Book review: Adam Auerbach, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums

Adam Auerbach, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 328pp., $34.99. ISBN: 1108491936 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781108741330 (paperback).

Book review: Amita Baviskar, Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi

Amita Baviskar, Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi. SAGE Publications, 2020, 300 pp., ₹1,195. ISBN: 9789353289409.

Tribes at the Margin of Tribal Space: Urban Socio-Spatial Exclusion

Unlike the cities of the global North, where poor indigenous communities are primarily immigrants attracted to cities to secure better livelihoods, the tribals of Jharkhand in urban spaces are mostly ‘original inhabitants’. In Ranchi, their original state has been increasingly dwindled or marginalised and led to a dialectical process of socio-spatial poverty traps. This study attempts to understand the socio-spatial integration of the tribal community within Ranchi city through the identification of tribal toponymy and the patterns of clustering and concentration vis-à-vis the process of land association and dissociation. Further, it brings together the attributes of such a produced spatiality. Location Quotient, based on secondary data, and Key Informant Interviews with field observations are applied to measure the tribal concentration and the processes of spatiality, respectively. The findings present a dismal picture, where the tribals mostly find themselves at the margins of the city space, especially in the core-inner city and the microperipheral localities. The continuous inflow of outsiders, the issue of land rights and land alienation, the pattern of socio-spatial clustering and disadvantages, and the dynamics of tribal identity associations are all integrally connected in perpetuating tribals’ urban spatial exclusion and thereby their socio-spatial segregation.

What Is Women’s Work? Reflections from Four North Indian Urban Clusters

The actual extent of the female employment challenge in India is much debated. Data on female labour force participation (FLFP) in India is hampered by shortcomings in data validity and data accuracy. The objective of this article is to explore challenges to data accuracy through two potential sources of error: measurement error and reporting error. Drawing on a unique source of granular survey data from households in four north Indian urban clusters, we demonstrate that the precise nature of the survey employed has meaningful impacts on the reporting of FLFP. Furthermore, the gender composition of respondents also seems to matter although, after controlling for gender, self-reporting is indistinguishable from proxy reporting.

Gender, Social Change and Urbanisation in Four North Indian Clusters

Urbanisation in India is reshaping established social and economic patterns of behaviour in ways that scholars are struggling to analyse. This article introduces this special issue presenting new empirical research on the interconnections between gender, social change and urbanisation in India. It does so by relying on a unique dataset drawn from nearly 15,000 households across four consequential urban clusters—Dhanbad, Indore, Patna and Varanasi—in North India. The collection of articles in this issue informs new inquiries into women’s employment, women’s agency and the construction and shaping of social attitudes. Specifically, the articles disentangle the practical barriers to women’s economic empowerment, measure how employment and household dynamics shape women’s agency and explore ways in which status hierarchies and variation in access to information colour women’s social attitudes and political preferences. Collectively, they demonstrate the uneven nature of gender empowerment in the shadow of an urbanising, but highly stratified economy and society.

Swachh Survekshan Needs to Clean up its Methodology: An Assessment of Ranks as Performance Incentives for Indian Cities

The Government of India is increasingly using ranks to incentivise sub-units of government. The largest such exercise, the Swachh Survekshan, has been conducted since 2016 and aims to incentivise cities to compete on and improve waste management and sanitation outcomes. Using publicly available Swachh Survekshan data, this article suggests that the current scoring methodology provides weak signals to urban local bodies (ULBs) and citizens on performance metrics. In particular, it shows that the ranks are not consistent and stable across years, there are severe discrepancies in data between components of the awarded score, and that the current methodology favours larger cities. Caution must be exercised, therefore, in interpreting the current methodology as fostering competition. More crucially, a ranking exercise is unlikely to succeed as a policy tool unless it is implemented as one component of a broader effort to improve ULB capacity on managing administrative data.