Abstract
Mike Davis (2006) in his seminal work ‘Planet of Slums’ rightly pointed out that ‘instead of cities of light soaring towards heaven, much of the 21st century urban world squats in informal settlements characterized by pollution, excrement and decay.’ The recent estimates of United Nations (https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-11/) corroborate this statement as more than one billion city dwellers across the globe live in slums with consistent threat of eviction, lack of adequate income and precarious livelihood conditions, inadequate housing and poor access to basic services including sanitation and potable drinking water. Importantly, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the multi-dimensional vulnerabilities of these slum dwellers and for the first time, the spotlights of academia and policymakers have turned from ‘urban elites and middle class’ to these ‘invisibles’.
In this context, the book Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provisions in India’s Urban slums by Adam Michael Auerbach assumes great significance. It is an impressive work drawing on both ethnographic research and a quantitative dataset. It helps one understand the complex process of engagement of slum dwellers in India to demand and avail public services through the channel of local party leaders. The author has convincingly tried to break the portrayals of slum dwellers in academia that the former are helpless; without any agency to demand the basic rights available to citizens, and largely depends on the mercy of local authority and politician for services. The book has been introduced by highlighting the puzzling disparities in India’s slums. The author has pointed out that despite sharing the common features of informality and entrenched as bastions of clientelistic politics, slums in Indian cities are not as marginalized in distributive politics of Indian cities as often mentioned by scholars. The slums are also not homogeneous entities and exhibit dramatic variation in their capacity to organize, demand and ensure the access of public goods and services. This puzzling disparity in India’s slums has intrigued the author to revisit a fundamental question in comparative political economy and define the central research question of the book: ‘why are some vulnerable communities able to demand and secure development from the state whilst others fail?’ This question is examined through a rigorous and careful research design which comprises of a mix method of ethnographic research in eight case study slum settlements located in north Indian cities of Bhopal and Jaipur and a primary survey of 2,545 residents in 111 slums in these cities. This study adopts a novel approach to comprehensively enumerate the party workers in the study areas through representative samples.
The author set the stage with a brief overview of recent trends of urbanization, growth of slums, government policies and programmes targeting slums since independence, prevailing governance structure and political representation system in Indian cities. The findings suggest that the sheer scale of slum population in India, combined with inadequate resources and uneven distribution due to local politics generate uneven development across slum settlements. The author has further described that slum residents cannot passively wait for the state to extend public goods and services and, therefore, they actively demand these goods and services from their elected representatives which include ward councillors, members of legislative assembly and local officials. The slum residents make these claims with the assistance of local slum leaders who act as a bridge between elected representatives/officials and slum dwellers. Many of these slum leaders work as party workers and are embedded at the bottom rung in the hierarchical network of national political parties.
This book brings to the fore how slum leaders play a crucial role in the political economy in Indian cities. The author has extensively researched on the background characteristics of these slum leaders including the essential attributes which are required for the slum dwellers to become leaders, the different pathways through which slum dwellers attain such positions, regular activities in which they engage including the electoral activities as party workers and the incentives that drive them to become slum leaders. During the ethnographic survey, the author found literacy and formal education are two important attributes which help the common slum dwellers to climb the social ladder from ordinary citizens to becoming local slum leaders. These are essential skills mainly because these party workers not only have to write petitions to different government departments to claim basic amenities and services but also represent protest delegations.
The book makes an important contribution in understanding the different pathways through which ordinary slum dwellers become slum leaders, as the author claims that political parties do not parachute their people as slum leaders, but instead they emerge from the rank of ordinary citizens. They do not face any formal elections, term limits or any other codified rules to delineate their work and responsibilities. There are two pathways through which ordinary citizens become slum leaders: first, through voting or raising hands or voices in public meetings, while in some communities, residents deliberate and come to a consensus over who will be the leader. The author has rightly pointed out that this type of informal leadership in slums is very competitive and unsettled and to maintain the leadership, slum leaders have to consistently work to gain more personal following. The book unravels the types of activities in which slum leaders are involved. This includes helping individual residents and households obtain government-issued documents as well as programmatic benefits; making claims for shared public goods and services for entire slum communities through writing petitions, meeting with party leaders and mobilizing slum dwellers to protest in front of concerned authority. Since slum leaders in this study were party workers, they were also engaged in electoral activities such as organizing rallies, doing door to door campaigns, arranging votes for the party candidates during election which some times involve distribution of cash, liquor and food in exchange of votes. Many slum leaders were also engaged in dispute resolution, construction of religious places and undertaking modest projects such as digging drains, fixing potholes, sweeping trash and replacing hand pumps and so on. The book has also brought out the incentives because of which ordinary slum citizen aspire to become party workers. The study shows that the slum leaderships invite material rewards and social prestige. The slum leaders get nominal fees for solving the problems of slum dwellers and also with a large number of followers, they attract patronage and promotion in party organization.
The book examines the factors which led to striking variation in the level of infrastructure development and access to public services across slums. It tried to explain these factors through two-stage theory of local organization and development. The author argues that not all the slum are equally positioned to organize and make claims on the state through local slums leaders mainly because of two demographic factors- settlement population and ethnic diversity which determine the presence and density of slum leaders. The book has made a good attempt to fill the gap in the existing knowledge on how the attributes of community leadership, mainly presence, density and partisan distribution impact the overall development of slums.
Drawing on the ethnographic survey, the author discusses three mechanisms that link the party worker density with the provision of public goods and services in slums. First, the dense network of party workers in slums increase the competition among them for maintaining and expanding their personal followings which is essential to show their strength to the party elites. It develops a sense of accountability among them and drives them to be responsive to their followers. The problem-solving credentials and level of public support make these local party workers more popular among party elites who regularly monitor the work of these local slum leaders. This intense competition among slum leaders in slums with dense network of party workers help the slum dwellers to demand their claim for public goods and services through these local party workers. The residents always have room for shifting to other local slum leaders in case of ineffective or transgressive approach of a party worker. These checks and balances keep the party workers on their toes who try to maintain and expand their following through their problem-solving approach and providing claims of public goods and services to slum dwellers. Political connectivity of party workers with politicians and bureaucrats is the second mechanism that link the density of party workers with outcomes in local goods provision. The author further disentangles this mechanism and explains that being a party worker gives leverage to the slum leaders to have a direct line of communication with party elites. They regularly meet face to face with the party elites and share information about the slums including their demands. They also use party stationery such as business cards and letterheads which bear the party symbol, name of the workers, and his/her position at the time of writing petition for local development. The third mechanism which link the density of party workers with service delivery is mobilization capacity. The author argues that dense network of party workers offer an organization structure in which party workers coordinate with each other to mobilize the slum dwellers for demanding any development and pushing back forced eviction. Through a statistical analysis, the author further validated the positive relationship between density of party workers and provision of public goods and services such as paved roads, streetlights, municipal trash collection and organizing medical camps.
The book has also unfolded the relationship between settlement size, ethnic diversity and dense network of party workers. In India, political parties face resource constraints in building organization networks and fighting elections and, therefore, the settlement size is one of the major considerations while allocating party patronage and organization position in slums. The author argues that parties disproportionately allocate more party positions in larger slums mainly because slum leaders there can potentially deliver larger number of votes which promote their political career building and help them generate more fees for their services. In addition to settlement size, ethnic diversity also affects the density of party workers in slums. More diverse settlements tend to develop more leaders per capita because residents prefer to support and approach slum leaders from the same ethnic groups from which they belong. This further leads to dense network of party workers.
This book makes invigorating departures from the existing scholarship on distributive politics in India on several fronts: first, in this study, communities have been considered as major unit of analysis, not the voters, administrative units or electoral constituencies. Second, the book distances itself from usual narratives of election-centric development or the development which takes place only at the time of election and examines the development which happens beyond the election periods. It focuses on activities of party workers on day-to-day basis which include writing petition, mobilizing residents, and navigating to the state institutions for claiming development of slums. This book also probes the reasons for limited attention on the political competition among slum leaders and tries to fill this gap by highlighting the everyday competition among slum leaders to increase their followings in the presence of multiple slum leaders residing in the same slums. The book also provocatively challenges the prevailing notion among academia that ethnic diversity in form of social groups, religion along with regional diversity in slum settlements undermine development. Countering this view, the author finds that such ethnic and regional diversity creates greater network of party workers which helps the slum dwellers demand their claims in distributive politics of Indian cities in more effective ways. He also counters the common assumption in distributive politics that political brokers or slum leaders are uniformly present across the space and work only during elections. Through the ethnographic study and empirical findings, the author has argued that presence, density and partisan balance of party workers vary across slum settlements and this ‘geography of political brokerage’ increases the claim making capacity of slum dwellers and, therefore, shapes the current form of distributive politics in slums.
To conclude, through this impressive work, the book has made significant contribution in the field of comparative politics of slums in India. It highlights the substantial political agency of slum residents in Indian cities who are low-income voters residing in neighbourhoods with very weak or absence of formal property rights. It argues that the slum residents ensure their claims through their local slum leaders and do not wait for the state to deliver the public resources during elections. They engage in ‘active’ citizenship by regularly demanding and making their claims through forming neighbourhood associations and through slum leaders. The book recognizes the serious manifestations of social and economic marginalization in India’s slums curtailing the capability and freedom of slum residents. In true sense, the book has turned the spotlight towards slum leaders who are perceived as agents of change in India’s slums. The author dismisses the popular assumption against slum leaders that they are ‘inevitably thuggish and criminals’. He argues that they succeed through hard work and make considerable effort to solve challenges in slums in return for some nominal fees. The book has several lessons for community-driven development in the Global South. First, it cannot be assumed that all slum leaders are corrupt and, therefore, these informal authorities need to be involved in policymaking. However, the book makes a cautionary note that prior to partnership building, policymakers should probe the nature of informal community governance prevailing in slums and identity the residents who are deprived by slum leadership. Second, it shows that there should not be any prejudice against ethnic diversity as it does not undermine any development in slums. Finally, it suggests that political characteristics of slums need to be taken into account while assessing socio-economic vulnerabilities or designing slum development programmes. One of the major limitations of this book is that it focuses only on the slum leaders who are party workers while ignoring a large number of non-party slum leaders. Also, the book has portrayed slum leaders as agent of change in distributive politics of India’s slums but there is little discussion about their unsavoury behaviour including corruption, biasness against certain communities, engagement in anti-social activities and engagement as ‘slumlords’. These minor nit-picking aside, this book has made an important contribution to understand the distributive politics in India’s slums including political agency and social and economic marginalization of slum dwellers, brokerage and clientelism in slums with slum leaders as central actors, and community-driven development. We highly recommend this book to the social science community studying comparative politics in South Asia in the context of slum settlements.