Articles by Anant Maringanti

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The statewide Intensive Household Survey conducted in Telangana is similar to many such surveys carried out in undivided Andhra Pradesh. The data collected and used by state and non-state parties have political implications. One is of "data convergence", that is, intelligence about individuals that can be gathered by overlaying two or more data sets. The other is of "data travel", that is, the ability of many agents to access the data. In the absence of any safeguards, the conduct of the IHS and its emotionally charged context must be a matter of concern.

Notwithstanding the popular upsurge for the separate state of Telangana, it is clear that when the state is actually created it will be on capitalist turf and on capitalist terms. The declaration has been made on the basis of electoral compulsions of the Congress party that has pledged to abandon the nominal socialist agenda, which characterised the earlier aspirations for a separate state .

What kinds of subjects-in-the-making are the urban poor? The authors in this issue of the Review of Urban Affairs offer neither conclusive arguments nor radically new paradigms. They, however, nudge us to rethink poverty, not as an objective condition that can be addressed through policymaking at a distance or by targeted development schemes, but as constituted through contentious engagements of disadvantaged individuals and communities with neo-liberal policy discourses and agendas.

The right to the city, an idea mooted by French radical philosophers in 1968, has become a popular slogan among right to housing activists and inclusive growth policymakers. In Indian cities unprecedented and unregulated growth, incremental land use change, privatisation and chaotic civic infrastructure provisioning are fracturing resources created over centuries and reducing the right to the city to mere right to housing and property, thus short-changing the concept's transformative potential. Urban actors need to draw inspiration from the way social movements world over including in India have deployed the notion of the commons as a defence against corporate exploitation of biodiversity. Envisioning the right to the city as the fundamental human right, a demand for a just and sustainable social order where collective resources are respected and regenerated to support life, entails a democratic approach to the creation of knowledge about our cities. Such knowledge creation is necessarily a collaborative effort involving citizens who are differentially located in relation to the commons - policymakers, neighbourhood residents, workers and academic researchers.