Important changes in terms of class and geographical location took place within the Indian community in Durban in the 1970s. Increased access to secondary and tertiary education facilitated the emergence of a significant middle class as the UDW churned out graduates in accountancy, engineering, pharmacy, teaching and law. Many of the new professionals came from the working class and were often the very first in their family to go to university.

The city's map was also redrawn, as bulldozers uprooted homes and dumped Indians on the outer edges of the city. The NIC's political base in its old stamping grounds of the Durban CBD, Clairwood and Cato Manor was increasingly eroded as the working and lower-middle classes took up residence in Chatsworth and Phoenix, while the middle and upper classes populated areas as far afield as Reservoir Hills and Isipingo Beach. Faced with these dramatic changes in places of residence, younger members of the NIC, in seeking to move beyond workshops and peace camps, turned their focus to these new areas to the north and south of the city. In these areas thousands of people were adjusting to new conditions and struggling to rebuild their cultural and sporting organisations.

It was the long trek to work, which dominated the lives of newly minted Chatsworthians, that presented the NIC with an initial entry point.

Chatsworth bus ban of 1972

Many of the new residents of Chatsworth, 25 kilometres south of Durban, were forcibly relocated from areas close to the city. Overnight they faced the daily prospect of travelling long distances to their places of work. Chatsworth had just one arterial road, private cars were a luxury and single-lane roads were congested. For commuters to the CBD, transport times and costs doubled.

Indian bus owners moved their operations into Chatsworth as Group Areas enforcement began to erode the old Indian areas. However, in a typical apartheid-era diktat, in 1972 the Durban City Council decided to ban buses from operating between Durban and Chatsworth. The aim was to force residents to use the newly developed rail system, which they had resisted because it was difficult to access and more expensive.