Gautam Bhan

Like many cities in the global South, New Delhi has not been built by architects, engineers or planners, but by residents themselves. One form of such auto-construction is the basti—an urban settlement that houses income-poor residents. A basti marks years of an urban life, built slowly and incrementally. It is more than a ‘slum’—it is a claim to development and citizenship. In the moment of the basti’s eviction, this claim is erased, signifying a closure for the political, legal, social and economic negotiations that allowed a vulnerable citizenry to settle and survive for decades.

Contemporary Delhi is a city scarred by the evictions of bastis. Ironically, many of these evictions were ordered in Public Interest Litigations by the Indian Judiciary. How did a judicial innovation introduced precisely to enable the marginalised to seek justice become an instrument of their exclusion? Drawing on an archive of court cases that resulted in evictions in Delhi from 1990 to 2007 as well as ethnographic research with basti residents and social movements resisting eviction, In the Public’s Interest shows how evictions have been fundamental to how urban space is been structured and produced, and asks what they tell us about the contemporary Indian city.

Students and scholars of sociology, urban studies, development studies and geography will find this book engaging and useful.

This report seeks to use COVID-19 and its attendant lockdowns in India as a crucial moment to assess the protective aspect of  social protection, asking three interrelated questions:

First, what do the immediate relief measures put into place to cope with the impact of COVID-19 and the lockdowns tell us about the current state of social protection systems? Second, how did these measures effectively target and deliver relief in complex and constrained situations such as the lockdowns? Third, going forward, what lessons does this set of immediate relief measures offer not just for medium-term recovery but for designing, building and improving social protection systems?

We chose to focus on three kinds of relief that are closely related to social protection: food, cash transfer and labour protections, analysing 181 announcements between March 20 and May 31, 2020, covering the four phased lockdowns announced by the Government of India. The archive focuses on announcements, circulars, notifications, and orders about these three kinds of relief.

Across them, we employ three key analytical frames that structure the report; identification, defining entitlements, and delivery mechanisms – key components of the actually existing practice of any social protection system.

The first part focuses on identification, looking closely at eligibility criteria to be part of a relief scheme, verification processes, as well as the use of databases to direct relief. The second part looks at defining entitlements themselves, assessing what was given as relief, and consider the factors that led to this determination. The third part then looks at delivery mechanisms, focusing on the modes, processes, and actors responsible for ensuring the promised entitlement actually reached the right person within an appropriate time frame.

Relief measures implemented during the lockdown are a rich archive against which to assess each. These measures both continued, used and expanded existing systems of design and delivery but also innovated with “temporary” measures that created new categories of recipients, new forms of entitlements, and new mechanisms of delivery. It is crucial that we learn from both the continuities and innovations of the social protection measures implemented in this time in order to improve and expand these systems in a post-COVID world.

In the 2020 COVID-19 first wave and its attendant lockdowns, a combination of lost income and restricted mobility created large scale hunger among urban residents. The Government of Delhi attempted to respond through an E-Coupon system that provided dry rations to those outside the Public Distribution System under India’s National Food Security Act 2013. This paper argues that the E-Coupon programme represents an invaluable archive through which to assess both the extent and geography of vulnerability in contemporary Delhi as represented by food insecurity.

Using a dataset of E-Coupon applications from over 17 lac households in Delhi, the paperassesses vulnerability in two ways. First, it measures unmet demand, i.e. the number of households outside the PDS system that, arguably, are vulnerable enough to have been included within it. In this, it allows an assessment of social protection based on vulnerability rather than a static, narrow measure of income poverty. Second, it spatialises this data at both known scales of urban governance – ward, assembly constituency, and district – as well as at ‘locality’ level, exploring a lesser-known administrative scale used by the Food and Civil Supplies department. Together, the paper then describes both the extent of unmet demand, as well as explores its spatial distribution within the city, drawing implications and learnings for the design of urban social protection systems.

This chapter interrogates whether the conceptual frameworks and approaches developed within urban practice on informal settlements apply equally well to informal livelihoods, and, particularly, how urban planning, engineering and design might better respond to such livelihoods. It does so by focusing on the links between informality, housing and work with evidence and examples drawn from Indian cities. Research, policy and practice within informal housing and informal livelihood have a lot to learn from each other, and conversations that begin that inter-referencing are essential and critical.

Perspective piece in the WHO Bulletin calling for research that focuses MCH work for informally working mothers. We draw on on-going research in India and South Africa with domestic workers and street vendors, and offer a broad framing for the relationships to be studied.

Writing alongside Southern urban theorists, this essay argues that the emerging body of “theory from the South” must be simultaneously tied to the production of forms and theories of practice. It must ask: How can a new body of thought give us ways of moving and modes of practice? Drawing from the experience of Indian cities, three such modes of Southern practice are offered: squat as a practice not just of subaltern urbanization but of the state; repair in contradistinction to construct, build and even upgrade; and consolidate rather than focus on the building of a singular, universal network within services and infrastructure. The essay then offers a first set of shared characteristics that may enable us to think of a practice as “Southern”, and urges the expansion of a vocabulary of Southern urban practice.

The essay is a reflection on the way we should think about and assess contemporary housing policy in India, moving beyond narrower frames of output, performance and evaluation metrics into more substantive questions of whether policies are addressing the housing question itself.

The essay is a chapter in an edited volume by Himanshu Burte and Amita Bhide called Urban Parallax, published by Yoda Press and the Aga Khan Foundation, both based in New Delhi.

In June, 2015, the Government of India approved a national housing programme called the Prime Minster’s Awas Yojana (PMAY; Prime Minister’s Housing Plan), the latest in a series of ‘urban missions’ that have seen the urban emerge as an object for policy intervention in a country long rurally imagined.

The emergence of these missions has necessitated the construction of a new urban grammar. Concepts, categories, and classifications have sought to define, delineate, and measure different aspects of the urban landscape so that different modes of practice and intervention may emerge. This article reads this grammar. It does so not to assess policy through its design, efficacy or feasibility, but to argue that policies, at least in part, attempt to create their own objects. A policy is thus both a product and an agent of contemporary politics, simultaneously instrumental and generative, acting a means to an end but also an end unto itself. It is, in many ways, as much a site of the construction of meaning as it is the allocation of resources.

This article looks at housing policy in the Indian city from a particular site: auto-constructed neighborhoods in the Indian city – referred to here as the basti in contra-distinction to the ‘slum’. In doing so, it offers a socio-spatial reading of these settlements along three lines: transversality, transparency and opacity. It then reads the proposed new national housing policy against these spatialities and argues that the policy fundamentally misrecongnises ‘housing’ in the Indian city.

This article is the Introduction to Bhan, G (2016) In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi.

The book is available from Orient Blackswan in India, and by the University of Georgia Press internationally, in paper and hardback in both geographies.

Book Abstract:
Like many cities in the global South, New Delhi has not been built by architects, engineers or planners, but by residents themselves. One form of such auto-construction is the basti—an urban settlement that houses income-poor residents. A basti marks years of an urban life, built slowly and incrementally. It is more than a ‘slum’—it is a claim to development and citizenship. In the moment of the basti’s eviction, this claim is erased, signifying a closure for the political, legal, social and economic negotiations that allowed a vulnerable citizenry to settle and survive for decades.

Contemporary Delhi is a city scarred by the evictions of bastis. Ironically, many of these evictions were ordered in Public Interest Litigations by the Indian Judiciary. How did a judicial innovation introduced precisely to enable the marginalised to seek justice become an instrument of their exclusion? Drawing on an archive of court cases that resulted in evictions in Delhi from 1990 to 2007 as well as ethnographic research with basti residents and social movements resisting eviction, In the Public’s Interest shows how evictions have been fundamental to how urban space is been structured and produced, and asks what they tell us about the contemporary Indian city.

There are many lines you can read again and again from the 2009 Delhi High Court judgment – commonly known as the Naz case – that decriminalized same-sex sexual relations in India. Let me give you one that has stayed with me since that day in the courtroom: " For every individual, whether homosexual or not, the sense of gender and sexual orientation of the person are so embedded … that the individual carries this aspect of his or her identity wherever he or she goes. While recognising the unique worth of each person, the Constitution does not presuppose that the holder of rights is an isolated, lonely, and abstract figure possessing a disembodied and socially disconnected self. It acknowledges that people live in their bodies, their communities, their cultures, their places and their times. " i Bodies, communities, cultures, places and times. In one sentence, the judges reminded us of what we talk about when we talk about sexuality. Not just sexual orientation or gender identity, read to be only about some people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Not just something called 'gay rights,' somehow separated from other intrinsic rights and freedoms. Not even just individual lives lived as if they could exist on islands of freedom. When they spoke of sexuality, the judges spoke of more than this. They spoke of sexuality as an intimacy both public and private, something we individually possessed but whose life was stitched into what we made together: families, communities, cities, nations. Sexuality as being not just about sex, body, identity and desire, but equally about politics and democracy. Sexuality, they reminded us, can be a powerful litmus test for the possibility of dignity within a constitutional democracy. As a gay man, this is what I read and heard in Naz: the possibility of, and insistence on, dignity. Sexuality as dignity becomes something else in our hands. It becomes not just about a life free of violence but one of full personhood, even of joy. It imagines bodies not just tolerated but loved and desired by ourselves and by others. It speaks of rights not just possessed but practiced. It holds choices of ways to live lives that are not just possible but meaningful and feasible without needing extraordinary courage or immense privilege. It draws spaces from our homes to the publics of our cities that can invite and embrace our presence. When sexuality comes with dignity, we don't hold our breath so often whether in fear or regret. As India turns 70, what can we say about the possibilities of dignity within our sexualities? In this essay, I offer just two of the many stories one can tell of sexuality in contemporary India. The first is the story of the legal challenge to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, an 1861 Victorian-era law that criminalized " voluntary carnal intercourse against the order of nature " and acted, effectively, as an anti-sodomy statute. The second is a rumination on the Indian city to see what kind of places it