Abstract
Yutaka Sato’s work is based on fieldwork in the slums of Ahmedabad in India. He examines the strategies that slum dwellers employed to secure their housing rights in response to the local government’s eviction drives. It addresses two different types of collective action initiated by the powerful amongst them to negotiate with external agencies. One was claiming their housing rights through redress with an Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) and the opposition party. The other was the search for co-operation from their neighbours through coercive means, often with the aim to obtain more compensation. The chapter shows that the powerful members of a slum community can mobilise an ‘illegitimate’ means of survival when they are at risk of eviction and deprived of access to ‘legitimate’ channels of claim-making such as NGOs.
The fieldwork on which this chapter is based was made possible due to the support of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under its Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (Type B, FY2010–2012, ref. 22730386). I am also grateful to Mr Mihir R. Bhatt at the Foundation for Public Interest (FPI) as well as Professor Darshini Mahadevia and Ms Tejal Patel at the Centre for Urban Equity, CEPT University, for their support in organising my fieldwork during 2003–2005 and 2010–2012, respectively.
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Notes
- 1.
Slums include chawls, which are dilapidated tenements predominated by single-room tenements arranged in a row. Chawls were built as employer-provided housing for textile workers in Ahmedabad and Bombay during the Second World War.
- 2.
Baviskar (2003, 97) uses the term to refer to the group that is instantly recognisable by dress, deportment and language. They are typically the urban-educated, the propertied, white-collar professionals, and those who are engaged in business.
- 3.
The social organisation of Muslims in India reflects many characteristics of the Hindu caste system.
- 4.
The initial phase of my fieldwork in 2003–2004 focused only on Hindu-dominated slums that included Colony A. Colony B, which is a Muslim-dominated slum, was added for fieldwork in 2010–2012. The data presented in this chapter draws on focus groups, individual interviews and household surveys that I conducted in Colony A (2003–2004 and 2011–2012) and Colony B (2010–2012). All the names mentioned in the case study have been changed to protect the confidentiality of these informants.
- 5.
As of December 2015, the Indian currency rupee (Rs) is 66.24 against US$1.
- 6.
Interview at the SNP Cell, 6 April 2004.
- 7.
However, the idea of the riverfront development as well as the SRDP was first suggested in the 1960s by Bernard Kohn, a French American architect.
- 8.
During my fieldwork in 2003–2005, I often received an SMS with these slogans on my mobile from the Government of Gujarat.
- 9.
The area indeed has a female CBO leader but Mukesh reiterated that all the CBO members were men.
- 10.
During the SNP, the FPI ran a programme called the Urban Partnerships to help women in the slums build the capacity to organise their female neighbours for community action.
- 11.
Interview, 6 February 2003. My later field visits to Colony A in March 2012, however, revealed that they were seeking to maximise the compensation they might receive from the AMC as a result of a possible eviction and intimidated those neighbours who questioned their attempt.
- 12.
The annual interest rates of SEWA Bank’s loans vary. The one for housing loans is 14.5% and the one for enterprise loans is 17.0%. The differentiation is due to the fact that housing does not generate an instant higher income flow. While these rates are slightly higher than those of nationalised banks, to which many illiterate and semi-illiterate poor women are deprived of access, my fieldwork found out that some of them were indebted to unscrupulous moneylenders who do not require any collateral or residential proof but charge a predatory rate of over 10–15% per month.
- 13.
Interview, 14 March 2012. The interview took place in Sita’s one-room home secretly. In Gujarat, it is a common practice that one takes off his/her shoes at the entrance when visiting someone’s house. Instead of leaving my sandals outside, I brought them inside Sita’s home so that no one would find me listening to her narrative.
- 14.
This came as surprise to me, given that Mirai was an elected leader of the CBO and once requested the FPI for computer classes for children in Colony A. Nevertheless, not only did Sita warn me not to rely on Mirai for fieldwork but also one of team members from CEPT University sensed that Mirai and Shakti were involved in some politics for personal gains.
- 15.
The land is privately owned. The AMC sanctioned the land and gave the entire Colony A a 10-year land tenure when the SNP was implemented in 1997.
- 16.
Interview with the staff of the MHT, 20 September 2010.
- 17.
This model is a replication of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) Schemes in Mumbai. The SRA model brings profits to private developers as the land prices in Mumbai are high, as compared with those in Ahmedabad .
- 18.
Earlier, two other criteria were proposed for the would-be resettlers to meet. First, 10 years of stay must be proved by each household with one of the following: a ration card, a voter ID, an electricity bill issued 8 years ago, and any other relevant proof of residence. Second, 25 years of domicile in Gujarat State for non-Gujaratis.
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Sato, Y. (2017). Coping with the Threat of Evictions: Commercialisation of Slum Development and Local Power Play in Ahmedabad , India . In: Erdi, G., Şentürk, Y. (eds) Identity, Justice and Resistance in the Neoliberal City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58632-2_3
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