Photo courtesy of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions."Earlier we used stay in a small hut in a slum in Shastri Nagar, Solapur city. When it rained, the hut used to leak, and there wouldn't be a single dry patch inside. We had to continuously bail out the water when it rained," says Balamani Ambaiah Mergu. She is rolling beedis, a thin cigarette, at her house at Kumbhari, the site of a housing initiative led by the Centre of Indian Trade Unions’ (CITU).
Mergu, whose mother tongue is Telugu, is one of the beedi workers who are part of the first of the housing projects in Solapur, in south-eastern Maharashtra, a state in west India. The project, named after the late communist leader Godavari Parulekar, counts 10,000 houses and was hailed as the biggest of its kind in Asia.
