The frontiers of Calcutta witnessed a demographic revolution in every direction in the 1950s and 1960s. The city's economic deceleration, which had set in after the First World War, became more acute after 1947. Amidst an irreversible economic decay—through the 1950s and 1960s—refugees from East Pakistan and economic migrants from West Bengal's rural districts came to populate not only inner-city bustees and squatter colonies in the city, but also places beyond the city's civic limits. A report published in the Economic Weekly in 1954, for instance, noted how vacant stretches of land outside the city, between Dum Dum and Barasat, came to be populated by refugee squatter groups in the early 1950s:

Besides claiming land by invoking the Lockean logic of individual labour and self-improvement, these squatters and bustee dwellers—refugees and rural– urban migrants alike—contributed to the creation of an enormous and diverse fringe economy in Calcutta, which, by the 1970s, had come to be known as the ‘informal sector’ at the instance of the International Labour Organization (ILO). Every morning, people commuted to the city from these new suburbs and jabardakhal settlements to eke out a living and returned home in the evening, in suburban trains and buses. Commuting became a mass phenomenon. Along with it came informally settled marketplaces in train compartments, rail stations, tram depots, and bus terminuses.

A section of the urban poor, especially those who migrated from West Bengal's rural districts, made the sidewalks their ‘home’ and stayed there for years and decades.