVox Recommends
Precarity and proof: In this long read, Anuj Behal writes of how residents in Delhi’s alums are turning to online shopping to secure housing tenure, document evidence of their existence and these spaces, and the history of evictions.
Homecoming: Kavitha Iyer chronicles how 52 families of the Jenu Kuruba Adivasi community marched back into Karnataka’s Nagarhole tiger reserve in May, after being forcibly evicted decades ago.
Loneliness epidemic: The Pudding channel, in this video, captures how people spend 24 hours of a typical weekend day in 2021, examines surveys and data to understand the effects of the pandemic on isolation.
War and childhood: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s, in this piece, revisits memories of his childhood in rural Kenya, his ancestry, and life in the shadow of war. The author, a giant in modern African literature, recently passed away, in May.
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