Book Discussion | “The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi”

NLSIU’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (HUPA) Chair on Urban Poor and the Law is organising a talk on the book ‘The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poor and the Politics of Resettlement in Delhi‘ by Dr. Sanjeev Routray. The event will take place on July 25, 2024, at the NLSIU Training Centre at 5 pm. The author will be in conversation with Dr. Sushmita Pati and Dr. Anwesha Ghosh.

About the book     

In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi’s urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.

About the Speaker

Dr. Sanjeev Routray is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He completed his PhD in sociology at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Routray is a sociologist-anthropologist, critical urbanist, and migration specialist of South Asia and beyond. His areas of expertise include urban poverty, political and legal mobilizations, transregional migration, and caste and labor market negotiations. He is the author of The Right to be Counted: The Urban Poor and The Politics of Resettlement in Delhi (2022, Stanford University Press) and his articles have appeared in leading journals including International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, and City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, and Action. Dr. Routray has received fellowships from the Urban Studies Foundation (UK), The Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (UK), Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Foundation (Germany), International Development Research Centre (Canada), and the Hari Sharma Foundation for his research and writing.