Dumped through Technology

Introduction

In this article I critically examine the response to a recent Government of India publication ‘Housing Stock, Amenities & Assets in Slums—Census 2011’ (GOI 2013) in the mainstream media. I specifically focus on one aspect of the media-reportage which commented on the state of the slums, and its residents, especially vis-a-vis the noticeable increase in the consumption and usage of mobile telephony services in the slums. This increase in consumption in popular mainstream reckoning is a definite indicator of improvement of the living and material conditions of slum-dwellers. In this article I will draw upon decade-long ethnographic research in Govindpuri ¹ (hereafter, ‘GP’), a slum settlement in Delhi, India’s capital city, to highlight the fallacy (and limitation) of such an assumption. The everyday materiality of a slum settlement is not only complex, but also situated within its particular and peculiar historicity and cultures of consumption to allow for such a simplistic assertion. Moreover, I will argue, that the inclusion of ‘mobiles, Internet, computers and henceforth’, as assets for the first time in a report of this nature is symptomatic of the shifting positions of the slums in the State’s imagination, especially in the transforming urban materiality of Delhi. Lastly, I argue that this particular imagination of the slum-dwellers as ‘technologically-capable, active consumers’ ought to be treated with caution as it is has definite implications on the rights of the marginalized as citizens.

From Citizens to Consumers: The Compulsions of the ‘Clean’ Discourse

A rather timely publication, Housing Stock, Amenities & Assets in Slums—Census 2011 (GOI 2013), lists erstwhile undocumented details about the everyday living conditions of the slum dwellers across the country in its state-wise tabulation. Along with the access to potable water and sanitation facilities to the slum dwellers, it accounts the ‘number of households availing banking services and number of households having each of the specified assets’. These assets include, amongst others, mobile phones. The report for a researcher on slum politics in India is a valuable resource (Ramanathan 2013). However, to address the particular concerns this article raises, it was the media reportage and response to this report that caught the attention.

One particular facet of the report which was repeatedly highlighted, was the dense penetration of mobile phones in slum settlements, especially Delhi. A few of the headlines ran as such: ‘Amenities in slums match up to urban homes (Das Gupta 2013)’ and ‘34 per cent in slums have no toilet, but 63 per cent own mobile phone (Vishnu 2013)’. The manner in which these articles in mainstream media articulated these data sets is quite revealing of the popular perceptions of ‘slumming’ in the cities. Consider these: ‘India’s first-ever census of household amenities and assets in slums has revealed that slum dwellers are also spending more on TV sets, computers and mobile phones rather than sanitation’ in the former article, and the following in the latter: ‘Depending on how one looks at it, “slumming it” may just have acquired a whole new meaning—either most Indian towns live the life of slums or the quality of life in slums is improving’. In both these articulations the tension to reckon the slum dwellers as ‘consumers’ is contemptuously palpable. The first blatantly overlooks the structural factors leading to the systematic lack of sanitation facilities in slums, which in fact is a state responsibility, by shifting the onus on to the slum dwellers for not tackling these issues; it is also clearly disapproving of the fact that the slum dwellers spend more assets clearly meant for ‘entertainment’ than investing in ‘improving’ their everyday conditions. The second articulation, more subtle in its tonality, at the outset sets out the anxiety of sharing the same ‘consumerist-cultural’ space with the slums.

Both these articulations convey the anxiety of situating the consumption practice of mobile telephony in slums outside of the framework of development, with a focus on Information, Communications and Technology for Development (hereafter, ‘ICT4Ds’). The discourse and practice for ICT4Ds in marginalized spaces is marked by an insistence on a utilitarian logic, wherein the ‘technologies of connectedness’ are inserted to develop economic capabilities and social capital. The anxiety then is not only in regards to accommodate the digression from this ‘peculiar’ usage pattern from its purely ‘developmental’ agenda (as is evidenced by comment quoted from the first media report), but also vis-a-vis sharing the same cultural economy of consumption by the mainstream with the marginalized (the second quote).

However before we undertake to situate (and thus unfold) these anxieties within the specific context of GP, it is imperative to situate some of the key concerns of the report and its media reportage, pertinent to the argument the article proposes and these anxieties in the broader transforming urban materiality of Delhi. One of the significant aspects of the Census 2011 report is the inclusion of media technologies to determine the living standards of the poor, ² especially the slum dwellers, in the city. The media reportage, following the release of this report, emphasized on the connection between the sanitation facilities and increase in the usage of mobile phones to draw different inferences about the state of development in the slums. Both these factors are significantly telling of the transforming urban materiality of Delhi and the position of the poor within this imagination.

The shifts in the urban planning imagination, processes and policies in the post liberalized Delhi have been well documented across different academic disciplines. Central to this shift was the proposed aspiration to transform Delhi into a ‘Clean, Green City’ with a ‘world class’ appeal. It has been cogently argued that in practice this transformation was geared towards to meet the demands of an acquired middle-class sensibilities of an ‘organized, planned and pollution free’ urban living. Inherent to this project of transformation was the systemic and structural invisibilizing of ‘eye-sores’ in the cityscape, namely the slums and other such settlements. This agenda of the state translated into demolition and resettlement of slum quarters to the fringes of the city boundary, and had the support of the middle-class through the strategically devised initiative of the Bhagidari system. Literally translated as ‘participatory system’ ³ —a citizen–government partnership program, it involved the middle class in achieving the aspiration of a ‘clean, green, hassle-free, world-class capital city,’ ⁴ in order to turn Delhi into a ‘truly international city’. ⁵ By insisting that only ‘registered’ citizen organizations could participate in this program, the state systematically ensured that the urban poor, including the slum dwellers, who lack the social and infrastructural capacity to form such collectives, were strategically absented in this process (Chandola 2010, 2012). In doing so, the Bhagidhari system re-callibrated notions of citizenship by categorically positing as ‘occupants of legally defined neighbourhoods’ (Srivastava 2009, p. 345) as citizens vis-à-vis the ‘others’—urban poor, slum-dwellers, homeless and migrant labourers. Over the last decade—especially with Delhi hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2010—these discourses have assumed urgency, with the middle class desperate to claim its ‘world-class’ city. The agenda of a ‘world-class city’ does not have any place for slum-dwellers and the poor. Their claims to citizenship are denied on the grounds that they do not suit the ideal of the ‘aspirational middle-class consumer citizen’ (Bhan 2009, p. 141) in terms of social, moral and aesthetic citizenship.

Concurrent to these paradigmatic shifts in locating the rights’ and position of the urban poor in the transforming urban economy, spatiality and ecology of the city, the perverse celebration of the prosperity which the liberalization of the economy since 1991 brought to a limited section of the society, namely the middle-classes, introduced the displaced notion of meritocracy in popular imagination. The policies adopted in Delhi to transform the city are indeed a continuation of the elitist agenda catering to the privileged sections of the society. However, the manner in which it is being executed is outside the praxis of caste, class and religion in the name of progress and development, thereby lending it a neutral character, which ‘denies it historical continuity and complexity’ (Chandola 2012, p. 404). Within this discursive framework the failure of the slums to both prosper and contribute to the growing economic success of the country is identified as the failure of ‘initiative and will’ on behalf of the slum dwellers, instead of recognizing it as the state’s failure to ensure equitable opportunities for the urban poor to benefit from the so-called ‘universal’ prosperity. The intersection of these multitudinousness imaginings of the slum dwellers is critical in situating the dual anxieties raised earlier in the section (in response to the Census 2011 report) within the broader, historical context of the structural and systemic disenfranchisement of the poor since the liberalization of the economy in 1991.

The inclusion of a range of ‘media technologies’ to determine the living standards of the slum-dwellers, and the subsequent reactions to the consumption of these technologies consciously juxtaposed vis-a-vis the access to basic facilities as sanitation—conventionally considered state’s responsibility— is but a response to the shifting imaginings in which the urban poor is categorically identified as a proactive, engaged ‘consumer’ with an agency to exercise choice. This construction and consolidation of the urban poor—here, the slum-dwellers—as a ‘consumer’ is not without its hegemonic deliberations, as it permits the state to further distance itself from the responsibilities towards the disenfranchised ‘citizens’, and thus systematically deny them their rights, subsidies and entitlements. ⁶ The instance of juxtaposing use of mobile phones with sanitation facilities is a particularly exaggerated perversity of collapsing the discourse of ‘cleanliness’ and ‘consumption’ to emphasize on the loss of citizenship rights on account of accruing privileges as a ‘consumer’.

However the most compelling aspect of the media-reportage on the Census 2011 report is the deliberate and strategic comparison of amenities and infrastructural facilities between ‘slum’ and ‘non-slum’ areas with the intent to emphasis on the ‘narrowing gap’ between the two (Das Gupta 2013). By highlighting that there is ‘… an indication of an increase in their [slum dwellers] purchasing power, the report also reveals that 70.2 per cent of slum families own their houses as compared to 69 per cent in non-slum households (Das Gupta 2013)’. This analysis blatantly overlooks the historical, systematic and systemic marginalization of slums in the cities, and the social, political and economic disenfranchisement its residents have to endure by first, comparing the facilities and amenities available in the ‘slum’ and ‘non-slum’ areas and secondly, by the way of implication proposing that the residents of the ‘slum’ areas are ‘better off’ than there ‘non-slum’ counterparts as evident here: ‘While the lack of privacy, sanitation and sewage remain a concern in slums, Census data on ‘Housing Stock, Amenities and Assets in Slums’, which was released here on Thursday, show how this lack of physical space hasn’t cramped aspirations [emphasis added] in slums. Consider this: 74 per cent slum households have access to tap water while 70.6 per cent urban households have access to the same. Which means, you have a better chance of drinking tap water if you lived in a slum than if you were outside one (Vishnu 2013)’. These analyses by equalizing the ‘consumption’ patterns between ‘slum’ and ‘non-slum’ areas strategically intend to neutralize and normalize the everyday violence—by the way of discrimination, police hostility, limited access to spaces and opportunities-encountered by the slum-dwellers, but also implicitly absolve the state of its responsibility to cater for its underprivileged. The schematic thus that has evolved to locate the ‘citizen’ in the city, and thus her right to the city, is predominantly determined by a consumerist logic.

The fate of urban poor is caught in a cul-de-sac of a paradox: If they adopt technologies (here, identified as ‘techniques of doing things’, instead of technological objects) essential to survive —socially, culturally and economically—in an increasingly liberalizing economy, they are automatically required to relinquish their right to demand, entitlements and protest as citizens.

Complicating Consumption: Recovering the ‘Citizen’ Between Taking a Dump and Making a Call

Slums are sites of limitations; here the infrastructural capacities providing access to the basic facilities—especially, and sanitation are at best ad hoc. The lack of space and density of population demands of its residents to constantly optimize available resources to meet their demands. These practices often lend a materiality to commodities erstwhile unintended in their nascent imagination. Thus the cultures of consumptions in GP of diverse and different technologies is organic and constantly evolving. ⁷ In the previous section I have highlighted that this rather peculiar comparison between sanitation facilities and usage of mobile phones is in fact symptomatic of situating slums as thriving spaces of ‘consumption’ in the city. Here, I will locate the availability of sanitation facilities and mobile phones within the specific and particular materiality of the everyday in the slums of GP. I will highlight the historical continuity and situatedness of these practices in the given context; but will also critically situate the developments in both these sectors to emphasis that first, slums remain marginalized spaces in the city and secondly, that the imperative of modernizing discourse lends to draw a linear, teleological connection between usage of mobiles and progress.

From 2003, when I first made inroads in GP, to the present, the living conditions in this slum settlement have indeed significantly improved, especially the access and availability to water and electricity supply. ⁸ Of the three camps, Navjeevan camp in 2003 had no water supply and the residents—mostly, women—had to travel up to 2–5 km everyday to fetch for the daily consumption. Presently all the three camps have access to water. This however does not mean that households have regular water supply through direct pipelines or independent tap connections within the premises. The water still needs to be fetched from communally shared sources. These are either tap outlets shared amongst a few households, or in less ‘affluent’ sections, which are more common, requires the residents to streamline water directly from the common drain it is released into by making funnels out of used plastic bottles. Water supply is only available for assigned number of hours during a day (usually two hours in evening), and it is quite common, especially during peak summer season, for the water supply to be disrupted for days at end.

In our initial days of research in GP two assets—control over the communal water source and toilet within the premises—were identified as definite signs of ‘prosperity’ and ‘affluence’ of the household in question. In 2013 the situation is not ‘remarkably’ different, even though the number of toilets within the premises have increased. On an average in a lane in one of the camps with 30 thirty households only 3–4 have toilet facilities within the premises. Unlike other resources—water, electricity and often space (in case of high numbers of visiting relatives) —toilets are rarely shared. Besides the articulated reasoning of ‘maintaining cleanliness’ of their own toilets by the residents, the fact that the toilets within the premises in GP are not connected to a piper sewer system for the disposal of the waste, and instead have to rely on septic tanks, which makes the residents wary about sharing the toilet facilities. The septic tanks are usually dug under the house, and are usually eight to ten feet in depth. On an average if a family of six is using one toilet within the premises, the septic tank fills up in five to eight years and manual scavengers have to be deputed to empty the pit at a cost of 4–6, 000 INR.

Technically, however, all households in GP have access to the common toilet facilities provided by the state. There are four common toilets for the three camps in GP. The state of the public toilets is far from satisfactory and the control over its operations is closely monitored by the interested political parties to exert their influence in the area. In the 2012 municipal corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections Chandraprakash, representing the national party JD (U) was elected as the councilor of Ward no. 195 (Govindpuri), under whose jurisdiction the three slum camps, some parts of legal Govindpuri and entire Govindpuri extension (also legal) falls under. This ward falls under the larger Kalkaji constituency and Subhash Chopra, now in his third term, representing the reigning Congress party maintains a strong hold here. The two candidates have long-standing history of political feud. Earlier in the year (January 2013) their political rivalry got exacerbated, and the control, access and cleanliness of common toilets became the ‘site’ where this rivalry was played out. While it falls within the jurisdiction of the councilor to maintain the everyday-upkeep of the common toilets, for which the state government provides funding, the control over the water-supply of the constituency falls under the purview of the member of the legislative assembly. The latter to exercise his ‘power’ stopped the water-supply to the common toilets catering to the slums which meant they could not be cleaned on a regular basis, leaving the residents of GP in a desperate situation. I witnessed a particularly distressing instance of this desperation when I was accompanying the residents of GP to protest against the deteriorating condition of the common toilets. A woman in desperate need to use the facilities was trying to make way through the protesters, she was given way. However once inside the facilities she found it difficult to make her way as the toilets were overflowing with two-weeks of uncleaned excrement. She rushed out; her feet covered with the excrement and soiled herself in the process in full public view. Considering there was no water supply in these facilities, she found it difficult to clean herself even though the gathered protesters tried to arrange for water. It was not enough, and the woman in question had to walk a kilometre to her house in Navjeevan camp in that soiled condition.

The common public toilets are not only the sites whose control and upkeep is central to establishing one’s political strength in the area, they are also ‘sights’ of ‘distress and discomfort’ to the neighbouring middle-class residents. The common toilet adjacent to a middle-class apartment block is perpetually ‘under-construction’, and the park which shares its boundary with another apartment block and Bhumhiheen camp is guarded to ensure that this space is not used for garbage disposal and open-defecation by the slum-dwellers. These decisions, at the cost of inconveniencing the slum-dwellers by denying them access to basic facilities, are taken by the elected member to the legislative assembly to satisfy the middle-class desire of ‘clean, green’ experience of urban living. Moreover citing the aforementioned as reasons for ‘inefficient’ management of public toilets, the Delhi government has started to lease out the management of these common toilets to a third-party (CGDR 2011): Sulabh International Social Service Organization, ⁹ thus stretching its drive to privatize all infrastructural facilities in the state. While the state run common toilets are liable to provide service free of cost, Sulabh operates on a pay-per-use model. Every visit costs the user 1 INR. GP does not have a pay-per-use toilet facility yet, but it is anticipated that in the upcoming legislative assembly elections (2013) this decision will be taken to deal with the impasse between the political parties.

Women, children and the sick suffer the worst of the predicament on account of the ad hoc sanitation facilities available in the slums. It is a common practice for families to buy old newspapers in bulk (for 50 INR per kg) and use these to defecate on it to be later disposed in plastic bags. The younger children however have the option to defecate in the open drains in the slums.

The refrain of the above quoted news item that ‘“slumming it” may just have acquired a whole new meaning’, with most ‘Indian towns [living] the life of slums’ cannot be farther from the reality. In these analyses there is a linear logic drawn between the access to resources in the slums with ‘improvement’ in their living standards without taking into consideration the sociality and materiality within which the ‘resources’ are accessed. Along with the fractured sanitation (as well as water and electricity) facilities, the slum-dwellers have to encounter the everyday prejudice and discrimination of being ‘dirty and filthy’ by their middle-class neighbours.

It is in within this backdrop that the emphasis of both the Census 2011 report and its analyses on the usage of mobile phone as a definite marker of ‘development’ demands a closer examination. In these analyses, the penetration of mobile phones in the slums is presented as a rupture of sorts, which has in fact instituted practices and cultures of communication(s) erstwhile unknown to the slum-dwellers. Considering the Census 2011 is the first ever documentation of availability and usage of ‘amenities and assets’ [banking, Internet, computers, etc.] in slums, it is interesting to note that these analyses highlight the penetration of ‘mobile phones’ over other established media technologies. A detailed examination of the state level housing census data for National Capital Territory (Delhi) (GOI 2013) reveals the following patterns of media consumption besides the much hyped trend of the usage of mobile phones (66 per cent amongst the entire slum households in Delhi):

87 per cent own a television

Evaluating these patterns within the particular cultures of media consumption in GP further problematizes the insistence on ‘mobile phones’ as a definite marker of ‘development’. Indeed the media landscape in GP (as in any other context and space), and the consumption of media technologies, has intensified since 2003. However even then, a thriving culture of communication practices and use of media technologies lent its ‘communicative ecology’ a complex and complicated materiality.

In order to situate the communication practices (and the media technologies facilitating these) it is important to consider that slums in a city are microcosm of displaced groups and communities. Most of the residents of these spaces are migrants, especially from rural areas, seeking better opportunities in the city. However this displacement (and migration) does not imply that the residents ‘disrupt’ all their ties—social, cultural and economic—with their past. Essential to sustain this connection with the past, so to say, is to maintain a steady communication network. And the slum-dwellers ingeniously appropriated whatever resources and networks were available to them. Here, a digression to highlight the structural inadequacies limiting the scope of communication networks in the slums is in the wanting. A consideration of these factors will allow to situate the intense penetration of mobiles in the slums in the last decade in a broader context.

The limited penetration of landlines (5 per cent of the entire slum households in Delhi) is not a marker of the declining preference for this mode of telephony owing to the availability and ease of mobile connections. Prior to the liberalization of economy acquiring a landline telephone connection was a bureaucratic nightmare in most middle class contexts, but in the slums it was practically impossible. This was on several accounts, the slum-dwellers often could not provide for all the necessary documentation to apply for the connection, but more significantly the state did not deem it necessary to provide these services to the poor and marginalized in the city. ¹⁰ Moreover it would demand of the state substantial technical infrastructure to connect the high density slum areas to the main networks. The high call rates further alienated the urban poor from these communication networks. Even in 2003, when the country was on the verge of a telecommunications ‘revolution’, the penetration of landlines in GP was remarkably low. The households which had a landline were those houses which lay on the outer limits of the slums, sharing proximity with the ‘legal’ settlements such that extending the telephonic network (copper wires mesh) was not an infrastructural burden. Then, and now, households ‘inside’ the slums are not connected to the landline telephone network, ¹¹ even when both the state and private service providers are constantly improving their quality and delivery mechanisms to meet the competition from mobile service providers. Thus it is significant to bear in mind that the connectedness of the slums to the mobile networks bears a history of structural marginalization of these spaces from the communication networks, and thereby the euphoria around the mobile penetration ought to be not only guarded but its impact evaluated within this backdrop.

The penetration of Subscriber Trunk Dialing - Public Calling Office ¹² (hereafter, ‘STD-PCO’) networks across the country, in both urban and rural areas, dramatically changed the landscape of communication practices and cultures. Initially envisaged as stand-alone units, the STD-PCO’s diversified into multi-faceted, business sites. In 2003, GP’s landscape was doted by these units, which catered to different local demands alongside being the main communication hub in the locality. For instance, most of these units would also offer stationery, photocopying facilities and serve as the local VCD parlours, from where people could buy or borrow music and video CDs. STD-PCOs as media-dense sites rapidly transformed into spaces where innovative practices and cultures of communication unfolded. These practices were strongly situated within the ‘informal’, everyday networks within GP. More often than not, the owner (or the caretaker) of the booth would also assume the role of the ‘sender and receiver’ of messages at a certain rate. Most people, especially daily-wage labourers and women, who did not have the luxury to ‘hang’ around these sites, predominantly identified as masculine spaces, would leave the phone number and the message to be delivered, and consequently would become the connecting node between the two parties. Mobile networks had begun to make their presence felt in GP, but the high cost of the hardware (handsets) and relatively expensive call rates, compared to the STD-PCO networks, meant that the penetration was still limited.

Another significant factor which facilitated increased media consumption in GP was the emergence of a local electronics market in ‘legal’ Govindpuri extension. Govindpuri lies in close proximity to Nehru Place, one of South Asia’s largest computer and electronics market. The combined factors of the New Economic Policy (1991) and the subsequent New Telecom Policies (1994, 1997 and Broadband Policy, 2004) unleashed an unprecedented growth in electronics and telecommunications sector in the country. Nehru Place emerged as the hub of the latest innovations and technologies. The subsequent entry of mass-produced, cheap Chinese electronic goods—mobile handsets, audio and video devices, cameras, etc.—widened the consumer base and reached out to the masses. And thus by the mid-2000’s, a satellite electronics market specializing in cheap, Chinese produced electronics goods was thriving in lane no. 13 of Govindpuri extension. It catered to the population of this area, but soon it consumer base extended up to the slums of Govindpuri. Here, a range of consumer electronics: radios, transistors, Chinese FM radios, amplifiers, speaker boxes, loudspeakers, professional amplifiers, mini TV sets, DVD players, VCD players and all-in-one units (cassette/CD/radio players) are available at affordable prices, especially compared to the ‘branded’ equivalents of the same product.

By 2005, the rapid expansion of the telecommunications sectors into untapped markets resulted in the service providers significantly lowering their rates. They also introduced schemes targeted to reach out to the ‘cash-low’ lower-middle classes, urban poor and a growing section of the migrant population. There are options to top-up the credit on one’s pre-paid mobile connections starting from as low as INR 5, and these usually are bundled with other privileges as free 100 text messages to connections on the same service. Not surprisingly most of the residents of Govindpuri have a pre-paid connection, however it is not solely the economic imperative that influences the decision, especially since the post-paid connections are comparatively cheaper in a longer, sustained usage period. The modalities involved in acquiring a connection—both pre-and-post paid—play a significant role in informing this preference. Even though there is a requirement of security checks (usually involving submission of identification and residential proof) it is easier to circumvent these in the case of a pre-paid connection. The thriving extra-legal ‘mobile’ markets in Govindpuri allow residents to acquire prepaid connections without necessarily providing their details. The intentions are not always illicit, though these cannot be ruled out, but usually more practical: a significant section of the population in Govindpuri, comprising mainly of migrant workers, have not these documents to produce. These extra-legal ‘mobile’ markets also allow access to the residents, on a considerably lower price, to the latest equipment. And thus it is not uncommon, especially amongst the youth, to find handsets of the latest versions and capabilities.

However to celebrate the multiplicity of the discussed ‘mobile modalities’ as re-calibrating the experience and aspiration of ‘slumming’ is at best, naive and at worst, a systematic deliberation to silence the voice of the poor as citizens; especially since it is reckoned they ‘talk enough, anyway’.

Discussion: Mobile Modernities

Official records as the ‘Housing Stock, Amenities & Assets in Slums—Census 2011’ (GOI 2013) are testimonies of, and by, the State to report on the ‘reality’—the transformations and progress; often reckoned as staid these testimonies, in fact, are ways in which the State not only ‘reflects on the real’, but also strategically sustains the idea of ‘the real’ it wants to purports. Considered on its own the report in question projects a ‘reality’ of the slums that is totally divorced from the ‘real, everyday’ experience of slumming. The media response to the Census 2011 report then can be identified by the State to mask its inadequacies (lack of inclination), as well as justifying the market-logic of development, by insisting on the ‘increased purchasing’ power of the slum-dwellers. In celebrating the dense penetration of mobiles the analyses fails to take into cognizance that for the first decade following the opening of the economy (1991) and the subsequent telecom policies (1994, 1997), slums and other marginalized spaces, were not part of the network and remained ‘disconnected’. These were essentially meant to cater to an urban, middle-class population. Indeed the penetration of mobile networks in the slums (facilitated by cheap hardware and competitive call rates) have introduced ‘new’ cultures and practices of communicating, but these are not dramatic ruptures and, in fact, in most instances either a continuation and convergence of existing practices, replete with their social and cultural discrimination, prejudices, politics of control and access. While it is of significance to highlight how the everyday of the residents in marginalized spaces is transformed by the use of mobile phones, these practices ought to be situated within the backdrop of whether these technologies allow for residents of these spaces to become ‘empowered, engaged’ citizens with capabilities and capacities to make informed choices about participating in the democratic processes. Mobile penetration and its cultures of consumption in marginalized spaces is affected by the market forces or government and non-government interventions to ‘incorporate’ the residents of the slums as ‘citizens’ by illicit participation in initiatives designed to exhibit ‘model citizenship’ patterns; any digression from these narratives causes anxiety, as is evident from the media reportage to the Census 2011 report.

The discussion undertaken in this article highlights the sustained, systemic and structural marginalization that slums experience, both at an everyday level and in the broader imagination of the State. The neo-liberal, market-driven logic has been internalized—by the State and the middle-classes (the biggest benefactor of these developments)—to the extent that ‘citizenship’ is now reckoned as a commodity, and an ideal ‘citizen’ one who can purchase it. The State testimonies, as the discussed report, are revealing of this sentimentality: the alleviation of the urban poor as proactive, aspiring ‘consumers’ intends to sustain ‘amnesia of experience of poverty’ by strategically absenting the narratives of social, cultural and political marginalization from the equation.