Language, Livelihoods And The City Built By Migrants

Mumbai’s recent drive to enforce working knowledge of Marathi among autorickshaw and taxi drivers has already altered the city’s commuting patterns. Drivers are changing routes to avoid checks near stations and commercial centres, some are temporarily withdrawing vehicles, and pockets of the city are reporting shortages. The policy is framed as a practical step toward better communication between drivers and passengers. The question is whether it is practical in the city as it actually exists.

Mumbai was built on the labour of migrants. The Kamathis who arrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries laid the physical foundations of the city, its buildings, roads and reclaimed ground.

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In the 1990s, another wave of contractors, many of them Shettys, took over large parts of the construction industry and shaped the skyline of the liberalisation years. The city’s business and stock markets have long operated in Gujarati; that fact requires little elaboration. Language has never been the sole adhesive of this place. Contribution has.

If working knowledge of Marathi is to be a condition of operating a public service vehicle, the infrastructure to acquire that knowledge must exist and function. Training programmes were conducted. Yet thousands of videos that circulated from those sessions made one point difficult to ignore: much of what was taught was not the colloquial Marathi of daily Mumbai conversation.

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Formal or literary registers do not help a driver negotiate a fare or explain a route change in traffic. When the government’s own training facilities stop and drivers are told to arrange tutorials themselves, the gap between mandate and means becomes obvious.

Regional Transport Offices have finite enforcement capacity. In a city whose public transport system still leaves large lastmile gaps, the men and women who drive autos and taxis perform a function the formal network has not fully replaced.

Directing that capacity toward underage driving, vehicle fitness or other clear threats to public safety would serve a more immediate public purpose than testing conversational ability on workers already providing an essential service.

Language requirements are not inherently unreasonable. But in a city built by successive waves of migrants and still dependent on their labour for both its skyline and daily mobility, any such requirement must be matched by accessible, practical training in the language people actually speak on the street.

Without that, the policy risks producing shortages and friction while leaving the original communication problem only partially addressed.

Ankieta Kothari is the founder of The Bombay Blueprint, a public platform chronicling Mumbai’s architecture, heritage, and evolving urban landscape

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