Abstract
India has surpassed China’s population according to a recent estimate by the United Nations (2023). This has spurred a new set of debates: How India can exploit benefits from this available demographic dividend? Is this demographic dividend going to be a boon or a bane? However, recent reports inform that much of this population is found moving towards cities with a strong hope of securing better livelihood opportunities and improved standard of living, but they are failing themselves, as modern cities are facing a mixture of issues including housing crisis, inadequate supply of water and inaccessibility of other essential services (United Nations, 2022).
Particularly, the housing crisis has a greater impact on the lives of the urban migrants. The Census of India (2011) estimates nearly one in every six city residents lives in a slum, which lacks access to secure property rights and essential services. These slum dwellers have an ongoing story of their struggle with the state, which we often hear through, but despite the scale and severity of this challenge, the government usually ignores this crisis, and policymakers fail to address this with appropriate policy responses. COVID-19 has exposed how structured inequality in urban locations has stripped the basic rights of poor residents, and then urban rights practitioners urged states for a transformed and renewed approach to urban development.
Scholars have, however, kept stressing about the right to the city for a long time and asserted for bridging the urban divide and ensuring the right to life for everyone (Lefebvre, 1996), but the situation has barely improved considerably, and inequality is reported on the rise, and the city witnesses sharp divide between haves and have-nots (United Nations, 2020). Davis (2006, p. 98) emphasized,
Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which states intervene, regularly, in the name of ‘progress’, ‘beautification’, and even ‘social justice’ for the poor to redraw social boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class commuters.
However, the poor citizens have never surrendered to the state, and they have employed different forms of strategies to influence the government administration for staking claims and entitlements. Deprived citizens employed different strategies to claim rights and entitlements (Chatterjee, 2004) in modern democracy. Routray further examines how the poor who are left behind organize their struggle to be counted, especially to claims urban citizenship entitlements when the state enumerates, documents, or counts its citizens, which is foundation of getting essential rights in the city, particularly tenure security (p. 23–24). He goes into the lives of the urban poor and captures the day-to-day struggle they engage in securing housing rights and grapples with the politics of representation, complexities and subtlety of the relation between the citizen and the state and depicts a vivid picture of the lives of the poor in Delhi, a capital city of India. He uses a mixture of methodology that not only captures the first person’s account of suffering but also the documentary analysis which provides how the agency of the urban poor wrestle with the state. From detailed accounts of urban poor, activists and bureaucrats, he explains prevailing tensions and challenges in the lives of slum dwellers and exposes how the poor are systematically excluded from state calculations (p. 15) which threatens their rights to secure tenure, and thereafter, the poor participate, negotiate and resists the technologies of the state through several counter-calculations understood as citizenship struggle (p. 25).
Routray offers a nuanced approach to the agency of the poor by investigating numerous strategies, what he calls, rann-nitis that subvert or partake in the quotidian practices of the state. He locates the idea of social justice and rights under the framework of citizenship, which has three key defining principles: As a legal right status, as a bundle of rights and entitlements and as a sense of identity and belonging. His theorization of citizenship goes beyond just to be get counted but compels to revisit the ‘idea of citizenship’, and who, then, is really a citizen? Moreover, what does it mean for most of the urban poor in the cities? Especially now, as the legality of citizenship and entitlement of rights is getting revised and reinvented in evolving jurisprudence on shelter, not to forget the number of cases of demolitions and forced evictions in Delhi for G20 Summit 2023. However, this book is a timely contribution to understand how disadvantaged communities’ stakes claim of their entitlements by employing different form strategies with sheer persistence in the world’s largest democracy, and it provides some light on the struggle of have-nots.
The book has six chapters divided into two parts, excluding the introduction and conclusion. Part 1 is composed of two chapters and Part 2 includes four chapters. The ‘introduction’ sets the premise for investigating instances of social injustice in reference to citizenship and state-society relationships. Then, the first two chapters of Part 1 provide a historical context to understand the struggle of numerical citizenship, changing parameters of planning and technologies the state adopts to improve its infrastructure and government in the set planning protocols.
Chapter 1 critically reviews the planning of the development, how the people in the city have been engaged in this process and the regular interaction occurring between the people and the state. Routray argues that politics and power affect all aspects of urban life, but it deeply affects the urban poor, later, he centralizes discussion of the book around this key theme, and he introduces a colloquial word—rann-nitis, tactics and counter-tactics, what urban poor exercises to make substantive claims to citizenship and their right to the city. Chapter 2 discusses state-designated categories where the urban poor live or forced to live through in case of resettlement process. The chapter describes different nomenclatures that is given to settlements where urban poor lives, vis-à-vis jhuggi-jhopri cluster, resettlement colony, identified slum, recognised slum and so on, and such categorization is differentiated by the state’s bureaucracy in providing entitlements to the inhabitants. In Chapter 3, Routray delves to understand the tactics and techniques, vis-à-vis, rann-nitis, aimed at occupying and distributing land parcels, fighting antagonistic host populations and dealing with the vagaries of police and municipal authorities (p. 28).
Interestingly, Routray provides great insights on the framework, that is, numerical citizenship, which he uses to understand the political mobilizations of the poor, and then the range of tactics employed by the poor countering calculative governmentality. However, the struggle for numerical citizenship does not end here, and it goes to the judiciary, a custodian and protector of essential rights. Chapter 4 describes documentary and inscriptive practices, and Chapter 5 details ‘how the poor engaged with the judiciary exploring’ and ‘how the law is lived, appropriated, encountered and challenged’ (p. 45) by the urban poor in order to realize numerical citizenship. The disadvantaged inhabitants engage in numerous activities such as dharnas, juluses, gherao, rasta roko and rallies (p. 262), which result in not only pressurizing the government but also help on such occasions to show their unity and learn to better articulate their rights to be counted. This definitely gives some room to continue the struggle of getting counted, but what if the key pillars of democracy, that is, judiciary and executives, both fail in protecting the rights of the poor? Lately, such instances of failure have increasingly become common and widespread. (Gonsalves, 2022), and this book becomes an essential reminder of the broken system, ignorant policymakers, poor bureaucracy and judicial apathy who have been undermining the constitutionality of that guarantee every citizen the fundamental rights of livelihood, housing, and shelter.
The book provides promising details to interpret processes of recognition, claiming of rights and construction of citizenship taking place in the modern state. ‘The ability to produce documentary evidence has remained central in the struggles for citizenship in the city (p. 278)’, which further translates into tenure security or legal entitlement over a piece of land and housing in the city. However, this is a disquieting observation, as cities are becoming pivotal in propelling the ongoing process of human civilization, and housing plays a crucial role in facilitating major socio-economic development goals. Considering this, if a majority of city residents, who are vital contributors to the city’s development, spend considerable time contributing to and managing the city but still struggle to get their name written in the government paper for enough years: How does this allow the poor urban dwellers to move up in the social mobility ladder? How is the urban policy reshaping in the age when the influx of people in cities is on the rise? How do democratic processes shape the practice of citizenship in modern state-citizenship relations? These are the puzzling questions the author needs to explain, but, at the same time, he leaves a riveting question before us: Why is a country moving towards democratic capitalism failing to foster essential services and rights among disadvantaged populations? These become dire to address, especially when Routray recapitulates that the struggle for numerical citizenship has only socialized collective spaces to a limited extent and could not reorder land relations in any substantial way (p. 279).
On top of that, the book is an invaluable addition to the growing literature on cities and urban poor. The rich ethnographic accounts unravel a complex, intertwined system of political and economic relationships that brings up the urban poor’s struggle for secured housing tenure in the centre. Routray’s work is essential reading for researchers, policymakers and practitioners interested in the inclusion of marginalized populations in urban planning and spatial arrangements within the context of smart cities, as it challenges conventional assumptions about megacities.