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Acknowledgements
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6 - Old Slums
- Supriya RoyChowdhury
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Summary
Cities of the Global South have witnessed the emergence of a newly affluent, highly mobile upper class, dramatic changes in consumption patterns, rapidly changing information and communication channels, and the exclusion of some from these processes. Disparities are hardly new to cities in developing countries, anchored as they are in highly unequal structures shaped by the privileged access of elite castes and communities, in traditional societies, to learning and increasingly to professional skills and other resources. Social and economic exclusions were structured into this urban framework where manual, unskilled work was performed by lower castes and underprivileged communities. In the current era, however, urban inequalities have a different face. As cities become sites of spectacular wealth and consumption, the widening chasm between those who can access the benefits of global marketisation and those who remain on the margins, or are in structurally disadvantageous positions within it, becomes starker. Many cities of the developing world are caught within these sharply emerging contradictions of wealth and deprivation.
These contradictions are blatantly visible in Bangalore. Bangalore's rapid economic rise, riding on the IT revolution and a facilitating policy environment for private capital, both domestic and foreign, has been discussed in Chapter 3. While this growth trajectory has brought some opportunities to a few sections of the urban lower classes in Bangalore, there is as yet no substantive analysis of the precise nature of these opportunities, and, more importantly, whether these translate to increased access to economic and social resources for the urban poor and their progeny. The questions examined in this chapter are: What happens to the urban poor in a context of rapid economic growth of the city? What are the channels through which the urban underclass get drawn into the city's growing economy? What are the modalities of inclusion and exclusion?
The decline of large state-owned manufacturing industries and of the SSI sector frames Bangalore's political economy of the last few decades. With the folding up of factory jobs, unskilled workers are employed predominantly in he construction industry and in the lower rungs of the service sector. In what ways do these macro features reflect in the lives and livelihoods of slum dwellers?
This chapter is about inner-city slums, where most people were found to work in casual wage employment, self-employment in petty trade, or as salaried workers in services.
List of Tables
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2 - Welfare and Work: State Autonomy Revisited
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Summary
The troubled relationship between economic growth and redistribution/welfare is a long-standing concern in the social sciences. Globalisation, associated increasingly with the duality of rising wealth and continuing deprivations, has brought an added sharpness to this concern. Two principal genres of a critical discourse can be located. Marxist critiques of globalisation and market-led economic growth – anchored in the dependency perspective, and infused with class analysis – are theoretically rich but marked by a deep, brooding pessimism and lacking in robust alternatives. On the other side, strands of liberal, mainstream social science are rooted in a pragmatic world view: that alongside a capitalist and market-based economic model, an appropriate degree of state responsibility should be restored and maintained. Marked by a nostalgia for the post-war social-democracy-inspired welfare state, and an anxiety to restore some dimensions of it, this genre of scholarship remains at the same time strongly committed to retaining the gains of the new economic model of globalisation and privatisation.
Partly a reincarnation of post-war Keynesian statist welfarism, this genre of writings can also be looked at as a narrative attempting to re-theorise the developmental state. Emerging at a time when the market had gained legitimacy of hegemonic proportions, reiterations of the state's centrality, which have emerged from global institutions and from leading scholars, are critical interventions that shape a new political normativity of justice and public responsibility. Do they do more? Does a substantively new theory of the state emerge from contemporary writings on the capitalist developmental state?
As a generalised critique of the inequitable nature of globalisation/market-led development began to emerge in both academic and public discourses, the expansion of social rights became part of the defined political agenda of democratic governments as well as of scholars striving to provide a humane face to a market-driven model of development. Critical of the inequitable impact of global capitalism, these writings have nevertheless stayed away from a determinist interpretation of the capitalist state as inevitably exclusivist and moved towards a more eclectic theorisation, which leaves open the possibility of inclusive social policies. Within this broad conceptual framework, scholars have reiterated the need for state attention to employment-generating economic policies as well as state-sponsored social insurance targeting poorer sections of the population.
7 - Impact of Slum Housing Policies: Bangalore’s New Ghettoes
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This chapter looks at state initiatives to address the issue of poor housing in urban areas. Three major central legislative enactments, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission/Basic Services to Urban Poor (JNNURM/ BSUP), Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), are outlined. This provides the backdrop to a discussion of the implementation of BSUP and RAY in Bangalore city. It should be noted that both JNNURM/BSUP and RAY have been discussed widely in both policy and academic forums. Much of this discussion has been in the nature of surveys to examine resource allocations, targets and achievements by counting projects and beneficiaries. Some studies have looked at the role of urban local bodies (ULBs), designed to have played a catalytic role in raising finance and in execution of housing projects. The emphasis in this chapter is on understanding the broader politics that surround the process of implementation of housing projects, and, importantly, the impact of projects and processes on the lives of slum dwellers.
The chapter draws on field-based research on housing projects in Bangalore city, looking at three spaces: slum development based on in situ housing; relocation of slums; and slums where housing projects could not be undertaken due to local resistance. The study reveals some important microfeatures of poor housing projects.
First, the state, through housing projects, provides to slum dwellers renewable leases for new apartments, which is meant to ensure protection from soaring rents and eviction. These, however, do not provide a sale deed or property rights. The projects, in this sense, have bypassed long-standing demands of the urban poor for right to land (Benjamin 2008, 2011; RoyChowdhury 2008, 2012). The projects have also ignored slum dwellers’ long-expressed demand for ‘land-to-sky’ rights on land (that is, right to own a piece of land and to build vertically on it) and their resistance to the idea of small apartments in multi-storey buildings which do not address their need to use housing for livelihood as well as for large and expanding families.
Second, the housing projects typically provide small accommodations, without the necessary and promised related infrastructure, thus bringing little change to the generally low quality of life in slums. State-sponsored housing projects were therefore, to a great extent, distanced from the actual needs and demands of slum dwellers for land rights, water, sanitation, stable supply of power, schools, anganwadis and health centres.
Contents
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3 - Urban Poverty and Informal Work
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Poverty of cities and the phrase ‘urbanisation of poverty’ has drawn much recent scholarly and policy attention. The overall consensus and a shared concern seem to be that rural poverty is declining significantly, while the pace of reduction of urban poverty is slower. Beyond this broad consensus, however, the literature shows that there are very different approaches to understanding urban poverty. International policy agencies have mostly seen urban poverty as a spillover of rural poverty, caused by the process of migration of the rural poor. On the other hand, particularly in the Indian case, scholars have argued, on the basis of migration data, that the poorest do not migrate, and on this view, the roots of urban poverty lie in the structure of the urban and industrial political economy rather than in the poverty of migrants.
This political economy framework of analysis rests on three important dimensions of the urban context in India: first, the narrowness of urbanisation, as the number of small towns and cities, their developmental trajectories as well as their potential as providers of industrial employment remain stunted due to lack of policy attention; second, the absence of structural transformation in the economy, as large numbers remain tied to agriculture (disproportionate to agriculture's declining share in GDP) primarily because of lack of growth of jobs in the manufacturing sector; and third, work available to the unskilled or semi-skilled urban workforce, whether migrant or non-migrant, is in the informal sectors of manufacturing, construction, lower rungs of the services or in self-employment. Marked by low and irregular wages and income as well as lack of job security and social insurance, informal work underpins the poverty of large numbers of urban workers. In this context, some scholars have emphasised that state-sponsored social insurance can be an instrument of inclusion of poor informal workers into higher levels of access to health, education and other services, thus presenting formality–informality as a continuum, rather than as a binary. Contrarily, others have seen informality as structured exclusion, a result of globally competitive, high-technology production and services, naturally excluding the unskilled and underprivileged. The following sections provide information on some broad features of the Indian economy framed by the debates on migration, employment and informality.
8 - Women Workers in Bangalore’s Garment Export Companies
- Supriya RoyChowdhury
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The debate on employment has been outlined in Chapter 3, and I briefly highlight here that while the increasing share of services in GDP has made this sector central to the current phase of growth, there remain concerns that the share of services in creating employment has been relatively lacklustre. In this context, the drying up of manufacturing sector employment has drawn much attention. As manufacturing industries turn increasingly towards globally competitive, capital-intensive, and high-technology production, the question that has been asked is whether this trajectory is appropriate in a country where the majority of the workforce is still unskilled and therefore unemployable in technology-embodying domains, whether in manufacturing or in services.
In this context, the emergence of apparel exports as a labour-intensive, growing industry rings a very optimistic tone. Apparel production was an exclusive domain of the industrially developed countries until the 1970s or 1980s, when the relocation of the industry to less-developed countries and China began primarily in search of cheaper labour costs in a predominantly labour-intensive industry. The significant contribution of the ready-made garment (RMG) sector in terms of development of exports as well as generation of employment notwithstanding, the use of a largely female workforce in highly irregular and insecure wage and working conditions has cast a long shadow on the RMG sector. A critical discourse emerging from researchers, NGOs and trade unions has increasingly framed this industry, forcing, to some extent, the attention of international brands on the unfair conditions in factories across the Global South which produce for global apparel retail. However, ground-level conditions, in terms of wages and working conditions, remain poor and particularly so in the absence of collective bargaining mechanisms, aided by the indifference of governments and political parties (Mezzadiri 2016).
My earlier work on garment workers in Bangalore provided ethnographic accounts of the lives of women workers, touching on socio-economic backgrounds, worker households, aspirations and mobility (RoyChowdhury 2010, 2015). This chapter draws upon recent field research, conducted in 2016 and in 2018. Garment factories in Bangalore are spread across the city, with some concentration in older industrial areas like Peenya and Yeshwantpur in north Bangalore and Mysore Road in the west of the city.
Index
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5 - New Slums: Migration, Livelihoods and Living
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This chapter presents a discussion of four slums, which are settlements of migrants who came to Bangalore not earlier than 2002. At the time of the study, the households had been in residence on an average of 8 to 10 years. Several households were found to be circular migrants, that is, they left the city to go back to their home villages regularly for several months of the year, typically during the harvest season.
The relationship between migration and urban poverty has engaged development scholars for a long time. As discussed in Chapter 3, and to briefly rehearse here, the spillover thesis (that urban poverty is mainly the reflection of rural poverty, carried over by poor migrants) continues to inform policy discourses mainly emerging from international organisations. In criticism, migration scholars in India have pointed out that the poorest do not migrate; the relatively better-off/better-informed among the rural population are those who are able to actually move to cities and towns (Kundu 2007, 2014). Mitra (2006, 2010) has suggested that while there is obviously a distinct association between rural and urban poverty, the total inflow of rural–urban migrants – and the percentage of migrants to total urban population – is not high enough to justify the spillover thesis; Mitra also points out that many of the urban poor have been residing in cities for several decades; thus the poverty of migrants may be related to urban poverty at the margin. Chapter 6 in this book shows that contrary to the claim that the urban poor are predominantly new rural– urban migrants who fail to take advantage of urban opportunities, old inner-city slums in Bengaluru combine limited opportunities for economic mobility with deep pockets of poverty and marginalisation of households that have been in urban residence for two or three generations. I have called this category the ‘old poor’. The discourse on urban poverty has in fact gone beyond the spillover thesis to recognising structural dimensions of the political economy of cities – decline in manufacturing jobs and an increasingly technological paradigm of development that marginalises the unskilled and semi-skilled urban workforce, whether migrant or non-migrant. In this sense, the poverty of migrants can be seen to be a symptom rather than a cause of urban poverty.
9 - Conclusion
- Supriya RoyChowdhury
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The dualities in the developmental trajectories of cities of the Global South have drawn much attention. Critical debates have been generated on processes which had earlier been assumed to be part of the normal stages in development. I highlight two themes here briefly: migration and technology. The positive links between migration, urbanisation and development shaped modernisation theory in the 1950s, advocating the replication of the western industrialisation/urbanisation model to developing countries. Modernisation theory, hegemonic for a long time, has perhaps been officially discarded in the social sciences. Nevertheless, the image of industrially advanced nations, which are predominantly urban societies in which the erstwhile rural communities became fully integrated into the structure of cities, continues to fuel the imagination of policymakers as well as development scholars and practitioners, located both in the west and in developing countries like India. On the other hand, continuing processes of cyclical movement of migrant labour have been seen to challenge the classical approaches linking migration and development. Patterns of circular migration suggest that points of rural origin left behind continue to provide, at least partially, not only the sustenance of those who stay back but also the security of those who migrate (discussed in Chapter 3), thus disrupting the universality/uniformity message of migration/ urbanisation theories. Nothing has illustrated this more than the massive exodus of migrant labour from cities in India back to their villages during the recent pandemic of 2020.
The issue of migration is closely linked to changing technologies of production and shifts in the structure of urban labour markets. Saskia Sassen, in her landmark work on global cities, underlined the proliferation of sweatshops in exploiting undocumented immigrant workers. Her broader point was that ‘even the most dynamic and technologically developed sectors of the economy generate jobs that can conceivably be held by unskilled foreign language workers’ (Sassen 2005). She highlighted the massive arrival of immigrants from low-wage countries to global cities of the west. Cities in the Global South too have recreated that space of exploitation, as a middle and upper class of professionals greatly benefit from the technologically driven wealth generation of globally connected cities like Bangalore and New Delhi while simultaneously a low-paid class of service providers, most often migrants from rural areas, appear as housekeepers and nannies, watchmen and waiters, drivers and app-based delivery boys.
Frontmatter
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4 - A Political Economy Overview: Karnataka and Bangalore
- Supriya RoyChowdhury
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Karnataka epitomises India's post-liberalisation developmental trajectory: high growth rates combining with continuing pockets of poverty and deprivation. These pockets are typically seen in terms of regional disparities, between the state's backward northern districts and the more advanced south, and between the urban and the rural. As discussed in this chapter, the state's glittering image as a leader in IT and ITES is at least partially darkened by slow progress on human development indicators and low levels of social sector expenditure. From the mid-1980s onwards, a growing, upwardly mobile, technical/professional middle class supported, as well as benefited from, the quick expansion of IT in Karnataka; on the other hand, large numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled workers remained outside of the technology-led growth. Even as successive agrarian crises caused dislocations from the farm sector, a declining rate of employment in manufacturing left them with little opportunities of absorption into the urban economy. These features of the state's political economy, presented below, foreground a discussion of the rise of Bangalore as India's Silicon Valley, where similar contradictions have played out.
Karnataka's growth rate (GSDP) increased from 5.3 per cent in 1980 to 7.3 per cent in the 1990s and stood at 8.3 per cent in the second half of the 1990s. During the latter part of the 1990s, Karnataka's agricultural, industrial and service sectors grew at average rates of 4.0 per cent, 9.2 per cent and 10.6 per cent respectively as compared to all-India averages of 3.6 per cent, 5.0 per cent and 8.7 per cent respectively. The growth rate of GSDP in Karnataka was 6.2 per cent in 2012 and 8.5 per cent in 2017–18. The growth rate of GDP for India was 5.5 per cent in 2012 and 6.5 per cent in 2017–18. Thus, the growth record in the state has been consistently higher than the all-India one.
As is well known, Karnataka's economic rise has been largely led by the service sector. The share of services in the state's GSDP was 65.15 per cent in 2018–19. The state has emerged as an IT hub, home to the fourth-largest technology cluster in the world, nineteen IT and ITES special economic zones (SEZs), five software-technology parks and dedicated IT investment regions.
1 - Introduction
- Supriya RoyChowdhury
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The debate on urban theories
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, socio-economic exclusions, deeply encrusted in cities of both the Global North and the South, not only contradict earlier understandings of the urban as homogeneous and uniform, but also pose serious challenges to the modernisation theory – entrapped understanding of the urban as a process and promise of development which will engulf all. Emerging debates are linked by two fundamental dilemmas: First, how does the specificity of the regional/local and the diverse trajectories thereof call for a distinct theory of the city in the Global South? Second, what could be an appropriate conceptual framework for imagining urban marginalities?
The argument for specificity, in post-colonial theorisations of cities of the Global South, rests largely on the deep and stubborn pockets of poverty and social marginalisation in which many disadvantaged urban communities continue to live. Moving away from overarching theories of Southern exclusion, drawn from dependency and world-systems theories, recent scholarship on cities in the Global South has understood urban exclusion primarily in terms of space, broadly defined. Scholars have critiqued typical policy frameworks which see slums in Third World cities as only material spaces to be measured and reconstructed. Instead, and drawing closely on David Harvey's (2009 [1973]) conceptual distinction of space as material and relative, they have pointed to the need to see urban marginality, slums in particular, in terms of the context in which they evolved as spaces for living and livelihood (a process which is negotiated and incremental), their porous and fluid character (in contrast to the exclusivity of the residential space of upper-class urban citizens) (Bhan 2019), and their often seemingly contradictory opposition to state-sponsored housing projects. These features – more or less ubiquitous in cities of the Global South – of urban exclusion have led scholars to new ways of thinking about urbanisation, rooted in the Southern context. Theresa Caldeira's (2017) conception of peripheral urbanisation sees the space in which the urban poor live as one marked by a particular kind of temporality and agency, with a set of relations to law and property that are very different from those that characterise the formal domain, which generate a distinct kind of politics and therefore necessarily lead to highly unequal and diverse cities.
City of Shadows
- Slums and Informal Work in Bangalore
- Supriya RoyChowdhury
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Alongside debates over rising inequalities, the stubbornness of urban poverty, globally, has emerged as a major academic and policy concern. Urban poverty policy positions are typically framed by paradigms of basic services and welfare. In the backdrop of Bangalore's evolution into India's silicon valley, the book presents research spanning old, inner city slums, new migrant settlements in urban peripheries, slum development projects, and garment export and construction workers, highlighting that intergenerationally, the urban poor remain tied to traditional low paying occupations, or, get incorporated into new urban growth channels (export industries, low end services) under highly unfavourable terms and conditions. Using the concepts of the old and the new poor, to explore channels of inclusion and exclusion, the book underscores that the poor's vulnerabilities are defined by different regimes of informality. Debates on the urban poor's political agency are used to problematize informality's complex relationship to contemporary theories of class.
Chapter 4 - Civil Society and the Urban Poor
- from Part I - Political Society and Protest Politics
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- By Supriya RoyChowdhury, Institute for Social and Economic Change, India
- Edited by Ajay Gudavarthy
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- Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India
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Introduction
Cities in developing countries have been the sites of dramatic wealth creation and consumption generated by the processes of globalization. Globalization has generated enormous wealth for those who are already wealthy, while at the same time pulling many sections of urban society into employments, income and consumption patterns which were hitherto unknown.
On the other hand, this unprecedented creation of wealth and opportunities have highlighted the plight of those who are excluded, in two senses. Firstly, there are thousands of people in cities who continue to be trapped in unskilled and semi-skilled work that brings low returns to hard labour, in traditional employments like the construction industry, or domestic service; globalization has possibly made some difference to them in terms of work availability (for example, through the boom in the construction industry in rapidly growing cities), but no significant opportunities have been generated to expand their life chances, or those of their next generation. Secondly, globalization itself has created a new workforce, as multinational producers locate manufacturing industries in Third World cities to take advantage of low wages. Typically, this has led to export zones, employing large numbers of semi-skilled or unskilled workers, often comprising a predominantly female workforce, with low wages and little security. Again, while this process has created a large number of urban jobs for the underclass, simultaneously new pockets of urban deprivation have been generated.