ABSTRACT
The year 1991 distinguishes itself as a critical turning point for the Indian Republic as the beginning of economic liberalization. Amidst a crisis in which low growth rates and pre-Independence policies prevailed, Indian leaders saw neoliberalism as the next step in India’s process of economic evolution, a trajectory which Asia was following on the heels of the West. Despite the role of neoliberal strategies in generating rapid growth, neoliberalism has and continue to attract fierce support and opposition since its inception. Opposing views of the Indian state’s neoliberal policies question whether the benefits truly outweigh the heavy human costs.
The slum presents itself as an object and site through which the effects of these economic policies will be studied. From Delhi to Mumbai, slums are perhaps the most distinct image of the urban poor. Slums are viewed as an inevitable feature of any urban settlement, and one that is inextricably linked to the issue of poverty in the nation where the income gap continues to widen. However, simultaneously, slums are celebrated as the site of an inherently Indian ingenuity and entrepreneurship, which can only blossom in conditions of extreme poverty created by liberalization. Neoliberalism has manufactured the modern Indian slum, a space that is simultaneously defined by abject poverty and emblematic of Indian innovation.
THE “SLUM PROBLEM” AND POVERTY IN INDIA
In a truly Foucauldian fashion, the normalization of poverty in India cannot be discussed without also discussing the power relations that have shaped it.[1] A 2016 poverty profile by the World Bank classifies one in five people in India as poor.[2] While the ruling elites express concern for the issue of poverty as a whole, such statistics are considered a normal state of affairs in India, and perhaps even inevitable in the greater course of national development. As India’s GDP grows, a staggering and growing number of millions remain poor. In their analysis of the life cycle of neoliberalism, Miguel Centeno and Joseph Cohen posit that there is an underlying “dominant paradigm…of hegemony,” wherein the market itself is normalized and depicted as an inescapable force intertwined with natural social law. [3] This apparent irrevocability supports the idea that political choices with regards to liberalization will always have winners and losers, and that there is a certain natural-ness to the poverty exacerbated by these choices. By understanding populations living in poverty through statistics and viewing this as an unavoidable product of liberalization, the state rationalizes its own indifference and lack of effort to include the poor in processes of development.[4]
A certain sense of “obviousness” also pervades such narratives about slums, which consequently establishes an intimate link between populations living in poverty and the slum. This link posits that there is a distinct line between the slum versus the non-slum – the former is decidedly and exclusively occupied by those in the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. An omnipresent feature of every urban settlement, India or elsewhere, the slum is essentially the sociocultural and physical translation of poverty in a locality.[5] The overpopulated, unsanitary, morally depraved, and potentially criminal environment is the popular perception of the slum. This imagination portrays slums as threatening to the moral and physical wellbeing of its inhabitants. The poor are viewed as “victims” of their conditions of existence, rather than of the policies that have created these conditions. In an analysis of the causes of poverty and Indian slums, Victor D’Souza warns against considerations of economic factors without viewing poverty within a greater context. Sociocultural marginalization, a product of labour divisions in a capitalist society, is essential in the self-perpetuation of poverty that keeps the same populations at the bottom without prospects for socio-economic improvement.[6] A study on the distribution of slum households based on caste background indicates that the Scheduled Castes, a population “at the extreme end of the community’s social structure,” permanently resides within the slums observed.[7] Structurally marginalized people are routinely discounted from the national project of development, which is driven by neoliberal policies. To remain in the slums is thus to remain in the unbroken cycle of poverty, and to be left behind amidst the progress of the non-slum.
As the ecological manifestation of poverty in India, increasingly visible with rising income inequality, the modern slum is a product of liberalization. Not only is the slum an ever-present locality in cities ranging from Mumbai to Delhi, it is also a ubiquitous element of the Indian sociocultural landscape. The slum is unique in that it simultaneously assumes alterity in its exclusion from economic progress, and inclusion in national discourses that see poverty as necessary, inevitable and even natural in broader processes of development.
SLUM ENTREPRENEURIALISM AND THE SPIRIT OF JUGAAD
Amidst shocking statistics of preventable deaths, dismal living conditions, and continued exploitation, there remains an even more powerful state-driven narrative about the slum; one that celebrates the Indian entrepreneurialism of the poor and accredits it to economic liberalization. Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, is home to a massive hub of entrepreneurs who have taken advantage of informal business opportunities to sustain their livelihoods. The Deutsche Bank Urban Age (DBUA) Award, a distinction that seeks to motivate ordinary citizens to take matters into their own hands by improving their cities, was awarded to a toilet block in Khotwadi, a slum in west Mumbai.[8] Hope and optimism are the prevailing and interconnected themes throughout the endless accounts of the burgeoning free enterprise in the slums. Examples of success have only been made possible because of the adverse conditions that such businesses were made in, rather than in spite of them. These are tales of coal turned into diamonds from pressure, not the flower that has bloomed through the cracks in the sidewalk.
This narrative portrays uniquely Indian resourcefulness and innovation as the ultimate driver of success, a case of the humble slum dweller selling his wares in Dharavi to the upper-class Mumbai executive. By celebrating people who live in poverty and their apparent triumphs in a system that champions individualism and entrepreneurship, a certain romanticization takes place. The slum that inhabits such individuals transforms the image of hopeless poverty and despair to a reserve of potential that commends the success of the free market. However, there is discrete danger to viewing these populations through a rose-tinted microscopic lens, in isolation from larger political, economic, and ideological contexts. By idealizing the neoliberal policies that have made the flourishing of slum entrepreneurship possible, one transforms the responsibility of the state to rehabilitate and reintegrate the nation’s poorest, into an expectation imposed upon members of society to do it themselves. What Akhil Gupta refers to as the “invisible forms of violence that result in the deaths of millions of the poor,” stemming from the failure of the state to intervene, is not what is highlighted in the state-authored narrative of slum entrepreneurship. But the aforementioned success stories fall in line with elite aspirations to create more entrepreneurial urban spaces.[9]
At the core of this slum repackaging is a mission to incorporate slums into larger discourses of neoliberalism through the rise of the culture of jugaad. Defined as “frugal innovation,” jugaad is the idea that everyday people can make use of what little they have to fix everyday problems. Jugaad is widely perceived as embodied collectively by the poor. From the aforementioned award-winning toilet block in the slum of Khotwadi to a cheap and environmentally friendly alternative to refrigeration discovered in a tiny village, the poor are celebrated as a source of pride in post-reform India because they capture the spirit of innovation, creativity, and resourcefulness that should be modeled by the West.[10] In addition to discourses of social mobility—that the poor can lift themselves out of poverty in this way when left to their own devices—there is also an inherent “Indian-ness” attached to this notion of jugaad. Utterly disregarding sociocultural marginalization and other non-economic, structural factors at work within urban slums, jugaad is portrayed as the Indian path to economic growth through neoliberalism. The poor are praised in their everyday struggles and their work ethic aspired to, because they perfectly capture the essence of the jugaad culture.
CONCLUSIONS
The idea that adversity and poverty are necessary conditions for the creation of a burgeoning, free enterprise is deeply problematic. This notion implies that slum communities should shoulder the heavy expectations of providing basic living conditions for themselves, and escape self-perpetuating poverty without any state involvement. The slum phenomenon is not a persistent problem or a shameful reflection of high rates of urban poverty. Through the normalization of poverty as an unavoidable outcome resulting from the “natural” laws of the free market, the slum has been transformed into a fêted site of boundless creativity and cleverness unique to the Indian identity.
In the pervasive materialization of poverty, slums continue to exist. While failure to eliminate slums by improving the lives of their inhabitants should call into question the legitimacy of the state, modern slums continue to be viewed as a necessary feature of post-reform India.[11] In fact, slums are shaped into a critical component of state-driven narratives that celebrate liberalization. Slums are indeed a product of neoliberalism, and they deepen the conditions of poverty that define the space. The urban slum has been transformed into a site of Indian innovation that not only venerates economic liberalization, but depicts its residents as a people who will continue to thrive in their increasingly underprivileged conditions because of it.
Renee Xu is a second year student majoring in Anthropology and Contemporary Asian Studies. Renee is interested in Geopolitical Relations within the Asia region.
Works Cited
Centeno, M., & Cohen, J. (2012). The Arc of Neoliberalism. Annual Review of Sociology, 38,
317-340. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/23254598
D’souza, V. (1979). SOCIO-CULTURAL MARGINALITY: A THEORY OF URBAN SLUMS
AND POVERTY IN INDIA. Sociological Bulletin, 28(1/2), 9-24. Retrieved from
http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/23619350
Gupta, A. (2011). National Poverty and Global Poverty in the Age of Neoliberalism (Pauvreté
nationale et pauvreté mondiale dans l’âge du néolibéralisme). Cahiers D’Études
Africaines,51(202/203), 415-426. Retrieved from
http://www.jstor.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/stable/41343738
Kaur, R. (2016). “The Innovative Indian: Common Man and the Politics of Jugaad
Culture.” Contemporary South Asia 24 (3): 313-27
http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/09584935/v24i0003/313_tiicmatpojc.
McFarlane, C. (2012). The entrepreneurial slum: Civil society, mobility and the co-
production of urban development. Urban Studies, 49(13), 2795-2816
http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/00420980/v49i0013/2795_tescsmatcoud.xml
[1] Akhil Gupta, “National Poverty and Global Poverty in the Age of Neoliberalism (Pauvreté nationale et pauvreté mondiale dans l’âge du néolibéralisme)” Cahiers D’Études Africaines, 51(202/203): 416
[2] “India’s Poverty Profile,” World Bank. World Bank Group, May 27, 2016, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/infographic/2016/05/27/india-s-poverty-profile. (accessed October 27, 2018).
[3] Miguel A. Centeno, and Joseph N. Cohen, “The Arc of Neoliberalism,” Annual Review of Sociology 38, (2012): 328
[4] Gupta, “National Poverty and Global Poverty in the Age of Neoliberalism,” 417.
[5] Victor D’Souza, “Socio-cultural Marginality: A Theory of Urban Slums and Poverty in India,” Sociological Bulletin, 28(1/2): 10
[6] Ibid., 15.
[7] Ibid., 16.
[8] Coline McFarlane, “The entrepreneurial slum: Civil society, mobility and the co-production of urban development,” Urban Studies, 49(13): 2801
[9] Gupta, “National Poverty and Global Poverty in the Age of Neoliberalism,” 215.
[10] Ravinder Kaur, “The Innovative Indian: Common Man and the Politics of Jugaad Culture,” Contemporary South Asia 24(3): 313-314.
[11] Gupta, “National Poverty and Global Poverty in the Age of Neoliberalism,” 215.
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