Archives: Journal Articles

The seven papers in this collection were developed from abstracts selected from the submissions in response to a call issued in July 2021. At the time of the call, the second wave of the pandemic was receding. The call sought submissions that promised to illuminate underlying inequities that led to differential and extreme impacts of the pandemic on the population and explicate lessons therefrom.¹ The 68 submissions received were humbling in the sheer diversity and intensity of urban experiences. This present collection is based on the following themes: (i) distribution across several cities; (ii) focus on vulnerable sections and unrepresented sections; and (iii) interplay of state, civil society, and markets.

Noting that the central government has taken constructive steps to prepare the water sector to address the multiple challenges ahead of it, this comment points out that it is the states that have the primary constitutional mandate over water. States have to not only adopt legislation based on the centre’s groundwater model law, adapting its principles to local circumstances, but also framework legislation on the lines proposed by the centre.

Recognition of the right to water in Indian courts has had little impact on the ground. This paper explores the seeming disjuncture between what happens in the court and the everyday reality of living with a less-than-perfect claim on city water services in India’s urban slums. The paper seeks to understand and contextualise a court ruling which looks like it declares a right to water for people in urban slums, but in effect gives them little beyond what they already had. The paper also looks at the ‘everyday reality’ of municipal administration and the provision of drinking water in slums through in-house connections and community taps. In both case studies, the author looks to understand how the practice relates to frameworks of law and policy that shape the rationality and scope of action of the actors concerned, both judges and municipal officials. She found that the issue of land was the main stumbling block in both places, but it was conceptualized a little differently in each situation. These case studies underscore the critical importance of making the local interface between poor people and the state more empowering in order for rights to become local and meaningful.

This paper examines the relationship between fiscal federalism and social policy in India through an analysis of the effects of a recent effort to increase fiscal decentralization to state governments on the nature of social policy investment at the sub-national level. Through its analysis, this paper highlights the persistence of a strong centralisation bias in India’s fiscal architecture for social policy. We trace this centralisation bias to the political and administrative dynamics of the federal bargain. The peculiar dynamics of this bargain have created a context where the core goal of centralization – to ensure equity – is undermined while the expectation of decentralization – greater accountability through alignment of expenditure with local needs and preferences, fails to take root. India is thus likely to continue to witness significant regional variation in social policy outcomes, despite a centralised financing architecture.

The Constitution of India envisages three types of emergencies: A national emergency; a state emergency (in the federal setup, regions are called states in India, and the central government has the power to impose an emergency if there is a breakdown of law and order in that state); and a financial emergency. The problem the State faces is how it can respond effectively to exceptional situations without casting its adherence to the rule of law into question.” Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde offers a set of solutions within a model structure anchored in constitutional laws. The model structure, which applies at the federal level, advocates a separation between the authorizing agency—the political wing—and the implementation agency, as well as creating a distinction between a “law” and a “measure,” and between a most extreme and a merely difficult situation. By focusing on the actions of the higher judiciary in India, this Article tests whether the safeguards in Böckenförde’s model structure function at the sub-national state level in a very different geography and context. The results highlight the concern that the dynamics of democracy and the reality of how political power is garnered in a federal Westminster style framework effectively stymie the procedural innovations introduced by Böckenförde’s model by creating conditions, not for fair play, but for subverting the spirit of the law. Even the procedures outlined by Böckenförde—such as an emphasis on making the agent who holds the emergency powers a political, and not merely an administrative organization—accentuates, rather than mitigates, this problem.

Background: Dengue is a major international public health concern, one of the most important arthropod-borne diseases. More than 3.5 billion people are at risk of dengue infection and there are an estimated 390 million dengue infections annually. This prolific increase has been connected to societal changes such as population growth and increasing urbanization generating intense agglomeration leading to proliferation of synanthropic mosquito species. Quantifying the spatio-temporal epidemiology of dengue in large cities within the context of a Geographic Information System is a first step in the identification of socio-economic risk factors.

Methodology/Principal Findings: This Project has been approved by the ethical committee of Institut Pasteur. Data has been anonymized and de-identified prior to geolocalisation and analysis. A GIS was developed for Delhi, enabling typological characterization of the urban environment. Dengue cases identified in the Delhi surveillance system from 2008 to 2010 were collated, localised and embedded within this GIS. The spatio-temporal distribution of dengue cases and extent of clustering were analyzed. Increasing distance from the forest in Delhi reduced the risk of occurrence of a dengue case. Proximity to a hospital did not increase risk of a notified dengue case. Overall, there was high heterogeneity in incidence rate within areas with the same socio-economical profiles and substantial inter-annual variability. Dengue affected the poorest areas with high density of humans, but rich areas were also found to be infected, potentially because of their central location with respect to the daily mobility network of Delhi. Dengue cases were highly clustered in space and there was a strong relationship between the time of introduction of the virus and subsequent cluster size. At a larger scale, earlier introduction predicted the total number of cases.

Conclusions/Significance: DENV epidemiology within Delhi has a forest fire signature. The stochastic nature of this invasion process likely smothers any detectable socio-economic risk factors. However, the significant finding that the size of the dengue case cluster depends on the timing of its emergence emphasizes the need for early case detection and implementation of effective mosquito control. A better understanding of the role of population mobility in contributing to dengue risk could also help focus control on areas at particular risk of dengue virus importation.

Semi-formal settlements like Delhi’s unauthorised colonies (UACs), which await regularisation by the state, are characterised by aspirations for housing improvements and enhanced property values. Frustrated by the rigid regulatory frameworks that operate in the binaries of legal/illegal, formal/informal, planned/unplanned and having limited influence over processes of regularisation, UAC residents use ‘transversal logics’ (Caldeira, 2017) to negotiate planning regimes, credit markets and local politics to improve housing, which become their ‘action space’ to meet aspirations for social mobility. This article investigates the role of finance and networks of credit in autoconstruction, with a focus on the work of market actors in navigating market–citizen and market–state boundaries, foregrounded against the relatively well-studied politics of state–citizen relations. It finds that landowners and housing finance institutions, as well as actors within them, navigate regulatory boundaries through innovative partnerships and creative workarounds, and by strategically deploying collective and individual identities. Even as cities like Delhi endeavour to become planned world-class utopias, a multitude of actors continue to reshape the city’s peripheral landscapes through the assertion, dissolution and spanning of multiple boundaries—regulatory, individual–collective, state–citizen, citizen–market and state–market.

IN March 2020, as the Covid-19 induced global panic made hitherto draconian acts – border closures, surveillance and lockdowns’ – legitimate forms of state action, India faced an important choice: unleash state power to manage the pandemic or invest capacity in the public health system.

The choices India made on 24th March (when the prime minister announced the first 21-day national lockdown) and in the months that followed, laid bare deep fault lines in India’s state capacity and the social contract that shape state action. Through the lockdown, the most pernicious elements of state failure – its stubborn refusal to deliver a modicum of justice, and uphold the rights of all its citizens, its centralizing tendencies and above all its penchant for using coercion over building trust and investing in the public health system – were unleashed on citizens. Elements of this remain visible as India redesigned its approach in the months after unlocking.

In the shadow of Covid-19, the Indian state was put to test in unprecedented ways. Its response will frame our debates on the Indian state and what it will take to ‘capacitate’ the state to deliver basic public goods in the years to come. As 2020 comes to a close, we need to look back to look forward.

India went into lockdown when the globe was in active pursuit of flattening the Covid curve. Weeks after the first Covid-19 patient was detected, Indian elites joined the global chorus seeking swift governmental action. Lockdowns were the consensus instrument. It is worth remembering that days before the national lockdown, several state governments had begun sealing borders and implementing state specific lockdowns. Lockdowns were a fait accompli.

Epidemiological models predicting millions of infections, combined with the global obsession for flattening the curve, played a part. But another factor that legitimized lockdowns as India’s only option was the reality of India’s broken public health system and a deep distrust in its ability to respond to increased infections. After all, India could not pull off the Wuhan miracle and build a hospital from scratch in 10 days. The global visibility on Covid-19 (the daily tracking of infections and testing rates) and the elite pressure in India required state action.