The right to be counted: The urban poor and the politics of resettlement

Abstract

In this brilliant book, Sanjeev Routray expertly traces the recent history of resettlement in Delhi, involving the displacement of over 1.5 million people over the last 30 years. He convincingly articulates and evidences how the urban poor in Delhi are able to stake incremental claims to the city and to housing through their strength in numbers – what Routray terms ‘numerical citizenship’. ‘Numerical strength in settlements becomes the primary drive for the state to recognize an informal neighbourhood. To begin with, a jhuggi [improvised informal dwelling] settlement needs to have fifty households to gain state recognition’ (p. 125). The book combines analysis of social suffering with the logics and rationales of political mobilizations produced through the process of resettlement. Routray’s ethnographic analysis spotlights the ways in which Delhi’s urban poor are able to develop networks of kinship and solidarity, and how they seek to gain a foothold within a dynamic context often defined by provisionality, uncertainty and contradiction. The book is packed full of detailed analysis and new insights built by fusing together a commitment to ethnography and the capture of everyday life on the one hand, with theoretical ambition and conceptual synthesis on the other. Particularly refreshing is how the text integrates ideas and thinkers from different parts of the world in re-theorizing displacement in Delhi.