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This document provides background information on a research proposal to study the impacts of slum resettlement policies in Patna, India. It discusses how slums provide important low-cost housing and services, but are often seen as illegal and targeted for removal. The proposed study will examine an existing slum site, an upgraded in-situ site, and a relocated site to analyze how resettlement affects the informal/formal city dynamic and livelihoods. Recent studies discussed show slums growing near jobs rather than the periphery, and resettlement aims to formalize housing but its impacts are complex, as it can disrupt social ties and employment.
This document provides background information on a research proposal to study the impacts of slum resettlement policies in Patna, India. It discusses how slums provide important low-cost housing and services, but are often seen as illegal and targeted for removal. The proposed study will examine an existing slum site, an upgraded in-situ site, and a relocated site to analyze how resettlement affects the informal/formal city dynamic and livelihoods. Recent studies discussed show slums growing near jobs rather than the periphery, and resettlement aims to formalize housing but its impacts are complex, as it can disrupt social ties and employment.
This document provides background information on a research proposal to study the impacts of slum resettlement policies in Patna, India. It discusses how slums provide important low-cost housing and services, but are often seen as illegal and targeted for removal. The proposed study will examine an existing slum site, an upgraded in-situ site, and a relocated site to analyze how resettlement affects the informal/formal city dynamic and livelihoods. Recent studies discussed show slums growing near jobs rather than the periphery, and resettlement aims to formalize housing but its impacts are complex, as it can disrupt social ties and employment.
[Research Proposal submitted by Abhishek Dwivedi to the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi for pursuing a M.Phil Degree]
Background of the Study Right from the Almrita Patel case of branding slums as public nuisance to the conceptualization of slums as sites of deep democracy, critical urban scholarship on the Indian city does acknowledge the resilience of informality as a way of life. Slums exemplify such a mode of living which is but a necessary evil and critical to the functioning of an informal, low-cost service provisioning in the Indian city. The very conceptualization of Slums as sites of habitation sounds problematic, if we consider the remarks made by the Supreme Court of India, in the pavement dwellers case of 1985. It states that the right to livelihood is an important facet of the right to life they who live in slums do so because they have small jobs (that) nurse the cities... they choose a slum in the vicinity of their work to cope up with the cost of money and time... It thus raises questions regarding the feasibility of slum resettlement schemes in totality, which solely aim at the removal of slums from the face of cities without considering its impacts upon the dweller. The States efforts to beautify urban spaces so as to satiate the demands of bourgeoisie environmentalism via urban cleansing thus merit a serious diagnosis.
The proposed study thus aims at analyzing the effects of resettlement slum policies in the forms of rehabilitation or in-situ up-gradation. It attempts to find out the relationship between slums as the problem and resettlement/up-gradation as its solution. It attempts to explore the lacunas between slum dwellers expectations and the supplements provided by the state in order to solve the problem of urban informality. In fact it shall work through a case study of Patna, and attempt at a comparison of (i) an existing slum site, (ii) an in-situ upgraded slum site and (iii) a rehabilitated site so as to analyze the feasibility of slum resettlement programmes in influencing the formal/informal dichotomy in an urban space. In so doing, it looks into the inter-linkages between the formal vs informal city through a diagnosis of the economy-induced exigencies of translocation, the duality of new rehabilitated sites of habitation and the effects of translocation on local social settings/ties and its repercussions on employment opportunities.
Recent studies on urbanization in developing countries of the Global South like that of Davis (2000) therefore show that the growth of slums is not on periphery of the city but in the vicinity of the Central Business District (CBD) which leads to the rise in population. In developing countries the growth of slums/slum dwellers is because of the increasing unemployment in the rural areas which bring migrants to urban industrial area in the search of employment. It leads to the increasing inequality within and among the cities of different size. With this huge influx of migrant or footloose labor, the employment opportunities do not match up which leads to the growth of the informal sector in terms of rise in unskilled, unprotected, low wage employment in the area. With the informal slum building up, the quasi-feudal relationship between the local official and slums dwellers is also increased. Thus following McGregor and McConnachie (1995) one may remark that a new face of 21st century cities is thus largely explained by the decline of the industrial economy in the cities and the rise, in its place, of a new economy that revolves around finance, producer services, entertainment, information technology, media, and so on. in this post-industrial economy the quality of life demands have triumphed over the logic of social reproduction. This leads to the gentrification of cities and the exclusion of disadvantaged urban populations and the traditional working class. Ananya Roy (2011) notes, the urban elite in many Indian cities, in their aspiration to be located on the map of global economy, are pushing through urban transformations as preconditions for entry to the hegemonic sectors of global economy. Initiatives like that of the Jawaharlal National Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) deploy different levers of the state to bring about socio-spatial changes through slum evictions and setting up of new peri-urban townships. However, the strategy of effectuated such a gentrification has not worked smoothly because of the presence of a large informal economy and the democratic processes within which they have often succeeded in securing conditions for their social reproduction against the demands of the elite urban middle class. Here, cities are transformed into entertainment machines, where high value-producing workers make quality of life demands, and in their consumption practices can experience their own urban location as if tourists, emphasizing aesthetic concerns. The JNNURM represents the most significant national-level effort to achieve such objectives.
As Sivaramakrishnan (2011) while analysing urban renewal mammoth scheme of GoI, i.e. JNNURM, asserts, the scheme is focused on the objective of fostering economically productive, efficient, equitable and responsive cities., The scheme also offers incentives for the employment of publicprivate partnerships in urban redevelopment. The initiative is clearly focused on an agenda of moving beyond the state socialist model of urban planning and policy by freeing land for urban redevelopment and by enabling municipal governments to engage the private sector in urban development efforts. Through its provision of substantial funds for the development of housing and services for poor communities, it also fosters a new urban social contract, one based on the incorporation of informal settlements into marketized models of land and housing delivery. In another study, on the nature of urban citizenship. Ghertner (2001) notes that a new phenomenon has emerged whereby slums are called illegal and pose as a nuisance and threat to high class neighborhoods. To re-look at this issue through the lenses of legality, one would well remark that the so-called civil society forums like Residence Welfare Associations (RWA) have challenged the basic existence of slums in the city by taking recourse to judicial intervention. In such a discourse the only basis of citizenship in the city is the ownership of property itself. The class having private property tries to get the un-propertied class out of the scene by labelling them as illegal. Such contestations are neatly explained theoretically by Chatterjee (2004) by unearthing the rupture in representational democracy by a neat mapping of modes of negotiation with the State as ones that fall within the ambit of either civil society or political society. To put it briefly civil society herein is presumed to be a legalist appendage that unfolds itself through the praxis of civic governance say for example, use law courts, civil suits and the Right to Information (RTI) to move ahead their agendas. In contrast to the political society that is deemed to be the preserve of a populist state apparatus like agitating protestors, workers on strike gherao etc. Thus while the concept of civil society refers to collectivities of right-bearing citizens, the concept of political society refers to collectivities from that substantial majority of the population of India which by virtue of its poverty and the limited reach of state planning and formal economy is compelled to live, work, and access services in contravention of the law people make political claims for access to land, water, electricity, and other necessities. In a different note however, Bayat (1997) has eloquently characterized the politics of urban informal producers as a quiet encroachment, by which he means the silent, protracted but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive and improve their lives (p.545). The space where this drama plays out is urban streets, which, as the public space par excellence, becomes the target of this quiet encroachment. The streets act as their homestead the place of production and residence. Moreover, when under attack, the streets also act as a site of resistance a resistance that tries to politically profit from the public visibility of primitive accumulation and the assertion of inviolability of life over the logic of capital. Much in the same vein, Rao (2013) in her study on resettlement and rehabilitation schemes in New Delhi, remarks that resettlement is promoted as a way to accommodate the poor in the legal city. While it does promise a smooth transition to formal modes of habitation, its implementation is a complex process as it tends to navigate through the dialectics of legality versus illegality in its everyday transaction. Most importantly, resettlement does not solve the problem for once and all, but merely defers the solution. Because first and foremost, no resettlement project fails to duly provide the requirements of each and every member of the pre- rehabilitated site. Secondly, requirements of official procedures like that of eligibility tokens, compel the expectant beneficiaries to hob-nob with middle men and/or government officers so as to secure fake/ temporary documents in order to intermittently reap the promised benefits. It is such negotiations and new forms of civic participation that Holston (2009) in his study of squatters in the fringes of Sao Paulo, Brazil, terms as insurgent citizenship. Residents in these peripheries formed into voluntary associations to demand the regularization of their property and the delivery of basic urban services as citizens who claimed rights to the city. Most of these organizations developed with considerable autonomy from the established domains of citizenship officially available to the working classes. Moreover, segregation motivated residents to demand inclusion in the legal city, in its property, infrastructure, and services. Holston argues that such mobilizations politicized people around the redistributive claims of rights to the city focused on the residential conditions of daily life in the new auto-constructed peripheries. Residents demanded urbanization of their neighborhoods, forcing the state to provide infrastructure and access to health services, schools, and child care. Thus in stark contrast to Chatterjee (2004) what Holston interestingly argues is that such urban struggles did not produce a mass of Brazilian who were only tenuously, rights-bearing citizens and who were not, therefore, proper members of civil society but rather a population for the state to control.
Research questions 1. What are the changes in living conditions of slum dwellers in post- resettlement scenario? 2. What are the measures that resettled dwellers adopt over time, to solve the problems caused by resettlement schemes? Proposed Methodology For this study one rehabilitated site and one in-situ up-graded site shall be selected. The rationale of the selection of these two different types of the sites is to take in to account the impact of distance factor which becomes very prevalent in the rehabilitated sites. In order to sharpen our analysis a non-rehabilitated slum site shall also be incorporated. This will provide the wide range of views regarding the expectations of slum dwellers from government and their own suggestions for the problem of urban informality. Thus this study proposes to do a comparative analysis on two fronts. Firstly it compares the situation of pre re-settlement slum clusters with that of post re-settlement conditions. Secondly it compares the in-situ up-gradation with rehabilitation as a solution to urban informality.
Site(s) of study As discussed above the study shall be done on three different types of sites. These selected sites are as under: 1) Ishopur site - It is a rehabilitated site which has been rehabilitated, in 2012, under BSUP component of JNNURM. Under this category only four sites have been rehabilitated i.e. Ishopur, Shrifaganj, Khagaul and Mangal Talab. Among these sites first two has 192 dwellings while the rest have 64 dwellings. The multi-storied appartments on G+ 3 bases has been built. So the first site of 192 dwellings i.e. Ishopurhas been selected for the study. It is located in the Phulwarisharif, situated in the outer skirts of Patna. Though it comes under the Patna urban agglomeration but isoutside the jurisdiction of Patna Municipal Corporation. Here the slum which was earlier located at PhulwariNahar has been shifted around3 km exterior to the earlier site. It has 192 low cost dwellings which have been allotted to beneficiaries from earlier slum. 2) Bhola Paswan Shastri Bhawan: It is an in-situ upgraded site which has been upgraded in 1994 by the State Government. It is located near the Ashiana Mode. This site has 84 dwellings on G+3 apartment model. In it, two slum clusters, closely located in the range of 300 meters, have been up-graded at one location. While in other location the road has been made. For the convenience of narrative, in this study the Bhola Paswan Shastri Bhawan will be written as Bhola Paswan colony. 3) Kamla Nehru Nagar slum: It is the biggest slum in Patna urban agglomerate. As per the records of Patna Municipal Corporation this slum has 900 households. This slum is habituated on the government land. It is located in the middle of the city near Patna junction.
Tools/ Techniques of Data Collection
For the data collection the research tools which are used as under: Semi structured questionnaire Focus group discussion Observation method For the analysis of data SPSS software and for preparation of figure and graphs Ms-Excel shall be used in this study.
Significance/ Limitation The proposed study shall thus attempt to bridge up the existing gap in literature on slum studies, done in Tier II and Tier III cities of India. Firstly, it shall help us to see through micro processes or initial stages of small-scale slum development in a smaller non-megalopolis like Patna. Secondly, this in turn shall help us to understand better as to how processes of exclusion foment into large scale structures of backlash or silent insurgent modes of accommodation within the spaces of the emergent dual city. In doing so however the study may not succeed in exploring organic sociological aspects of community life viz., caste, gender and ethnicity, in slum-like settlements. However in its underlying attempt of exploring socio-political alliances it shall cursorily probe into the emergent spaces of social capital that migrant slum dwellers build on to maximize the former.
References Bayat, Asaf (1997): Street Politics: Poor Peoples Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press)
Chatterjee, Partha (2004): The Politics of the governed: reflections on popular politics in most of the world. (New York: Columbia University Press)
Davis Mike (2004): Planets of Slums, New Left Review, Vol.26, pp. 05-34
Ghertner, A (2001): The Nuisance of Slums: Environmental law and production of Slums illegality in India In Shapiro, J and McFarlane, C (ed.) Urban Navigations (New Delhi: Routledge)
Holston, J (2009): Insurgent Citizenship in an era of Global Urban Peripheries, City and Society, Vol. 21(2), pp. 245-267
McGregor, Alan and Margaret McConnachie (1995):Social Exclusion, Urban Regeneration and EconomicReintegration, Urban Studies, 32 (10), pp. 1587-1600.
Roy, A (2011): The Blockade of the World-class city: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism In Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (ed.) Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, (New York: Blackwell)
Sivaramakrishnan, K (2011): Re-visioning Indian Cities, (New Delhi: Sage)
World Bank (2005): Bihar: Towards a Development Strategy, (New Delhi: World Bank)