Subadevan s/o Mahadevan (S8943558G)

Senior Thesis in Sociology AY 2014 – 2015

Senior Thesis Proposal

Title of Study: Governance in the “marginal center”:

Understanding when and how local leadership becomes

relevant in the lives of Chennai’s slum communities.

Supervisor: Assistant Professor Ijlal Naqvi

 

1. Introduction

This thesis explores how and when informal community level leadership becomes

relevant in the lives of the urban poor of India, one of the most rapidly urbanizing

countries in the global south.

Excluded from full participation in the civil realm and normal political life, India’s

urban poor, in particular, its slum dwellers, are forced to turn to other informal

mechanisms and modes of organization in order to have their voices heard. This raises

the question of what these mechanisms and modes of organization are and how they

impact slum dwellers’ ability to secure land tenure and access to basic services such as

water, electricity, and sanitation.

This thesis explores one such possible mechanism in the Indian context – that of

informal community level slum leadership. It seeks to understand how such leadership

structures originate, and whether they remain relevant in the eyes of slum dwellers in

light of the contemporary challenges they face with regard to security of land tenure and

access to basic services. While situated in the particular context of Chennai, it is hoped

that the findings from this thesis will provide some insight into when and how informal

modes of governance are used to ameliorate the precarious existence of slum dwellers

in the larger context of the global south.

 

2. Context

India, in particular, Chennai, the state capital of Tamil Nadu, will form the context of this

research study. Both the country and city level contexts provide interesting sites for the study of

contestations over the larger issue of citizenship and the particular focus of this study: aspects

of informal community level slum leadership and the contexts in which they become relevant in

the lives of slum dwellers.

Housing the second largest population in the world, India is home to more than 1.2 billion

people, with approximately one-third of them dwelling in cities (The World Bank, 2014a, 2014b)

This number is expected to grow substantially. India, along with China and Nigeria, is expected

to contribute 37% of the total projected global urban population growth between 2014 and 2050

(United Nations, 2014). The period between 2001 and 2010 alone has seen an annual increase

of 1.2% in India’s urban population (Bhagat, 2012).

This rapid urban population growth has greatly benefitted India’s economy, contributing

approximately 65% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (Bhagat) that has grown by an

average of 7.53% in the last ten years1. The returns of this economic growth, however, have not

been distributed equally. High urban growth rates have also resulted in commensurately high

levels of urban poverty, with the poor comprising 25% of India’s urban population (United

Nations Development Programme, 2009).

                                                                                                               1 Annual GDP growth rate calculated by author based on World Bank data. Source: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG

 

Slums form the primary residences of India’s urban poor. Over 65 million of India’s urban

poor reside in slums (Office of the Registrar General and Census commissioner, 2013). Urban

growth and slum proliferation appear connected, with the number of slum dwellers having grown

by 13 million from the 52 million recorded in 2001 (Rukmini, 2013).

The Indian government has attempted to deal with slum proliferation, which it views as a

problem, through the passing of policies such as the Jawarharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission

(JNNURM) in 2005, and more recently, the Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) in 2009 that envisions

“slum free cities” through the provision of affordable housing and basic services enabled by local

participation in the decision making process (JNNURM, n.d.; Ministry of Housing and Urban

Poverty Alleviation, n.d.). While these policies are designed at the national level, they are

administered at the state level. State level politics and governance thus have an immense

impact on how these policies manifest on the ground.

Located in Tamil Nadu, the third most urbanized state in India (Sivakumar, 2011), Chennai

is India’s fourth largest city in terms of population, housing 4,681,087 residents ("Chennai city

census 2011 data", 2011), more than 25% of them slum dwellers (Chandramouli, 2011).

Chennai also houses a unique political landscape, largely divorced from the national political

scenario, with regional parties, namely the Dravida Munnezha Kazhagam (DMK) and the All-

India Dravida Munnezha Kazhagam (ADMK) dominating elections and making electoral appeals

on the basis of material redistribution (Wyatt, 2013). Electoral politics in Tamil Nadu resembles a

revolving door, with both parties often taking turns to succeed the other.

 

This initially boded well for slum dwellers, with the DMK focusing its pro-poor policies on

the in situ development of slum communities, enabled through the passing of the Tamil Nadu

Slum Areas (Improvement and Clearance) Act of 1971 and the setting up of the Tamil Nadu

Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB). However, this changed when the World Bank (WB) started

funding urban sector development in Chennai and mandated an institutional structure divorced

from party politics in return for funding the Tamil Nadu Urban Development Project (TNUDP) in

1988. Consequently, the TNSCB overwhelmingly focused on the construction of large-scale

resettlement projects, something that has increased in intensity with the freeing up of funds for

state level urban development through the JNNURM (Raman, 2011).

This has resulted in several attempts at large scale evictions with calls to make Chennai

slum free before 2023 through the relocation of slum dwellers dwelling in ‘objectionable’

locations such as the banks of rivers and waterways (Shivakumar, 2014; The New Indian

Express, 2014). Slum dwellers have experienced increasing precarity in their lives, unsure of

when they will be asked to leave their houses and relocated to peripheral settlements that

divorce them from their social and economic worlds. This renewed precarity, coupled with

changing policies towards slum dwellers over the last four decades, provides an ideal context

within which to study urban resistance to eviction and relocation, and the role that informal

community level slum leadership plays in organizing and enabling such resistance.

 

3. Preliminary literature review

The world is increasingly becoming urban, with the majority of the world’s population now

living in cities. The proportion of urban residents in the world is expected to grow tremendously

with India poised to be a major contributor to this growth (United Nations, 2014). India’s rapid

urban population growth however, has resulted in an increase in the number of urban poor, the

majority slum dwellers, owing to a combined inability and unwillingness of Indian cities to deal

with this rapid urban population growth (Roy, 2009). These slum dwellers lead precarious lives

characterized by inadequate access to basic services and episodic threats of eviction. Excluded

from participating in formal governance mechanisms, the urban poor have to find other ways to

resist and ameliorate their precarity. Doing so, however, is not easy, for it requires complex

negotiations and contestations with government bodies and officials.

This requires some level of leadership and organization among the urban poor.

Understanding how these leadership and organizational forms originate and function is crucial to

decoding how the urban poor attempt to claim citizenship, the ability to make certain claims of

the state on the basis of equality and membership (Chatterjee, 2004), in contemporary cities in

the global south. In particular, it is important to understand how indigenous, informal forms of

community level slum leadership attempt to organize slum dwellers and negotiate citizenship in

a context of diminished political representation and access to formal governance mechanisms, a

topic of inquiry yet to be addressed adequately in the literature on urban governance in India.

The notion of citizenship has traditionally been discussed in the context of the nation state.

In the present day however, it is most prominently manifested, negotiated, and contested in the

city, especially so in the global south. The rapid rate of urbanization, its accompanying influx of

urban migrants, and population growth has resulted in highly dense urban populations and

conflicts over the appropriate use of land. The city is a site of violence, with two opposing groups

 

- one trying to exclude new entrants, and the other, trying to extend the notion of what it means

to be a citizen by broadening the scope and understanding of social and economic rights

(Holston & Appadurai, 1999). Issues of citizenship take on a particularly material form in cities,

with differential access to land tenure, infrastructure, and basic services the primary sites where

citizenship is contested (Benjamin, 2008; Harvey, 2008; Kooy & Bakker, 2008; McFarlane &

Rutherford, 2008).

Partha Chatterjee’s theoretical distinction between civil society and political society

provides a useful analytical framework to understand the essential difference between those

with and without citizenship, and the differential mechanisms through which they attempt to hold

on to or challenge the understanding of citizenship in the context of the city. Chatterjee argues

that civil society is a restricted space, available only to a privileged few, namely bourgeois

middle class inhabitants, and is not representative of all the inhabitants of the city. The rest

occupy this space that he calls political society, “a site of negotiation and contestation opened

up by the activities of governmental agencies aimed at population groups” (Chatterjee, 2004, p.

74).

Chatterjee’s use of the term population group holds particular importance. The concepts

of civil society and political society are embedded upon the differential statuses of being either a

citizen or a member of a population group. The term citizen is a normative term that carries

ethical connotations of having equal rights and the ability to make certain claims on the state on

the basis of these rights. Population however, is:

“wholly descriptive and empirical … Identifiable, classifiable, and describable by empirical or

behavioural criteria and are amenable to statistical techniques such as censuses and sample

surveys” that “makes available to government functionaries a set of rationally manipulable

 

instruments for reaching large sections of the inhabitants of a country as their targets for

‘policies’.”

(Chatterjee, 2004, p. 34)

These instruments such as censuses and population/sample surveys, while seemingly

rational and objective, serve as tools of power and governmentality that allow the state to

classify segments of its inhabitants into multiple categories for the administration of policy. The

state is now able to make the claim of legitimacy not from citizen participation, but from claiming

to provide for the well being of its inhabitants through administrative policies, often in partnership

with external international agencies. These policies are not depoliticized tools of administration.

Instead, they often hide ideological predispositions and are manifestations of social, economic,

and political inequalities. Even state policies that provide for the welfare of the urban poor must

be understood as mechanisms designed to prevent mass uprisings that threaten the status quo

(Chatterjee, 2008).

It is within this political landscape that national and state level plans to rid the city of slums

so as to beautify it must be understood. The exclusion of the urban poor is led by the urban

middle class who view slum dwellers as unworthy citizens of the city, with the state complicit in

their efforts due to its desire to reap the economic benefits of prime urban land (Fernandez,

2004). This is not done through the “old politics” of electoral politics but through the “new

politics” of technocratic, rationalistic discourse within public consultations concerning planning

trajectories in the city, where civil society engages the state in “public-private partnership” and

champions the notion of “collaborative change” (Harriss, 2006, pp. 455-456).

 

While such public consultations are often exalted as forms of empowered participatory

governance, they serve instead, as sites of exclusion. Civil society serves as the site of middle

class activism, with the majority of civil society organizations involved in engaging the state

through such consultations comprised by the urban middle class. Such public consultation

sessions are held at expensive hotels, with information pamphlets printed in English and

attended by academics, journalists, and upper class civil society representatives (Ellis, 2012,

2013).

Even supposed attempts at crafting spaces to include the urban poor in consultation have

largely been exclusionary. Nithya Raman (2013) provides such an example in the form of a case

study in Chennai, where she worked with a group of experts hired to oversee the second round

of revisions for the City Development Plan (CDP). She reveals how these experts, burdened by

a lack of money, time, resources, and manpower, saw these consultations as mere academic

exercises, designed to inform rather than influence their decisions on the form that the city

should take. Furthermore, the agenda formulated by these experts was too general and did not

reflect the concrete concerns of the urban poor who demanded that:

evictions of slum-dwellers immediately cease and that funds allocated for the urban poor be

used instead to provide infrastructure, services and tenure in existing slum settlements rather

than to construct alternative housing on the outskirts of the city

(Raman, 2013, p. 293).

Excluded from participating in civil society, the urban poor are forced to turn to the “old

politics” of parties and mass movements, having benefitted at least minimally from the electoral

system despite its flaws (Harriss, 2007). This places them within the domain of political society

 

as conceptualized by Chatterjee. The concept of political society, however, must not be

misunderstood as being one and the same with electoral politics. Electoral politics, while one

possible platform upon which the urban poor can stake their claim to the city, is not the only, nor

the most effective means by which to do so as there are rarely any repercussions for failing to

deliver on electoral promises (Nelson, 2007).

Furthermore, the move towards municipal governance and the delivery of services through

parastatal bodies has resulted in the diminishing clout of political parties in determining policies

affecting the urban poor. These policies are instead, determined by international organizations

such as the World Bank (WB), with the central government complicit in their formulation. The

diminishing clout of political parties is visible through an analysis of the Tamil Nadu Slum

Clearance Board (TNSCB)’s changing policies towards housing provision for the urban poor.

Influenced by the then ruling Dravida Munnezha Kazhagam (DMK), the TNSCB had

initially pursued a model of in situ slum development. This changed, however, when the WB

began providing urban sector funding form 1975 promoting a model of cost recovery and a

move away from expensive in situ redevelopment in favor of slum resettlement. Stymied in its

efforts by political parties catering to the urban poor, the WB mandated a depoliticized

institutional structure bypassing party politics for the TNSCB, with the head of the TNSCB drawn

from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and the formation of a Community Development

Wing (CDW) that allowed for communication with slum residents without using political parties

as a conduit (Raman, 2011).

The Tamil Nadu government had no choice but to give in to the WB due to the

considerable funding necessary for the Tamil Nadu Urban Development Project (TNUDP) of

1988. As a result, the TNSCB’s focus is now on the construction of large scale resettlement

 

projects, at odds with party politics where political parties attempt to gain votes by pandering to

the demands of the urban poor (Raman, 2011). Furthermore, the move towards municipal

governance, enabled by the 74th constitutional amendment that sought to devolve local

governance from the central to the state level and aimed at citizen empowerment through the

recognition of urban local bodies, has paradoxically had the opposite effect of reducing political

representation. This is especially in Chennai, where elected representatives, known as

councilors, number 1:20000 residents, a stark contrast to the 1:3400 in Bangalore (Harriss,

2007).

Despite the immense difficulties faced in trying to get their voices heard in a political

context dominated by the urban middle class, the global South’s urban poor have been

successful to some extent in forcing the state to extend them citizenship and its associated

rights and duties (Heller & Evans, 2010; Holston, 2009). Large-scale social movements and

agitations are only one part of the vast repertoire they use to engage the state and its actors,

with the urban poor having added new strategies of state engagement to their arsenal, some of

which problematize Chatterjee’s distinction between civil and political society. For instance,

Coelho and Venkat (2009), in their analysis of neighborhood associationalism in Chennai, found

that typically middle class modes of organization and state engagement such as the formation of

Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) are being increasingly co-opted by the urban poor in

their attempts to claim urban citizenship, in particular through land ownership.

Other authors point to the urban poor’s everyday efforts to negotiate fissures in the

governmental apparatus, what Benjamin and Bhuvaneswari (2006) term the “politics by stealth”

used to negotiate the “porous bureaucracy” (p. 222). While these bureaucratic fissures can be

exploited in ways that marginalize the urban poor as Weinstein’s (2014) account of Mukesh

 

Mehta’s role in pushing through the Dharavi redevelopment project shows, it can also be used

by the urban poor to gain exceptions from policies and to exert their claims to citizenship.

Such efforts must be understood in the context of the post-colonial state in India, itself not

a monolithic entity but an agglomeration of multiple competing factions that blur the lines

between the formal and informal realms (Ranganathan, 2014). McFarlane (2012) highlights that

viewing formality and informality as mutually exclusive domains is a futile exercise, instead

arguing that the formal and informal must be viewed as mutually enabling practices for the

purposes of governance and planning.

The nebulousness of the formal-informal divide is demonstrated by Ranganathan’s (2014)

account of the politics of getting land tenure in Bangalore, with the state itself engaged in illegal

land acquisition and illegal settlements gaining legitimacy over time through the exercise of

public authority through various means such as “the acceptance of property taxes paid by

informal residents by the local government, tacit sanction from an urban authority, investment in

roads or water supply by a local politician, or protection offered through networks of political

actors” (p. 95).

Solomon Benjamin (2008) uses the concept of “occupancy urbanism” to show how the

poor exploit these fissures in the state apparatus through subversive politics. The poor engage

the state upon multiple autonomous sites of contestation, for instance, by reoccupying land that

has been cleared, and establishing de-facto land tenure by getting lower bureaucracies such as

village and town councils to extend the delivery of basic services. The urban poor have also

taken to extending their claims to citizenship by evoking notions of legality and legitimacy, for

instance through the filing of Right to Information (RTI) requests, and erecting permanent

structures despite the lack of tenure (Rao, 2010, 2013).

 

While these accounts provide an insight into the ways by which the urban poor engage the

state and make their claims to citizenship, they do not provide significant insight into the ways by

which the urban poor organize and the ground level key actors that enable the urban poor to

make such claims upon the state in a coordinated manner.

The need for coordination and organization in engaging the state is apparent when

one considers the nature of slum life, where the majority of residents are illiterate and the state

only relevant through its unreadability and claims made on the basis of state authority (Das,

2007). Furthermore, while bureaucratic fissures provide increased opportunities for the urban

poor to engage the state and further their claims to citizenship, the local bureaucratic context is

not always friendly to the urban poor.

Instead, it can be quite hostile to the needs of the urban poor, with bureaucratic

officers viewing slum dwellers as unworthy residents of the city due to their inability to pay for

services such as water and electricity connections. Nikhil Anand (2012) documents how slum

dwellers in Mumbai are prevented from accessing proper water connections due to water utility

engineers’ conceptualization of them being dirty, undeserving, and not part of the city based on

their inability to pay for proper connections. Karen Coelho highlights a similar situation in

Chennai where neoliberal water sector reforms and an accompanying culture of audit have

resulted in the creation of a discourse of the ‘public’, the unworthy and disruptive poor who do

not want to pay access to services, captured in its essence by a quote from an engineer in

Metro Water (Chennai’s water and sanitation public utility):

The goal should be: only if you pay your taxes and charges, you can give a complaint. But here

people say ‘You are the government, you have to give us service’. And the organization gives in

to this: If people block the roads, they get water. The department keeps crying about losses -

 

why won’t there be losses? Take Melnagar – it has 800-odd tenements, in which there are 65

air-conditioners, 180 phones, almost all houses have TV and cable, but they don’t want to pay a

single paisa to the board because they are TNSCB [Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board

tenements] – that is like a quality assurance stamp, you cannot question them.

(Coelho, 2005, pp. 182-183)

Faced with this scenario, it is important to understand how the urban poor organize in

order to exert its claims to citizenship in the city. The literature on urban governance and citizen

empowerment has pointed to the key role played by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

in enabling the urban poor to organize and make their claims upon the state. Arjun Appadurai

points to the key role that NGOs played in the empowerment of slum dwellers in Mumbai,

pointing to their cooperative structure, reliance on transnational networks, and efforts at

“counter-governmentality” (2001, p. 35) where they empower slum dwellers through the use of

self-administered surveys and enabling them to engage with international experts and various

professionals with their creativity and agency as the main exhibit.

However, NGOs do not always reflect the desires of the urban poor (Harriss, 2007).

Even NGOs that start out by pushing for the rights of the urban poor can become complicit with

the state when they are included in the planning process (Weinstein, 2009). Furthermore, the

success of NGOs in empowering the urban poor is dependent on the condition of “embedded

brokerage”, where NGO actors engage on an intimate basis with local communities while being

connected to international funding sources (Stewart, 2012). This raises the question of how and

through whom these NGO actors engage with these local communities.

 

The literature on the role played by key actors within slum communities in addressing

needs expressed by slum dwellers and collaborating with external actors such as NGOs and

political representatives to exert slum dwellers right to the citizenship upon the state is extremely

sparse. Jha et al. (2007) present one of the few, if not the only account(s) of how slum dwellers

attempt to gain access to formal government services through informal leadership figures. They

show that there are two main types of leadership structures in Delhi’s slums, with older,

homogenous slums mimicking traditional village style panchayat structures and newer slums

adopting novel leadership forms, for instance, selecting their leaders on the basis of their

educational qualifications and ability to interact with formal state structures. They argue that

local leaders act as important intermediaries between slum dwellers and the state and that such

leadership structures play an important role in politically empowering slum dwellers as

encapsulated in this quote:

Urbanization in Delhi does appear to be providing the poor with a greater voice in democratic

discourse. Slum dwellers benefit from a remarkable access to politicians and other government

officials. Although wealthier slum dwellers do seem more able to make themselves heard, a

more important factor is the degree of informal organization achieved by the slum itself. By

acting collectively, even poor slum dwellers can gain a voice. Such an organization is easiest in

ethnically homogeneous, more established enclaves, but even in the newest slums, leaders can

emerge to act as a conduit for democratic responsiveness.

(Jha et al., 2007, p. 244)

This relative gap in the literature sets the stage for my study that seeks to understand

when and how such informal slum leadership structures become relevant in the lives of slum

dwellers in the context of tenuous access to basic services and episodic threats of eviction.

 

4. Research Design

4.1. Research Question

This thesis addresses the gap in the literature on the relevance and functions of informal

slum leadership and governance in Indian cities. In particular, it raises the specific question:

‘What makes informal slum leadership relevant in the lives of slum dwellers?’

4.2. Research Hypothesis

Hypothesis: Informal slum leadership becomes relevant in the eyes of slum dwellers in

times of perceived material and social need, where:

• Material need is operationalized as the need to gain land tenure and access to

basic services such as water, sanitation, and electricity.

• Social need is operationalized as the required organizational capacity for the

conduct of community events such as temple festivals.

4.3 Guiding questions

The following questions serve as guiding questions for this study:

1) How do local leadership structures and its associated institutions form in these

slums?

2) What are the functions that these leadership structures and institutions perform?

3) How do they seek to mitigate slum dwellers’ lack of land tenure and access to

basic services?

4) What is the extent to which informal leadership structures and institutions interact

with other formal governance mechanisms?

5) How do these informal leadership structures measure in terms of importance when

compared with other leadership structures?

 

6) Do other governance actors influence the form and function of local leadership

structures?

7) What are the instances in which local leadership structures and institutions

become relevant in the eyes of slum dwellers?

8) How do these instances tie in with state and national level policies?

9) How does leadership succession take place in these slum communities?

10) What are the strategies that local leadership structures use to gain access to

tenure and basic services?

4.4. Methodology

This research study is primarily ethnographic in design, using semi-structured interviews,

informal interviews, and observations to get various insights into the relevance of local

leadership in slum residents’ lives. Ethnography as a method provides more avenues for the

discovering of in-depth and intimate insights as compared to other research methods (Axin &

Pearce, 2006).

As part of my initial ethnographic fieldwork, I wrote field notes immediately after every field

visit, and wrote “notes on notes” and weekly analytical memos drawing and reflecting on my field

notes in order to start the process of analysis and writing (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011). This

helped me identify relevant themes in my fieldwork, assess their relevance to my research

question, and determine whom I needed to talk to and the questions I needed to ask during

subsequent field visits.

The formal ethnographic methodology used in this study is that of the extended case

method developed by Michael Burawoy (Burawoy, 1998). Burawoy outlines four dimensions of

the extended case method of which the most relevant to this study is the extension of the micro

 

to the macro - to connect the social processes particular to the case to larger external forces

and their specific geographical and historical context (Burawoy et al., 2000).

This thesis uses the extended case method by drawing on the literature on urban

governance in India, in particular, on how the poor organize to negotiate the state, and

connecting the dots between the relevance of informal slum leadership and the larger macro

forces and policies that impact the manner in which slum dwellers attempt to organize to make

their claims to citizenship on the basis of land tenure and service delivery.

My initial fieldwork has yielded insights from 58 participants. This was achieved through

repeated field site visits where I visited the field between four to six times weekly and spent an

average of six hours in the field during each field visit. My research, however, was not limited to

the confines of the slum communities alone. I also visited other governance officials at their

homes and offices, travelled to Vellore, a neighboring city to interview a prominent NGO actor

who played a key role in eviction resistance efforts in Anjenayar Nagar in the 1970s, and visited

various government offices in an attempt to find out how to get pattas2.

My respondents fall into the categories of: slum dwellers, informal slum leaders,

retired/current government officials, elected representatives (councilors), political activists, and

NGO actors. The rationale behind interviewing people from these categories was to understand

how slum leadership and its associated governance mechanisms function within a larger

governance structure that interacts with slum governance, and whose actors’ roles and actions

interact with and influence slum leadership and the lives of slum residents.

                                                                                                               2 Pattas are documents indicating ownership of land.

 

Governance Actor Type Number

Slum Residents 45

Retired/Current government officials 6

Elected Representatives (Councilors)3 2

Political Activists 4

NGO Actors 1

Table 1: Breakdown of interviewees by category

Additional responses will be gathered during the second phase of fieldwork in December,

where in addition to further interviews with slum residents, I will attempt to get insights from local

Assistant Engineers who play a key role in service delivery and NGO actors who have had

significant interactions with the residents of the slum communities that form the field sites for this

study.

Moving forth, I also complement my ethnographic research by drawing on the field notes

of Madhura (Madhu) Balasubramaniam, my colleague with whom I served as Research

Assistant on a project studying the slums along the Buckingham Canal, a major waterway that

cuts through Chennai, and their relation to the canal and the city at large. We both worked under

the supervision of Dr. Karen Coelho, Assistant Professor at the Madras Institute of Development

Studies (MIDS), with this research project serving as my initial foray into the field and forming

one of the field sites for my research study. I use Madhu’s notes mainly to compare parallels in

                                                                                                               3 I actually interviewed the husbands of the elected representatives for the wards in which the slums were located. Both of their wives had stood for the position of councilor, as these were areas with reserved electoral seats for women. In both instances however, it was the husbands who performed the functions of the councilor, for instance meeting residents who came to their office with complaints.

 

terms of identified themes and draw on interview data that I otherwise would not have had

access to.

4.5. Case Selection

The fieldwork for this study takes place in Chepauk, a locality in central Chennai. The

majority of fieldwork for this study will take place in two slums in the locality: Anjenayar Nagar

and Service Colony4.

Anjenayar Nagar is a smaller slum settlement, consisting of five streets with approximately

68 houses and containing an estimated population of approximately 400 people. Service Colony

on the other hand, consists of seventeen streets, with an estimated population of between 1000-

1500 people.

Both these communities are comprised of people from the lower castes. Yet, there is a

clear division between them on caste lines. While the residents from Anjenayar Nagar are

Tamils belonging to the ‘Pariyars’, a scheduled caste group, the residents of Service Colony are

‘Oddars’ / ’Goddas’, who trace their lineage back to neighboring Andhra Pradesh and consider

themselves of a higher caste as compared to the residents of Anjenayar Nagar5. These caste

divisions mean that interactions between people in these communities are minimal, especially

among the older generation of slum residents.

                                                                                                               4 Anjenayar Nagar and Service Colony are fictional names. The real names of the two slums are withheld so as to protect the identities of the various actors who would be easily identified if the real names of the slums were revealed. 5 There is some confusion over the caste composition of Service Colony. The majority of them interviewed said that they were ‘Oddars’, a caste-group whose sub-caste divisions place them in the Most Backward Class (MBC) and Scheduled Caste (SC) categories. An ex-leader I interviewed however, said that they were mistaken and that they were actually from the ‘Godda’ community, an SC group.

 

Both communities also differ in terms of physical infrastructure. Anjenayar Nagar consists

mainly of single story buildings, while Service colony consists mainly of storeyed houses. The

storied buildings in Anjenayar Nagar are also much smaller than those in Service Colony, which

also tend to have more elaborate designs. This points to a possible class differences between

both slum communities in addition to their caste differences.

Although these two slum communities comprise the main field sites for this study,

interviews will also be conducted with residents from the surrounding slum communities to sieve

out commonalities and differences and to reveal patterns of interaction between local community

leaders of various slum communities located within close proximity.

I chose these slums as my field sites for two reasons. Firstly, they are both mature slum

communities, with Anjenayar Nagar having been established 60 to 70 and Service Colony 100

to 200 years ago. In addition, they are both located on what I term the “marginal center”,

inspired by Janice Perlman’s expression “the myth of marginality” (Margolis, 1979) that

describes how people fail to see the close institutionalized links between slum dwellers and the

larger city, instead viewing slums as cancerous outgrowths requiring eradication.

The slums that form my field sites lie within walking distance from the world famous

Marina Beach, where locals congregate from all over Chennai on weekends, and are a kilometer

and a half from Citi Center, one of Chennai’s famous shopping malls. They are also located

within walking distance of the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (the government agency

tasked with the clearance of slums in Chennai), the Public Works Department, and

approximately five kilometers from the Ripon building, the office of the commissioner of

Corporation Chennai, one of the key state level governance institutions in Chennai.

 

Despite living in such close proximity to the lifestyle and administrative heartbeat of the

city, the locations and conditions in which these slum dwellers live are unnoticeable to the

general public. While those that frequent the area might know that there are slums in the area,

they are unlikely to know the names of the streets in which they are located, let alone condition

in which slum residents live. These slums exist at the margins of people’s consciousness

despite being located in the center of the city and holding importance for a larger understanding

of the urban politics and the state (Stevenson, 2007).

The fact that these slums are located in the lifestyle and administrative centers of the city

provides the conditions for a promising case study. These slums are located extremely close to

sites of privilege, providing the conditions ripe for resistance. Furthermore, some of the major

governmental organizations determining and administrating policies directly relating to their

existence are located in close proximity. This also provides a context for us to understand how

informal slum leadership interacts with other urban governance actors whose actions influence

the lives of slum dwellers.

4.6. Timeframe

This research study will be one year in duration. Preliminary fieldwork has been conducted

between late April to mid August 2014. This early fieldwork phase saw me assisting Dr. Karen

Coelho, Assistant Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, on her study

exploring the relationship of slums lining the Buckingham canal, a major waterway cutting

through Chennai, to the larger city while concurrently performing my research for this study.

Participation in this study helped me gain access to slum communities in central Chennai,

establish the relevance of my research question, and understand the larger political and social

contexts within which these slums are located. I also used one of the field sites for her study,

 

Anjenayar Nagar, for my own study, using it as a base before branching out to neighboring

Service Colony.

This is followed by the current phase of the project, where I am doing an initial analysis of

my findings between mid August to early December 2014. Beyond this, I conduct additional

research between early December 2014 and early January 2015 to further address my research

question and sub-questions in depth. All the findings will then be collectively analyzed and the

thesis completed between early January 2015 and early April 2015.

4.7. Feasibility

The success of this thesis was contingent on my ability as a researcher to gain access to

the slum communities that I use as the field sites for this study. Participating in Dr. Coelho’s

study granted me initial access into these slum communities. Additionally, my gender, caste,

and language characteristics enable me to gain further access into these communities, allowing

me intimate insights into the slum communities that are the subject of analysis in this thesis.

Gender is an important determinant of geographical sites of access in these communities.

Females are largely confined to their houses while males are more often than not, allowed free

access to most sites within the slums. This allowed me access to spaces that might be closed

off to females and to greater understand how local governance mechanisms play out in the

landscape of the slum communities I study. However, this also acted as a limitation of sorts. It

was, and will, continue to be difficult for me to gain access to young adult females to interview.

This closes off one avenue of understanding how local governance plays out in the lives of

various segments of the slum population.

 

Being a third generation diasporic Indian, I am divorced from certain aspects of Indian

society. While caste plays an important role in social stratification and division within Indian

society, I do not know for sure my caste lineage. However, the fact that I am Tamil and that my

grandfather went across to Malaysia as an indentured labourer upon a British colonial ship likely

places me in the scheduled caste category that these communities comprise of. This allowed

me to build upon the basis of a common identity to get greater access to the residents of the

slum community.

In addition, my proficiency in spoken Tamil also helped establish a sense of common

identity and allowed me to interact freely with slum residents, putting them at ease, and allowing

me to get intimate insights into the workings of the slum community that I otherwise would not

have been privy to.

These above three factors made it much easier for me to gain access to the slum

communities I study and allowed me to successfully engage slum residents in conversation,

giving me several initial insights that I analyze in the next section. This gives me confidence that

I will have minimal problems gaining intimate insights relevant to my research during the second

part of my field research in December, allowing me to meaningfully answer the research

question that motivates this research study.

 

5. Preliminary Discussion

This preliminary discussion is based on my initial fieldwork that took place between end

April to mid August 2014 and draws evidence from my field notes. Through my fieldwork, I found

that while both my field sites differed in the forms of leadership present, they shared certain

common elements, namely that leadership structures become most relevant: 1) when the threat

of eviction looms, 2) when there is a need to get access to basic services, 3) when the annual

temple festival(s) need to be organized, and 4) community life needs regulating. This initial

finding provides some support for my research hypothesis, with the first two factors falling under

the category of material need and the second two factors falling under the category of social

need. It also highlights that local community level slum leadership remains relevant in the lives

of slum dwellers despite the presence of other governance actors such as elected councilors

and NGO representatives.

Leadership and material need

Anjenayar Nagar, the initial field site in which I started my research and where I spent

most of my time, had a strongman leader who had come to power approximately 50-70 years

ago6 when the majority of the years ago when most of the community were establishing their

homes after having migrated from neighboring parts of Tamil Nadu.

These early days were precarious, with the state having attempted to evict them several

times. The leader had together with one of his associates from the Communist party,

coordinated the people to hold strikes, sent petitions to the central government to resist the state

government’s attempts at eviction, and attempted to get the residents of the community pattas,

certificates that establish the legal ownership of land (Field notes, May 20, 2014). He had some

                                                                                                               6 It is difficult to establish the exact dates when such events took place as most of the informants have trouble identifying exact dates.

 

success in this regard, having ensured that the residents in the community paid their utility bills

and kept their records, and got half of the houses pattas before his passing approximately four

years back.

There appears to be a gap in leadership succession since his passing. Some of the young

men in the community, including his son, have stepped up to fill in the daily functions of

leadership, for instance, in the conduct of daily tuition classes for young children in the area in

an ad hoc style of leadership. There is a new leader, who lives outside the community due to his

job and rarely comes to the area except when there are matters of grave urgency or for the

holding of the annual temple festival.

This did not fit with the urgency that many of the interviewees expressed their grievance

over their lack of pattas. It was only later when I talked to his son that I found out that a court

stay order had been filed, thus ensuring that one half of the community was, for the moment at

least, safe from being evicted (Field notes, June 06, 2014). This information may not have been

conveyed to everyone in the community, with the spectre of eviction haunting many residents in

the area. This was partly due to the reason that the settlements on the other side of the canal,

where the railway tracks for the new Metrorail system stood, had been evicted and its residents

relocated to tenements located on Chennai’s periphery. While the fate of those with houses on

the canal bank is still to be determined, the stay order has made local leadership largely

irrelevant except for the conduct of the annual temple festival in the eyes of most of the

community.

Leadership structures in Service Colony have been around for much longer due to the

longer history of the settlement and it has seen a succession of leaders. Yet, the last two

decades have seen a dearth of leadership, owing to the destructive gang fights that had erupted

 

in the area in 1992. The leader then, had stepped down after being thrown in prison for

appealing to the police, who were in cahoots with one of the warring sides in the gang fight. The

leader who took over had fallen out with some parts of the community due to his extractive

nature (Field notes, August, 10, 2014). Yet, there have been recent attempts at rejuvenating

local leadership in the area, with the community attempting to hold elections to select their

leaders, something that I witnessed when I was there, with the community even going to the

extent of printing election posters featuring the candidates and displaying them on walls and

water tanks.

This attempt had come to naught when the police stepped in to halt the elections as the

community had not gotten the required permission to do so (Field notes, June 27, 2014). When

asked why the elections were being held again after such a long time, one of my informants said

“if you look in terms of leadership, there wasn’t for about 8 years, now only they are trying to get,

that’s why the elections is happening this Sunday. To get people pattas and all. So if you come

then, you can know everything” (Field notes, June 27, 2014).

An encounter I had with a lady who sold flowers in the streets of Service Colony although

she resided in Kabali Nagar, an adjacent community, further elucidated the close link between

attempts to secure land tenure and the relevance of local community level slum leadership. She

said that there were no local leaders in the community and said that the community had all

gotten pattas (Field notes, June 27 2014). There also appeared to be a close link between the

relevance of local informal leadership and the desire to get access to basic services. For

instance, when asked why local elections were being held once again in Service Colony after

such a long time, one of my informants, a political activist who was serving as one of the

election committee members remarked ‘the main thing is because they wanted to hold the Adi

festival. Also, now there are problems such as the drainage being blocked, all the rubbish being

 

accumulated. They must put complaints for all of this, so they decided to form the panchayat

again’ (Field notes, June 04, 2014).

The salience of basic service delivery in determining the relevance of local informal

leadership was also highlighted by a particular encounter that I had on one of my earlier visits to

Service Colony. The area was filled with brackish water, flooded from heavy rain the night

before. There was a big truck from Metro Water, the governmental agency in charge of water

provision and sanitation draining the floodwater through the underground drainage pipes.

I took out my camera to take out some photos when a man standing nearby came up to

me and pulled me along to see the state of drainage in Thwaraka Nagar, another adjacent

community. There was yellowish water separating the ground between two rows of houses. An

old lady rushed out after seeing me, mistaking me for a reporter, and started shouting ‘send this

out, send to the papers! Send to the collector! This must go out! All of you’ll come out, they are

taking pictures, this must go out!’.. She then admonished my accomplice, who was trying to

explain that I was a researcher (and who I later learnt to be a member of the local panchayat

committee) by saying ‘yes, make sure you get it out there and make this problem go away, then

only we will pick you as panchayat leader’ (Field notes, June 24 2014).

Leadership and social need

While the material bases of leadership are immediately apparent in both my field sites, the

social bases of leadership appear just as important in both the communities that I studied.

Temples in both communities serve as the primary sites of gathering and community

organization, with meetings held either within the temple grounds themselves or adjacent to the

temple grounds.

 

The annual temple festivals are of huge importance in both communities. The new leader

in Anjenayar Nagar apparently only comes to the community mainly for the conduct of the

temple festival (Field notes, June 24, 2014). One of my informants in Service Colony allocated

equal importance to the conduct of the temple festival as to addressing material concerns such

as the lack of patta and adequate drainage facilities in sparking the resurgence of local

leadership in the area (Field notes, June 04, 2014).

I cannot give a definitive explanation as to why these temple festivals play such an

important part in the lives of slum dwellers. This scenario also plays out in other contexts, with

Jha, Rao & Woolcock identifying a slum leader’s establishing of a temple that functioned as a

locus of community activity as one of the factors that allowed him to become the leader in a

Delhi slum (Jha et al., 2007). I give an intuitive explanation drawing on Chatterjee’s explanation

that slum dwellers have to find a way to “give to the empirical form of a population group the

moral attributes of a community” (Chatterjee, 2004, p. 57). Temple festivals appear to serve as a

means of maintaining community solidarity that allows lower caste inhabitants to survive in the

city and to push for exceptions to policies and extend their claims of citizenship.

This need to give the community a moral identity also manifests in informal rules that

govern the lives of slum dwellers. These informal rules are designed to govern the behavior of

residents in these slum communities and appear to fulfill the dual purposes of keeping social

order and preventing the state from intervening in community matters. I was unable to get much

detail on this in Service Colony, with the only notable rule being that people of the various

communities lining the street were prevented from arbitrarily entering other communities,

something that had lapsed in recent times.

 

Anjenayar Nagar, however, had many informal rules designed by the previous leader

governing various aspects of their lives. For instance, residents were not allowed to: display

political paraphilia, beat the molam 7 during funerals, smoke tobacco on the community’s public

grounds, elope, and drink alcohol in public amongst other things, with some of these rules,

namely those regarding the display of political paraphilia and the beating of the molam, still

surviving despite the leader’s demise. Respondents in both communities also said that the in the

past, leaders did not let the police enter the community unless permission had been sought.

Despite the lack of local leadership present in both communities at present, it is clear that

slum dwellers still consider them relevant in their lives for the fulfillment of material and social

needs, with both communities distrustful of their elected councilors who they allege to have done

nothing for them as encapsulated in this quote by a respondent ‘the councilors, they don’t do

anything, only come, win votes and go’ (Field notes, June 03, 2014).

Local community level slum leadership appears to be largely unengaged by other

governance actors such as local councilors and parastatal agencies such as the Community

Development Wing (CDW) of the TNSCB who do not consider them worthy of engaging, instead

affording them minimal concessions so that they will not interfere with their work (Field notes,

August 04, 2014). NGOs previously played a large role in developing both communities, with

significant interactions between local leaders and NGO representatives, and Service Colony

itself being named after the NGO whose clubhouse operates within it. The influence of NGOs in

both communities however, has largely died out. Such leadership structures thus currently exist

in a state of vacuum.

                                                                                                               7 The molam is a hand-drum with the skin made of cow skin. It is an important marker of Dalit identity.

 

Conclusion

While this preliminary investigation gives an insight into the ways by which local informal

leadership becomes relevant in the eyes of slum dwellers, there are still significant gaps in the

research that needs to be addressed. For instance, the exact processes by which local leaders

managed to get tenure and basic services for their communities remain unclear. The fuzzy

timelines given by some residents when asked to recall certain events also contributes to this

information deficit and leaves me unable to link acts of contestation to specific policy timelines.

This necessitates further, more focused data collection to fill in these research gaps during the

second phase of my fieldwork in December.

 

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