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Tiger conservation in India has been driven for the most part by a philosophy that prioritizes the need for inviolate tiger reserves free of human beings. Such reserves, it is argued, provide much needed territory to 'care' for the tiger. In this paper, we examine the biopolitics of tiger conservation in India and argue that the current approach to tiger conservation amplifies the nature‐culture divide and ignores other imaginations of tiger conservation that are more cognizant of human—non‐human entanglements in protected area landscapes. The paper argues that tiger conservation has been a mix of sovereign, disciplinary and neoliberal environmentalities, all built on a certain 'truth' about tigers. The paper raises questions and concerns about the 'truth' discourse that underlies tiger conservation and also argues that tiger conservation has marginalized the environmentalism of the poor. It makes the case for more debate and discussion about tiger truths and suggests the need for a more than human approach to tiger conservation that recognizes the adverse consequences of fortress conservation as well as its limits in caring for the tiger in more than human geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian state is empowered to acquire land on behalf of private companies by virtue of ‘eminent domain’ outlined in the Land Acquisition Act 1894. Several amendments to the 1894 Land Acquisition Act have broadened the purview of the ‘public purpose’ clause and have facilitated more state intervention in land acquisition on behalf of private capital. Rather than questioning the legitimacy of the prevailing practice of state intervention to resolve the glitches of access to land by private corporations, the New Act of 2013 has expanded the ambit of ‘public purpose’ to include public‐private‐partnership projects. This paper seeks to look into the political economy of why the neoliberal state must continue to acquire land on behalf of the capitalists in the liberalized economy. This paper also attempts to bring out the implications of divergent livelihood outcome under state acquisition and direct corporate land purchase for the land acquisition framework in India through the case study of Rajarhat New Town in West Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper quantitatively analyzes the spatial heterogeneity of district‐level correlates of open defecation in rural India. We employ standard non‐spatial regression, spatially explicit regressions and multi‐scale geographically weighted regression to compare the stability of measurable correlates of open defecation across these different methods as well as across analyzed spatial units. Attributes like ownership of household assets, drinking water inaccessibility and prevalent literacy rates were identified as the most stable district‐level correlates of open defecation. Our results also demonstrated the relevance of our hypotheses about (a) possible negative sanitation externalities stemming from the co‐concentration of Scheduled Caste communities and other communities in densely populated rural districts, and (b) possible positive sanitation externalities stemming from the co‐concentration of Muslim and non‐Muslim communities in densely populated districts. Overall, however, our analyses demonstrate notable spatial clustering and significant spatial non‐stationarity of examined variables. Therefore, in our opinion, research findings that ignore spatial heterogeneity of sanitation drivers provide incomplete information for policy development and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The floodplain wetlands of Ganga- Ichamati interfluves in India have become severely degraded due to incessant, unsustainable utilization practices and lack of community awareness. In spite of the wetlands being the prime source of livelihood for millions, no comprehensive management strategy to accommodate the diverse aspirations and priorities of different users has been implemented for the wetlands to date. In this paper, the authors applied a framework of criteria and indicators to evaluate the status of sustainability achieved by community endeavours in one such wetland. The priorities, consumption patterns and contributions towards wetland conservation of major user groups functioning in that area were assessed by the framework developed through participatory multi-criteria decision analysis. Results show the deteriorating status of the wetland at present regarding biodiversity conservation and livelihood generation. Fishing activities were identified as the dominant utilization option here followed by agriculture. The paper further explored the preferred alternative utilization strategies for achieving sustainability. Effectiveness of the developed framework in evaluating the extent of sustainability achieved in community endeavours was also highlighted in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the key resource interactions driving the current trend in intramontane mobility as a traditional subsistence practice in the Garhwal Himalaya region of Uttaranchal, India. For hundreds of years, the natural resource based mid-altitude villages in the Pindar River basin hinged on the annual summer migration to highland pastures. Where self-sufficiency has been obtained through an environmentally embedded tradition of crop and livestock farming, highland forests and alpine pastures continue to provide the human and animal requirements of fuelwood and fodder, as well as the forest products defining traditional diets and cottage industry. The paper reports the data from a rapid appraisal survey of resources obtained by households in selected mid-altitude villages from the seven highland locations that have sustained the centuries-old subsistence culture of the Pindar basin. While livestock have been the crucial link in a forest/fodder–manure–cultivation chain that has necessitated households' dependence on highland pastures and forests, over the last four decades there has been a decline in the numbers engaged in livestock raising and, concomitantly, the annual migration to summer pastures. Instead, there is a trend towards increased cultivation of cash crops and forest resource collection in the traditional highland encampment areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at how the city of Hyderabad, the capital of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and production centre of the Telugu film industry, has been represented in recent popular cinema. It outlines the history of a new mode of representing the city in Telugu cinema and argues that its significance lies in the tendency to delocalize the city. Criminalization of the city's older inhabitants, who are marked by either religion (Islam) or their ‘non-standard’ dialect of Telugu, often accompanies this move. In the process, any claims that they might have on the city are delegitimized. Okkadu, a major commercial hit, restaged the country versus city dichotomy and the antagonisms complicated by cultural and political tensions between the three constituent regions of Andhra Pradesh. This film follows the late 1990s trend in the film industry to recreate entire cityscapes within the studio, ensuring that location shooting in busy city streets and neighbourhoods merely returns us to the grandeur of lavish and ‘realistic’ studio sets. It reconstructs Hyderabad's most recognizable monument, the 400-year-old Charminar, in addition to its obviously imaginary residential neighbourhood. This paper looks at how and why the city of Hyderabad, especially its older parts, for which Charminar is a metonym, is rendered into a fantasy space in the film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper addresses questions of ethnography in geographic fieldwork through research conducted on globalisation and work in Tiruppur, an industrial boomtown in South India. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in western Tamilnad State became India's centrepiece in the export of garments made of knitted cloth. This industrial boom has been organised through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of Gounders from modest agrarian and working-class origins. In effect, the whole town works like a decentralised factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant-worker origins at the helm. My research explores the historical geographic trajectories linking agrarian and industrial work, and the ways in which these histories are used in the present. In these uses of the past in remaking self and place, I interrogate the self-presentations of Tiruppur's entrepreneurs, as these “self-made men” hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to “toil”. This paper explores questions of ethnographic method emerging from a political-economic context in which globalisation has worked by turning “toil” into capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are characterized by sociospatial differentiation. Intra-urban inequality is found in cities across the world. Cities in the 'peripheral south' have been neglected in spite of their significant role in theoretical formulations and generalizations. The present paper attempts to argue that sociospatial differentiation is an inherent characteristic of cities, although the spatial form of inequality may vary depending on the specific culture and physical geography of the area. In the remote city of Aizawl in the eastern Himalayan region of India, multi-storey buildings are cohabitated by higher and lower income classes - the former were found at the top floors and the latter at the bottom floors. The vertical arrangement of income classes within a single building is seen as an adjustment strategy of the increasingly urbanized 'tribal' society in the hilly terrain of the city. [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]

The state of Kerala in India is known for its active civil society and the massive decentralization campaign launched in 1996. However marginalization of tribal communities hampers the state's decentralized environmental management strategies. The proposed construction of a dam along the Chalakkudy River will displace two colonies of the Kadar tribe in Chalakkudy and Athirapilly towns, destroy habitats of local wildlife and devastate unique riverine vegetation endemic to the region. This brings to light issues of social and environmental justice as well as a wider responsibility to protect and preserve unique flora and fauna. The state's decentralization strategies, as they relate to tribal communities, lack consideration of local power distribution and cultural conditioning. This raises questions about the state's role in social justice as well as biodiversity conservation. In 2010 and 2011, the author's interviews in Chalakkudy and Athirapilly towns reveal that tribal communities perceive that their place in society restricts their contribution regarding natural resource management and use. The paper suggests that unless the culture of planning and decision making in the state are changed, decentralized strategies will be ineffective, resulting in a predominately top-down approach towards natural resource management, and will negate Kerala's goal of democratic decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the need for an efficient and cost-effective methodology for preparing flood hazard maps in data poor countries, particularly those under a monsoon regime where floods pose a recurrent danger. Taking Gangetic West Bengal, India, as an example and using available historical data from government agencies, the study compiled a regional map indicating hazard prone subregional areas for further detailed investigation, thereby isolating actual high risk localities. Using a GIS (Geographical Information System), a composite hazard index was devised incorporating variables of flood frequency, population density, transportation networks, access to potable water, and availability of high ground and maximum risk zones were mapped accordingly. A digital elevation model derived from high resolution imagery available in the public domain was used to calculate elevated areas suitable for temporary shelter during a flood. Selecting administrative units of analysis at the lowest possible scales – rural development blocks (regional) and revenue villages (subregional) – also ensures that hazard mapping is prepared in line with the existing rural planning and administrative authorities responsible for remedial intervention. [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]

This article draws on research conducted in a fishing village in southern India to examine the ways in which middle‐aged women in a precarious socio‐economic position used mobility and immobility strategies to improve their livelihoods, both inside and outside of fisheries. Kaufmann et al.'s (2004) work on motility is applied to show how the mobility decisions and livelihood needs and plans of five women (occupying different socio‐economic positions) were influenced by socio‐economic structures. The study shows that the women's mobility decisions allowed them to improve their socio‐economic positions and reconfigure their gendered identities in the local village, outside the fishing sector. Motility (which encapsulates socio‐spatial mobility) empowered these women by allowing them to move out of the increasingly precarious small‐scale fisheries industry. We argue that the concept of motility provides a useful analytical framework for understanding mobility, and we use the women's narratives to exemplify this claim. [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]

This article introduces plastic recycling networks in Kolkata, India, as a case to illustrate the contradictory entanglement of economic and environmental change in urban informal contexts of the Global South. In light of the prevailing environmental critique of informal plastic recycling in India, this article discusses plastic recyclers' environmental impact and contribution as well as the potential to enhance the environmental and economic performance of their business. Network and chain approaches in the emerging field of Environmental Economic Geography are combined with the notion of social metabolism to conceptualize the entanglement of environmental and economic processes as well as socio‐environmental inequalities entailed in recycling networks. The analysis reveals the impact that the heterogeneity and fluctuation of plastic waste supply has on the economic organization of recycling networks, giving rise to distinct forms of governance in its intermediate and down‐stream segments. Such an integrated perspective also serves to explain why environmental upgrading is hard to achieve under prevailing circumstances by plastic recyclers in Kolkata. Based on an assessment of the social and political conditions of informality under which plastic recyclers operate, the adoption of common assumptions about ecological modernization imbuing parts of Environmental Economic Geography is called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dam‐related downstream adjustments of riverbeds are normally investigated by analysing the trend in sediment supply and high flow events during the pre‐ and post‐dam periods. The required data for existing predictive models is not measured at river gauges, which limits the application of these tools. We derived the frequency of sediment‐transporting streamflow events (T*) and upstream sediment supply (S*) in the pre‐ and post‐dam periods with widely available gauged records and predicted changes in the downstream riverbed by adapting an existing model. Ten gauging stations in the Godavari River Basin, India, located downstream of dams, were chosen as study sites. Annually surveyed cross‐sections at each site validated the accuracy of the predicted dam‐related downstream changes. Then, a regression equation (R2 = 0.75) was established between T*/S* (independent variable) and changes in the downstream bed elevation (dependent variable) for the Godavari Basin. We recommended that similar local empirical equations be formulated for larger river basins. Models of large‐scale rainfall‐runoff and sediment transport processes that can account for the influence of dams, such as the Soil & Water Assessment Tool, can be paired with the proposed regression equation to estimate dam‐related downstream erosion and deposition with globally available data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban sprawl has become a global phenomenon as an outcome of growing population and rapid urbanization. Previous studies have addressed the rising incidence of uncontrollable urban development, particularly in peri‐urban areas of cities, leading to chronic urban sprawl. The city of Guwahati, a million city in north east India, has expanded significantly in recent years. In this article, the links between population and growth of built‐up areas were examined using geo‐spatial techniques and remotely sensed datasets. The results indicate that the sprawl has accentuated in recent years. The intensity of land use remained uneven due to marked variations in the distribution of built‐up areas, plausibly an outcome of unplanned urban growth. If current trends are anything to go by, future urban sprawl could pose serious threats to the vulnerable eco‐sensitive and peri‐urban areas of Guwahati. Secondary cities have unfortunately received scant attention in urban policy research, and Guwahati, epitomizes urban woes in a developing country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protected areas have had significant impacts on local communities primarily through the physical removal of people. In some instances, people continue to live within protected areas due to the inability of the state to evict them. The restrictions on livelihoods placed on people living inside protected areas lead to in situ displacement. We show how conservation enclosures in the Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Tiger Reserve have produced a class of people that the state 'lets die' by banning customary practices such as fire use, hunting and harvesting of forest produce. Using longitudinal ethnographic, socio‐economic and ecological data, we demonstrate that conservation policy has alienated indigenous forest dwellers from their agricultural and forest‐land. The outcomes of conservation policy include dispossession through increased crop losses, reduced income from agriculture and forest produce, as well as a forest that is dominated by weeds due to fire suppression. The ban on hunting in particular has increased wildlife densities, which has enabled the state to accumulate revenues through the establishment of wildlife tourism facilities. All in all, centralized protected area governance has changed the relationships among people, forest and the state in a way that has produced adverse effects for both livelihoods and the ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slums pose a persistent challenge for fast growing urban areas in the global South, despite several decades of policy intervention. While Chennai has adopted several strategies ranging from upgrading to reconstruction, the city has been unable to deliver its target of ‘clearing’ slum settlements. Through an analysis of four enumeration reports and a look at the evolving political contexts and subsequent practices, we illustrate the evolution of slum policy approaches in Chennai since the 1970s. The analysis shows slum practices in Chennai continue to be characterized by an underlying continuity, with relocation as the dominant mode of operation since the nineties. However, approaches to slums have also evolved from paternalistic socialism with in‐situ development in the seventies, to approaches characterized by affordability and cost recovery in the eighties, to the aesthetics of global cities in the nineties, to the technology driven, to slum‐free ‘smart city’ discourse currently in vogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classification of 2 532 new settlements in the Census of India 2011 as 'urban', and specifically as 'Census Towns', has brought small and emerging urban centres back into the purview of urban studies and urban development in India. Taking this to be a point of entry, this article seeks to explore how the urban has been framed and approached from different and competing epistemological standpoints in the Indian context. First, it attempts to outline the different epistemologies of the urban in India, which may be seen as competing traditions because of the unequal stakes they have claimed so far in public and policy discourse. Then, it presents two brief case studies of Census Towns from the state of West Bengal to put forth new questions in this regard. The case studies illustrate significant gaps and discrepancies between the lived experience of the urban and its representation in dominant epistemological frameworks such as the official census. I argue that the historical development of various settlement systems, which constitutes the core narrative of urbanization in India, cannot be understood in all its complexity through mere census extracts or aerial images, but requires engagement with rich, embedded epistemologies that have taken shape within these settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are important vectors of neoliberal globalization in India. Despite facing widespread resistance against the proposed land acquisition for these zones, they are still being promoted across the country. We argue that the wealth redistribution to the country's elites and the fractured resistance movements enable neoliberalism and its practices to grow in the countryside. Using a private sector SEZ in Gurgaon as a case study, this article explores how special economic zoning, as a neoliberal policy, has been implicated in the spatialized production of poverty. We also show that the main actors who promote neoliberalism in India (the state and the large-scale urban private sector) have found a seemingly unlikely ally in rural India in the form of farmers with large landholdings, rural elites who are willing to let go of their land under certain conditions. The data for the article was collected in India in 2009-10. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the idea of simultaneous insider and outsider positionality in recognizing usefulness of the concurrence of distance, neutrality and impartiality in constructing relationships with respondents. It further presents two sets of doctoral fieldwork, in Johannesburg, South Africa and Delhi, India, to explore these issues. It informs that approximately 30 key informants were interviewed in both the cities using a standardized qualitative questionnaire.

The article discusses the intellectual and political challenges when dealing with the notion of continental drift as it relates to economic development and knowledge production in developing countries. The situation in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is examined in terms of global injustice, developing economies, and globalization. The article also discusses the crisis surrounding global food prices, including food riots and food security amongst the urban poor. New dietary patterns amongst the middle-class in the expanding economies of India and China and biofuel feedstock are viewed as primary causes of the crisis.

The remarkable ease with which the xenophobic tenor of the Hindu Right nationalist organizations or Sangh Parivar found favour with many privileged Indians in the early 1990s cannot be easily or comfortably discounted. Indeed, it even perniciously swayed a moderate secular central government led by the long dominant Congress Party. By mid–1992, when Sangh Parivar made the manifold dangers of the unsanctioned immigration by growing numbers of poverty–stricken Bangladeshi Muslim peasants their rallying cry, the lenient attitude of the Indian state towards these immigrants had hardened with astonishing rapidity. Unsettled by this sweeping tide of Hindu chauvinism, a hurriedly enforced “Action Plan” to locate and identify these undocumented immigrants was followed by brisk efforts under “Operation Pushback” to deport them from New Delhi — India’s capital city and locus of bureaucratic, political and financial power. Haphazard and sporadic in implementation, Operation Pushback, while unmasking partisan dispositions coursing through the Indian bureaucracy, also exemplified Congress’ belated attempts at redeeming its enervated standing. It is also worth noting that the highly circumscribed material realities of the Bangladeshi immigrants residing in Delhi’s numerous slums made them easy targets of these perverse politics, and that subsequent opposition, internally and from neighbouring Bangladesh, to the gratuitous brutality displayed towards the first groups of deportees contributed to the Operation’s abrupt truncation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]