Forced into construction jobs, migrants must now contend with climate change

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Editor's note: This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. One morning in October 2011, Dharmendra Ahirwar stepped off a train at Nizamuddin station, clutching his mother’s hand. The 13-year-old’s eyes nervously tracked his younger sister walking beside him. They followed their father who was trying to navigate the family through the crowd.    Two nights earlier, the Ahirwar family sat under a peepal tree in the courtyard of their one-room house in a village in Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh. “I could sense that we were struggling,” says Dharmendra, now 24, recalling that day. “That night, my father said we would have to go to Delhi to earn. Some people had told him that the city offered a lot of work.”  Dharmendra remembers asking his mother whether they were actually going to leave the village. She nodded in affirmation. “I was so anxious that I could not sleep for several nights after leaving the village. But leaving was a compulsion,” he says. “There was no work left in the village, we would have died of poverty.”  The family packed their stuff in …