Informality, Slums and Urban Renewal:

Exploring the case of Select Slum(s) in Patna

[Research Proposal submitted by Abhishek Dwivedi to the Department
of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi for pursuing a M.Phil
Degree]






















Background of the Study
Right from the Almrita Patel case of branding slums as public nuisance to the conceptualization
of slums as sites of deep democracy, critical urban scholarship on the Indian city does
acknowledge the resilience of informality as a way of life. Slums exemplify such a mode of
living which is but a necessary evil and critical to the functioning of an informal, low-cost
service provisioning in the Indian city. The very conceptualization of Slums as sites of habitation
sounds problematic, if we consider the remarks made by the Supreme Court of India, in the
pavement dwellers case of 1985. It states that the right to livelihood is an important facet of
the right to life they who live in slums do so because they have small jobs (that) nurse the
cities... they choose a slum in the vicinity of their work to cope up with the cost of money and
time... It thus raises questions regarding the feasibility of slum resettlement schemes in totality,
which solely aim at the removal of slums from the face of cities without considering its impacts
upon the dweller. The States efforts to beautify urban spaces so as to satiate the demands of
bourgeoisie environmentalism via urban cleansing thus merit a serious diagnosis.

The proposed study thus aims at analyzing the effects of resettlement slum policies in the forms
of rehabilitation or in-situ up-gradation. It attempts to find out the relationship between slums as
the problem and resettlement/up-gradation as its solution. It attempts to explore the lacunas
between slum dwellers expectations and the supplements provided by the state in order to solve
the problem of urban informality. In fact it shall work through a case study of Patna, and attempt
at a comparison of (i) an existing slum site, (ii) an in-situ upgraded slum site and (iii) a
rehabilitated site so as to analyze the feasibility of slum resettlement programmes in influencing
the formal/informal dichotomy in an urban space. In so doing, it looks into the inter-linkages
between the formal vs informal city through a diagnosis of the economy-induced exigencies of
translocation, the duality of new rehabilitated sites of habitation and the effects of translocation
on local social settings/ties and its repercussions on employment opportunities.

Recent studies on urbanization in developing countries of the Global South like that of Davis
(2000) therefore show that the growth of slums is not on periphery of the city but in the vicinity
of the Central Business District (CBD) which leads to the rise in population. In developing
countries the growth of slums/slum dwellers is because of the increasing unemployment in the
rural areas which bring migrants to urban industrial area in the search of employment. It leads to
the increasing inequality within and among the cities of different size. With this huge influx of
migrant or footloose labor, the employment opportunities do not match up which leads to the
growth of the informal sector in terms of rise in unskilled, unprotected, low wage employment in
the area. With the informal slum building up, the quasi-feudal relationship between the local
official and slums dwellers is also increased. Thus following McGregor and McConnachie
(1995) one may remark that a new face of 21st century cities is thus largely explained by the
decline of the industrial economy in the cities and the rise, in its place, of a new economy that
revolves around finance, producer services, entertainment, information technology, media, and
so on. in this post-industrial economy the quality of life demands have triumphed over the logic
of social reproduction. This leads to the gentrification of cities and the exclusion of
disadvantaged urban populations and the traditional working class. Ananya Roy (2011) notes,
the urban elite in many Indian cities, in their aspiration to be located on the map of global
economy, are pushing through urban transformations as preconditions for entry to the hegemonic
sectors of global economy. Initiatives like that of the Jawaharlal National Nehru Urban Renewal
Mission (JNNURM) and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) deploy different levers of the state to
bring about socio-spatial changes through slum evictions and setting up of new peri-urban
townships. However, the strategy of effectuated such a gentrification has not worked smoothly
because of the presence of a large informal economy and the democratic processes within which
they have often succeeded in securing conditions for their social reproduction against the
demands of the elite urban middle class. Here, cities are transformed into entertainment
machines, where high value-producing workers make quality of life demands, and in their
consumption practices can experience their own urban location as if tourists, emphasizing
aesthetic concerns. The JNNURM represents the most significant national-level effort to achieve
such objectives.

As Sivaramakrishnan (2011) while analysing urban renewal mammoth scheme of GoI, i.e.
JNNURM, asserts, the scheme is focused on the objective of fostering economically productive,
efficient, equitable and responsive cities., The scheme also offers incentives for the employment
of publicprivate partnerships in urban redevelopment. The initiative is clearly focused on an
agenda of moving beyond the state socialist model of urban planning and policy by freeing land
for urban redevelopment and by enabling municipal governments to engage the private sector in
urban development efforts. Through its provision of substantial funds for the development of
housing and services for poor communities, it also fosters a new urban social contract, one based
on the incorporation of informal settlements into marketized models of land and housing
delivery. In another study, on the nature of urban citizenship. Ghertner (2001) notes that a new
phenomenon has emerged whereby slums are called illegal and pose as a nuisance and threat to
high class neighborhoods. To re-look at this issue through the lenses of legality, one would well
remark that the so-called civil society forums like Residence Welfare Associations (RWA) have
challenged the basic existence of slums in the city by taking recourse to judicial intervention. In
such a discourse the only basis of citizenship in the city is the ownership of property itself. The
class having private property tries to get the un-propertied class out of the scene by labelling
them as illegal.
Such contestations are neatly explained theoretically by Chatterjee (2004) by unearthing the
rupture in representational democracy by a neat mapping of modes of negotiation with the State
as ones that fall within the ambit of either civil society or political society. To put it briefly
civil society herein is presumed to be a legalist appendage that unfolds itself through the praxis
of civic governance say for example, use law courts, civil suits and the Right to Information
(RTI) to move ahead their agendas. In contrast to the political society that is deemed to be the
preserve of a populist state apparatus like agitating protestors, workers on strike gherao etc. Thus
while the concept of civil society refers to collectivities of right-bearing citizens, the concept of
political society refers to collectivities from that substantial majority of the population of India
which by virtue of its poverty and the limited reach of state planning and formal economy is
compelled to live, work, and access services in contravention of the law people make political
claims for access to land, water, electricity, and other necessities.
In a different note however, Bayat (1997) has eloquently characterized the politics of urban
informal producers as a quiet encroachment, by which he means the silent, protracted but
pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive
and improve their lives (p.545). The space where this drama plays out is urban streets, which, as
the public space par excellence, becomes the target of this quiet encroachment. The streets act as
their homestead the place of production and residence. Moreover, when under attack, the
streets also act as a site of resistance a resistance that tries to politically profit from the public
visibility of primitive accumulation and the assertion of inviolability of life over the logic of
capital. Much in the same vein, Rao (2013) in her study on resettlement and rehabilitation
schemes in New Delhi, remarks that resettlement is promoted as a way to accommodate the poor
in the legal city. While it does promise a smooth transition to formal modes of habitation, its
implementation is a complex process as it tends to navigate through the dialectics of legality
versus illegality in its everyday transaction. Most importantly, resettlement does not solve the
problem for once and all, but merely defers the solution. Because first and foremost, no
resettlement project fails to duly provide the requirements of each and every member of the pre-
rehabilitated site. Secondly, requirements of official procedures like that of eligibility tokens,
compel the expectant beneficiaries to hob-nob with middle men and/or government officers so as
to secure fake/ temporary documents in order to intermittently reap the promised benefits. It is
such negotiations and new forms of civic participation that Holston (2009) in his study of
squatters in the fringes of Sao Paulo, Brazil, terms as insurgent citizenship. Residents in these
peripheries formed into voluntary associations to demand the regularization of their property and
the delivery of basic urban services as citizens who claimed rights to the city. Most of these
organizations developed with considerable autonomy from the established domains of citizenship
officially available to the working classes. Moreover, segregation motivated residents to demand
inclusion in the legal city, in its property, infrastructure, and services. Holston argues that such
mobilizations politicized people around the redistributive claims of rights to the city focused on
the residential conditions of daily life in the new auto-constructed peripheries. Residents
demanded urbanization of their neighborhoods, forcing the state to provide infrastructure and
access to health services, schools, and child care. Thus in stark contrast to Chatterjee (2004) what
Holston interestingly argues is that such urban struggles did not produce a mass of Brazilian who
were only tenuously, rights-bearing citizens and who were not, therefore, proper members of
civil society but rather a population for the state to control.

Research questions
1. What are the changes in living conditions of slum dwellers in post- resettlement scenario?
2. What are the measures that resettled dwellers adopt over time, to solve the problems
caused by resettlement schemes?
Proposed Methodology
For this study one rehabilitated site and one in-situ up-graded site shall be selected. The rationale
of the selection of these two different types of the sites is to take in to account the impact of
distance factor which becomes very prevalent in the rehabilitated sites. In order to sharpen our
analysis a non-rehabilitated slum site shall also be incorporated. This will provide the wide range
of views regarding the expectations of slum dwellers from government and their own
suggestions for the problem of urban informality. Thus this study proposes to do a comparative
analysis on two fronts. Firstly it compares the situation of pre re-settlement slum clusters with
that of post re-settlement conditions. Secondly it compares the in-situ up-gradation with
rehabilitation as a solution to urban informality.

Site(s) of study
As discussed above the study shall be done on three different types of sites. These selected sites
are as under:
1) Ishopur site - It is a rehabilitated site which has been rehabilitated, in 2012, under BSUP
component of JNNURM. Under this category only four sites have been rehabilitated i.e.
Ishopur, Shrifaganj, Khagaul and Mangal Talab. Among these sites first two has 192
dwellings while the rest have 64 dwellings. The multi-storied appartments on G+ 3 bases
has been built. So the first site of 192 dwellings i.e. Ishopurhas been selected for the study.
It is located in the Phulwarisharif, situated in the outer skirts of Patna. Though it comes
under the Patna urban agglomeration but isoutside the jurisdiction of Patna Municipal
Corporation. Here the slum which was earlier located at PhulwariNahar has been shifted
around3 km exterior to the earlier site. It has 192 low cost dwellings which have been
allotted to beneficiaries from earlier slum.
2) Bhola Paswan Shastri Bhawan: It is an in-situ upgraded site which has been upgraded in
1994 by the State Government. It is located near the Ashiana Mode. This site has 84
dwellings on G+3 apartment model. In it, two slum clusters, closely located in the range of
300 meters, have been up-graded at one location. While in other location the road has been
made. For the convenience of narrative, in this study the Bhola Paswan Shastri Bhawan
will be written as Bhola Paswan colony.
3) Kamla Nehru Nagar slum: It is the biggest slum in Patna urban agglomerate. As per the
records of Patna Municipal Corporation this slum has 900 households. This slum is
habituated on the government land. It is located in the middle of the city near Patna
junction.

Tools/ Techniques of Data Collection

For the data collection the research tools which are used as under:
Semi structured questionnaire
Focus group discussion
Observation method
For the analysis of data SPSS software and for preparation of figure and graphs Ms-Excel shall
be used in this study.

Significance/ Limitation
The proposed study shall thus attempt to bridge up the existing gap in literature on slum studies,
done in Tier II and Tier III cities of India. Firstly, it shall help us to see through micro processes
or initial stages of small-scale slum development in a smaller non-megalopolis like Patna.
Secondly, this in turn shall help us to understand better as to how processes of exclusion foment
into large scale structures of backlash or silent insurgent modes of accommodation within the
spaces of the emergent dual city. In doing so however the study may not succeed in exploring
organic sociological aspects of community life viz., caste, gender and ethnicity, in slum-like
settlements. However in its underlying attempt of exploring socio-political alliances it shall
cursorily probe into the emergent spaces of social capital that migrant slum dwellers build on to
maximize the former.





References
Bayat, Asaf (1997): Street Politics: Poor Peoples Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia
University Press)

Chatterjee, Partha (2004): The Politics of the governed: reflections on popular politics in most of
the world. (New York: Columbia University Press)

Davis Mike (2004): Planets of Slums, New Left Review, Vol.26, pp. 05-34

Ghertner, A (2001): The Nuisance of Slums: Environmental law and production of Slums
illegality in India In Shapiro, J and McFarlane, C (ed.) Urban Navigations (New Delhi:
Routledge)

Holston, J (2009): Insurgent Citizenship in an era of Global Urban Peripheries, City and Society,
Vol. 21(2), pp. 245-267

McGregor, Alan and Margaret McConnachie (1995):Social Exclusion, Urban Regeneration and
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Roy, A (2011): The Blockade of the World-class city: Dialectical Images of Indian Urbanism
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Global, (New York: Blackwell)

Sivaramakrishnan, K (2011): Re-visioning Indian Cities, (New Delhi: Sage)

World Bank (2005): Bihar: Towards a Development Strategy, (New Delhi: World Bank)