Contemporary Urban Missions and Reflecting Reality in Deprivation of Civil Areas in Indian Cantonments – A Pragmatic View

The contemporary urban schemes were launched around five years ago by the National Government to create more inclusive cities and offer a decent quality of life to urban residents. But in reality, the civilian areas of Cantonments are grossly overlooked from the benefits of such welfare schemes. There are 52 notified civil areas in Indian Cantonments with a population of 2.08 million, according to the 2011 census. The Cantonment Act, 2006 (by repealing the Cantonment Act, 1924) empowered Cantonment Boards to act as ‘deemed to be a municipality ’to receive grants and implement government welfare schemes, including the provision of 24 types of infrastructure and services to its residents. The present research reviews the provisions and coverage of contemporary urban missions, including Smart Cities, and highlights civilian areas of the cantonments as deprived urban areas. Besides the non-implementation of contemporary urban welfare schemes, issues like the age-old colonial infrastructure, revenue crunch through taxes and non-taxes, absence of development plan, lack of inter-jurisdictional coordination etc., need to be addressed. The present research will act as an input for policymakers to understand the problems of civilian areas, nature, and extent of welfare scheme implementation, and also suggest the necessary changes required at the policy level.

From the basti to the ‘house’: Socio-spatial readings of housing policy in India

In June 2015, the Government of India approved a national housing program 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 as 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 misrecognizes ‘housing’ in the Indian city.