Making the Global City: Urban Citizenship at the Margins of Delhi

There is a growing scholarly interest in the spatialisation of class relations in post-industrial cities. Gentrified suburbs exclude the poor and re-work notions of public property and urban citizenship to the advantage of the rich. My study moves beyond the sanitised places of the inner city and shows how the cleaning mission affects life in the new spaces of deprivation. I analyse home making in a resettlement colony of Delhi. After being removed from the hubs of the labour market and with little state support, resettled slum dwellers struggle under harsh conditions for survival. Those who can afford this expensive venture embrace home ownership at high personal risks und by exploiting the channels of the informal economy, hoping that possessing a legal dwelling will root them more firmly in the city. In practice, the new status is an often uneasy fusion of a formal and informal status and thus remains essentially precarious in an environment that criminalises informality. Keywords: ResettlementIndiaurban citizenshipurban governanceinformal economyDelhi Notes The date for slum-free Delhi keeps shifting. However, the notion of slum-free Delhi continues to surface in the government propaganda. In August 2009, the Chief Minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit, reiterated that Delhi would be slum free in the next 3–4 years. The focus on the city constitutes a departure from the post-colonial concern with the village and rural development, as core of the Indian nation or focus for modernising intervention. In recent years both scholars and politicians have discovered cities as dynamic places that shape India's participation in the globalising world and give identity to the Indian nation (Pandey Citation2002; Chatterjee Citation2004). Exceptions are the studies by Tarlo (Citation2000a, Citation2000b, 2003) on resettlement during the emergency and Roy Citation(2003a) about life at the fringes of Calcutta. Both authors examine in detail the motivations and practices of poor people who survive in a hostile social environment. For narrative accounts from contemporary Delhi see also Sarai Reader Citation2006; Tabassum et al. Citation2010. Inhabitants of Savda hail from the following slums: Yamuna Pushta (3260), JJ cluster near IGI Airport (1730), Nangla Machi (919), JJ cluster at Humayun Road near Khan Market (260), Naraina (200), D-Block, Tagore Garden (160), Rajiv Camp, Karkar-dooma (136), JJ cluster near Aditya Apartments on NH-24 (133) Indira Camp, Jhilmil (133), Lal Bagh in Shahdara (106), Amar Park, Zakhira (103), Barapullah, Nizamuddin (90), Harish Chand Mathur Lane (18) and JJ cluster at Continental Club on Rajendra Prasad Road (3) (Pandit Citation2010). Amitabh Kundu (Citation2004) describes the changing approaches to resettlement and the details about current resettlement policies. This paper is based on fieldwork in Delhi undertaken during the years 2008–2010. I am deeply in-debt to Ankur for the support I received during my fieldwork in Savda-Ghevra. The Ankur staff have been utterly helpful in establishing contacts, sharing information, discussing results and reflecting on life in the resettlement colony. The term 'official' is used in the English language also by Hindi speakers when they refer to their new status. There is no word for 'informal' in Hindi. People would express informality by saying: 'It was just like that'. A construction of a simple one story brick house costs between 100,000 and 150,000 Rs. The approximate monthly income of labourers ranges from 2500 and 8000 Rs. Every month the families pay the minimum of 2% interest on the loan. There are remarkable similarities between these stories of low-ranking government officials and the perspectives of lower middle class women and girls, whom Mankekar Citation(1999) interviewed for her study on television viewing and home-making. Middle class status is achieved through distancing from the poor, uneducated or amoral other. The contempt for the poor is a function of class differentiation and at the same time an excuse to impose segregation. Savda can boast of only two developments, efficient electricity supply and sufficient number of schools. Electricity was partially privatised in 2001 and since then service is no longer in the hands of bureaucrats but the employees of public-private corporations. Schools were the focus of an election campaign. When the Congress was fighting for re-election in 2008, the chief minister Sheila Dikshit personally visited Savda to enquire what people wanted. Local leaders spoke with one voice and said that they would support the Congress only if the government provided school. Subsequently – after children had already missed 2 years of schooling – several elementary schools were built. In another publication, I described in detail the battle for entitlements to subsidiese, food and pensions. Moving to a new location, people lost all their status and have to move the bureaucracy afresh on every single case. The task is tedious, time-consuming, requires money for bribes, lots of patience and persistence (Rao, Citation2009).