(ET)
The lanes, brick-paved and narrow, are littered with human and animal waste. At first glance, the area just looks like a vast cluster of unplanned construction. The quaint order in the way the streets are laid, houses set and the inner courtyards designed, hint at an old village that has grown into an urban sprawl called Naraich, in Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, the world’s most famous symbol of royal romance. In the Mughal era, this region was the centre of sword-making. The legacy has evolved into a cluster of foundries casting metal into pipes and manhole covers.
A large number of people from Naraich work in shoe factories or the foundries across the highway abutting it. Hundreds of others run tiny enterprises such as lathes, pattern making and shoe crafting from their homes catering to the foundries and other factories in the city. These home enterprises, a number of them unapproved, have been badly hit — first by demonetisation and later, by introduction of the goods and services tax, which brought them into the confines of formal industry.
