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Slum eradication has been a concern in South Asian cities since the colonial times. Legislation and policies are being framed both out of national desires and international strategies. However, very little is being studied on how these legislation and policies come into being, specifically geography's influence in their formulation. The article analyses parliamentary debates from India (Rajya Sabha, 1953–2014), and outlines the process of historical, political, and institutional dominance of Delhi. It shows that the slum legislation and policies in India are formulated by abstracting cases from the Delhi slums. This knowledge hegemony of Delhi is discussed within the growing consideration towards urban theory's southern shift, which puts the Southern cities (megacities) as underdogs. The paper argues that at a regional level, these megacities exert the same hegemony that the southern theory wants to avoid. The results argue towards broadening the southern theory and ordinary city discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural-urban classification constitutes an important framework for the collection and compilation of population data in many countries. While“urban” is often specifically defined,“rural” is treated simply as a residual category. The criteria defining urban also differ from country to country. This paper argues that these rural and urban statistical categories are also highly significant for local governance, increasingly so in recent years given the emphasis on local governance and its restructuring. In India, constitutional amendments have given constitutional status to local bodies in the federal structure of the country. Local bodies are thus now expected to draw up their own plans and initiate development works, which requires them to generate their own resources and lessen their dependence on central government funding. It is thus necessary to reorganize urban space into viable spatial units in terms of their revenue base. While rural-urban classification is the task of the Census of India, state governments are responsible for granting municipal status to urban centres. This paper examines the criteria and limitations of the rural-urban classification followed by the Census, its congruence with the dynamics of state-accorded municipal/non-municipal status and some implications for municipal governance in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a reflexive account of conducting fieldwork as a graduate student in the Sunderban area of West Bengal state, India, in the mid-1990s. Reflecting on my personal experiences of research in a setting that was simultaneously familiar and foreign, I use frames of positionality to understand the impact of explicit and implied power structures on the research process, the relationships between the researcher and those researched, and the transfer of knowledge. This paper argues that the multiple subject positions and identities of both scholar and subjects as presented in the field vary with setting, and that these positionalities affect access to informants, the tenor and outcomes of encounters, and knowledge production. While self-reflexivity is endorsed as a strategy for critically informed research, active measures such as openness about the agenda and activities undertaken, self-disclosure, making conscious accommodations for the research subject's work schedule and time constraints, mutual sharing of information, and explicit recognition of the research subjects' expertise through lived experiences are proposed as strategies for equalising the power balance between scholar and subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, cities and city regions have become the core of the global economy. Regional governments are increasingly drafting city development policies and implementing them through various visioning documents with the aim of making cities more global, networked and competitive. Welfarist governments especially in the global South are becoming increasingly entrepreneurial, and in the process poor citizens are getting pushed to the margins, evicted from their land and relocated to city fringes. Hyderabad in India provides an interesting illustration of neoliberal development trends in which poor local farmers are forced off their land to make way for a 'world-class' knowledge enclave, popularly known as Cyberabad. This paper examines the policies and processes by which the regional government has sought to brand Hyderabad as a world-class information technology destination and to restructure and reimagine it as a key node in a network of 'globally connected cities' of the world. It also considers the making of Cyberabad in terms of splintering urbanism, which is often understood as a defining feature of contemporary neoliberal urban processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many developing economies, a partial or full liberalization of the retail trade has encouraged the establishment of supermarkets. This innovation and the consequent shifts in market share can evoke protest from a spectrum of traditional and small-scale retailers, wholesalers, farmers and market workers whose organized resistance can influence the investment policies and decisions of governments and corporations. Yet, so far, resistance is rarely considered in global production networks analysis. The paper uses the case of the ongoing resistance and protest against the entry of modern supermarket operations in cities in India to show how such resistance and protest groups have influenced retail investors and public opinion, and gained collective power. In the Indian democracy, these mobilizations have developed a strong enough political influence in certain geographic regions to curtail the operations of transnational corporations and induce shifts in corporate expansion strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]