Indian Migrant Construction Workers: An Existential Absurdity
By: Tarun Bhasin
Tags: Migration, Construction, India, Real Estate, Development

Preface: Migration as an inherently Kafkaesque Phenomenon

“My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.” — The Next Village, Franz Kafka (Kafka, 1917–1923)

The Lens: State of Individuals in Mobility

Migration is an inherently Kafkaesque phenomenon. The ‘very-short short’ story The Next Village describes the vulnerabilities and anxieties of a migrant whilst in the process of migration. The terms underlined in the story above collectively convey: (Trahan, 1963)

· How the totality of life appears to be minuscule in comparison to the idea or the weight of change necessitated due to migration (voluntary or forced).

· The very mentioning of the ‘next’ village exerts the importance given to the forthcoming context or rather is a suitable tool to express the meaninglessness of the context of the migrant that precedes ‘the next village.’

· How migration distorts the understanding of the time perception of the scale of life lived and challenges the notions of normal happy life (and in raising the point, it begs one to consider what constitutes a normal happy life in the first place?)

· Lastly, it arrives at the definition of such an act or event as a journey with unforeseen ends, hinting towards its natural state of perpetual transition, motion, and lack of finality. The timeline of the process of migration as a phenomenon (assumably) exceeds the span of the experiencer (the migrant) itself.

The Next Village also serves as an empathetic lens and precursor to Kafka’s elaborate novel The Castle that paints a deeper socio-political picture into “the nightmarish challenges posed to access by modern bureaucracies…” (Jong & Rizvi, 2008)

The Premise: An Absurd Existential Positionality

The Castle is the story of a land surveyor “K.,” who enters a village that is ruled by a castle on a hill, under the impression of reporting to duty to a castle authority. Unable to gain access to the castle due to a bureaucratic mix-up, K. remains stuck in the village, tirelessly struggling to explain his quasi-legal status to the villagers who seem to hold the castle in high regard, and thus, tolerate K. and justify the rules and procedures of the castle to him, which seem to serve a singular purpose: to exclude K. from the castle. (Kafka, 1983) As a result, “not only is there no way for him to reach the castle, but there is also no way for him to leave the village.” (Jong & Rizvi, 2008)

The novel is an elaborate picturization of the absurd existentiality of the positionalities of three actors:

· K., who feels not only obligated but also rightful in his pursuit of the castle authority. (Kohzadi & Azizmohammadi, 2013) His quasi-legal status of migration is not only driven by the need to fulfill his duty but also his own desire to be of service to the castle, thus, blurring the distinction between his act of migration as one forced upon him and one of his own choice, thereby, putting the burden of proof on K. to justify his demand for access to the castle. (Webster, 1951) His history is irrelevant to the physical realm of the story.

· The castle authorities, who seem to operate opaquely, in opposition and defiance of their own stated purposes and seem to hold no accountability to the rule-driven establishment that is ‘the castle’ (Corbella, 2007), which in itself is an obscure sovereign exclusionary abstraction that is never revealed in the story. (Shah, 2014) Furthermore, they demonstrate no recourse to K. in order to fulfill his objective.

· The villagers, whose interpretations are driven by the idea of a flawless bureaucracy that they serve, exercise unsolicited power and governance over K. in their own self-interest and remain insensitive to K. by marginalizing him as the problematic element. (Breeding, 2016) The village becomes the physical manifestation of power in the absence of the castle’s authority that makes one question whether it is truly ‘the castle’ or ‘the village’ that is to be blamed for denial of access to K. (Yari & Afrougheh, 2013)

The absurdity of the situation arises, possibly due to three factors. Firstly, lack of information and ability on the part of K. to inform himself of his rights and means to gain access to the castle or lack thereof. Lack of awareness on the part of the castle authorities about their own bureaucratic discrepancies and their neglect to fulfill their societal commitments to K. A wilful or unconscious veiling of the incompetence of castle authorities by the villagers due to lack of their own institutional capacity and motivation to act on problematizations put forth by K. Here, access to the castle is a loosely defined metaphor towards the exercise of individual rights, that is (or fail to become) enforced when there is a (mis-)match between the above stated three factors at play. (Jong & Rizvi, 2008)

The Hypothesis: A Metaphor for Power Dynamics

The story itself is a metaphorical import to describe the situation of migrants, where they are the protagonist K. The Castle is a correlation to the government and its diverse bureaucratic agencies responsible for actualizing the rights of migrants as citizens under a democratic framework and servicing them with a spectrum of resources and facilities on a regular basis to support their livelihoods, such as housing, food, potable water, electricity, connectivity, education, healthcare and transportation. The village is the city itself, and its inhabitants the intermediaries that allow or deny access to the various opportunities of the city to the migrants. (Jong & Rizvi, 2008)

The access to the stated services is perhaps, one of the fundamental aspects of power relations between the established actors that interact with each other through intermediary organisations. The government, as an indirect provider, usually outsources the provision of public goods to non-state actors under a legal and management framework. As a direct provider, it chooses to execute it through semi-autonomous agencies. (Lipsky, 2008)

In both cases, the access to delivery mechanisms established between a migrant/citizen and the services ultimately define their access to the services. Since delivery mechanisms exist in the realm of the city and its citizens, the migrants depend on them to gain access to services. It is safe to conclude thus, that for a migrant, access to service will directly depend on access to people, organisations and groups of a city that administer the delivery mechanisms. Even in the case of equal access as a principle mandated by the government, true access might vary due to procedural discrepancies. (Zuurmond, 2008)

In such a case, it is the intermediary organisation in charge of the delivery mechanism that has the power to provide an equitable solution to the migrant, if it wishes to. This holds true for the provisioning of services and prevention of marginalisation as well. However, even minimal state intervention, to enforce and protect the access and rights of citizens, requires publicly financed intermediaries and delivery mechanisms, and their administration needs to be paid for. (Lipsky, 2008)

Thus, higher demand for civil rights and services would require a higher cost of operation. In the case of limited resources, the intermediary organisation may be forced to provide equitable service of poor quality to all or an inequitable service to those with the strongest access to the intermediaries. Here, already existing social inequalities have a chance of determining the outcome. If such is the case, then migrants who have limited access to these intermediaries are already disenfranchised by the established power dynamics of distributing access. They might further face vilification due to arbitrary and discriminatory practices of the government itself, and corruption. (Zuurmond, 2008)

Thus, we can conclude that the power dynamics presented in front of a migrant are already tilted and unfair to the practice of social justice and equal opportunity since an unequal outcome is only acceptable when all citizens have an equal advantage to compete in the system. In the case of migrants, they are already at a disadvantaged position to ever expect fairness out of the existing societal commitments or institutional capacity. It is imperative for migrants to have access to separate mechanisms for having their needs met since the idea of distributive justice in their case is not coherent with the idea of equal access. (Kruiter & Jong, 2008)

A major problem occurs when such separate mechanisms are deliberately disenfranchised by the government and its intermediaries, based on their limited and parochial definition and vision of access and its related delivery mechanisms, which ultimately leads to epistemic injustice. This is one of the most significant reasons for the Kafkaesque situation of migrants and forms the premise of the explorations in the dissertation on the power dynamics presented above by the three forms of actors and the three factors that control the power dynamics between them. (Kruiter & Jong, 2008)

Since this dissertation is a study on migrants, a very particular typology of migrants: the Indian migrant construction workers; to be able to discuss the life of migrants, one must understand migration not through the lenses of pedagogical exercises in its exertion on social, economic or geopolitical boundaries, but, through the lens of its inherent lived experience, of that of a migrant. Here, only literature will suffice, and the preface has aimed to provide just that. Therefore, it is to be noted that the above deductions are salient themes to view the following chapters, where they are not explicitly described. They serve as an implicit lens to weigh the arguments put forth by this dissertation.

Abstract

There is a sedentary bias in Indian urban policies owing to their colonial roots. Social and citizenship rights and access to their entitlements and provisioning services are linked to domicile status. Critical public services such as access to voting, nutrition, healthcare, hygiene etc. remain inaccessible to circular migrants. Within those, migrant construction workers, who live in work-dwell communities on construction sites, remain isolated and in politically dark arenas.

The dissertation is an inquiry into the status of their participation in urban areas and their relationship to systems of urban governance and democratic processes, both historical and current. The research is an effort to understand the objective policy and planning frameworks of the city through the lens of subjective literature.

The dissertation further details the participatory and representative processes of migrant settlement forms with a focus on Kumbh Mela, as a reconceptualization, design and implementation of a migrant camp-city, not with the idea of resuscitating its form but in reviving its underlying methodologies in a bid to make urban planning processes and decision-making mechanisms of the country more dynamic, their means more inclusive and heterogeneous, and thus, more responsive to kinetic urbanism, in order to augment urban-to-rural capital and assets flows.

Keywords: Circular migration, access, co-production, kinetic, right to the city, urbanisation

Introduction: Making a Case for Migrant Construction Workers

Macro: Geography as a Problem

Theoretical literature on migration assumes the primary motivation for migration to be differentials in a person’s or family’s overall earning opportunities due to better employment or wage prospects; triggered by the incentive of more productive and lucrative sectors in spatial locations other than the geography of their residence. However, if the migration is forced upon due to loss of livelihood at home, then the differential in income may not be realized due to exploitative labour practices. Their situation might further be aggravated by growing congestion in urban centres and deterioration of delivery mechanisms of public services in areas of high migrant influx. (Srivastava & Sutradhar, 2016)

Since the post-liberalization period, Indian cities are in a constant state of ‘flux’ by the continuous migration that characterizes their reality and giving rise to aspirations of permanence. In order to encourage urban agglomerations, systems of governmentality have shifted their focus away from regional policies, fuelling growth in and around existing urban centres, thus, further aggravating regional disparities. The realization of push and pull factors behind migration patterns is the primary motivation of migrant literature studies in India. (Srivastava, 2019)

Figure 1 Share of India’s urban population by district. A comparison between Census 1991 (left) and Census 2011 (right). Source: Geopolis, Census of India 1990–91 and 2010–11

Indian migration literature has intensely focused on the scale of regional disparity in the country. One of the reasons for regional disparity arises from the fact that a great majority of Indian rural poor live in rainfed areas that witness low agricultural productivity. (Connell, et al., 1976) Historic urban pockets like Kolkata, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore etc. receive rural migrants mainly from rainfed areas of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Kerala, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. (Dasgupta, 1987)

In 2004–05, 80% of the total rural poor were comprised of SC, ST and religious minority groups. With extremely low physical and social capital and means of access, marginalized communities in rural areas lack the services to support increasing populations and aggressively participate in migration to urban areas. (NSC, 2012) Post-independence, unabated migration proved to be a prominent growth factor for the national economy, which has turned it into a pertinent livelihood strategy for the rural non-agrarian poor. (Joshi & Joshi, 1976)

NSSO surveys since 2004–05 have been able to shed light on the share of industries employing seasonal migrants. 73% of India’s GDP comes from its urban areas comprising of 150+ cities and 400+ towns. It is supported by 80 million families that migrate every six months from rural areas to find daily wage work. The construction industry has constantly been the largest employer of migrant labour, employing 36.2% of total seasonal migrants. (RBI, 2012)

With slowing growth in textile, manufacturing and agriculture industries over the years, the construction industry has become a significant contributor to the country’s growing GDP and is now the third-largest employer in terms of gross capital. Seasonal migrants constitute over a third of its total workforce in urban centres, although they remain invisible in prevalent policy discourses. (Soundararajan, 2008)

With India as the third-largest construction market in the world in 2018, promising threefold growth by 2030 (Sharma, et al., 2019) construction industry is the most important employer of circular migrants in the country. Small-scale public and private residential activities compose the bulk of the Indian construction sector and present a diverse landscape to understand migrant flows. Therefore, migrant construction workers are the key to map the problems to urbanisation posed by seasonal/circular migration. (Srivastava & Sutradhar, 2016)

Some 16 million households (~34.3mn workers) work as unskilled laborers in the construction industry and live in make-shift colonies. With no land in both rural and urban areas (non-agrarian, agrarian), the seasonal migrants depend on labour and mobility for sustenance, lacking assets or skill to take on better roles in the economy or to build capacity to service or upgrade their community in rural areas. 60% comprises of families with both working adults with one to three children and a monthly family income between INR 6000–12000 (USD 100–200). (Roy, et al., 2017)

Laborers in cities with a high rate of construction typically dwell in 3 formats: (Broatch, 2017)

· Within the building as it is being constructed (small scale development)

· On the construction site in labour colonies (re-usable shanties that disassembled and reassembled from site to site, under the operation of a labour colony sub-contractor)

· Market ‘nakas’ (nodes)– prominent nodes of the city (in the form of slums)

Labour Colonies and nakas are work-dwell communities that rely on the autonomous relationship of construction labourers, private sub-contractors and informal material markets. (Broatch, 2017) (Roy, et al., 2017) (Srivastava & Sutradhar, 2016) Here, all socioeconomic interactions and networks are condensed within a strong spatial boundary, and thus, the cultural development of the occupants is dependent on the quality of space as a necessary pre-existence. (Fernández-Galiano, 2000) This robust local-relationship gives them a political identity that serves their economy and provides them with a cultural role in the nation-building narrative. (Barthes, 1993)

For such people, informal land markets ‘nakas’ become the predominant aspect of gaining access to urban lands. Little is known about the functioning of these land markets, while some studies show the relation between household and market typologies and the onset of permanent characteristics in such areas. (Posel & Marx, 2011) Housing in such a context is a prerequisite for socio-cultural development that ensures the safety and security of the marginalized and forwards tools that can allow for the inclusion of migrant construction workers into the city to delineate the meaning of ‘right to the city’ for such a population. (Purcell, 2002)

However, the changing location of the construction site every one to two years makes the mainstreaming of such areas problematic for the real estate industry. Providing static infrastructure to numerous workmen for every project by pooling/leasing private or public land, and to demolish it at the end of the project is not logical for any labour-resource intensive industry. (Bhasin, 2019)

Here, a broader understanding of housing and provisioning services, administrative and political frameworks, human development, economic opportunity, and socio-economic growth needs to be understood to create participatory mechanisms for the mainstreaming of migrant construction workers in urban environments and alleviation of urban poverty while augmenting urban-to-rural flows of assets.

Micro: A Cycle of Despair & Despair

Rapid urbanisation was touted to alleviate the poverty of rural populations, but since the 1980s urbanisation has slowed down, with an overall rate of 34% (much below the 55% global average). (United Nations Population Division, 2018) This slowdown in the rate of urbanisation is attributed to the phenomenon of seasonal migration, also termed as circular migration, which constitutes the movement of undocumented labour across the country. (Tumbe, 2016)

It is characterized by labour remaining in constant flux to find work opportunities in cities for both the short and long term without the prospect of settling in urban centres. (Sharma, et al., 2014) Many macro and micro surveys peg the population of circular migrants somewhere in the figure between 80 to 100 million for the year 2007–08. The incidence of rural households participating in circular migration with at least one household member as an out-migrant lies somewhere between 30–80%. (Deshingkar & Akter, 2009)

This flux is rooted in colonial policies when workers from rural areas were forced to migrate to urban centres in search of labour and capital but were subject to Influx control and apartheid laws limiting their access to the city and their rights to its services, disallowing them to gain assets in the city or settle. (Legg, 2007) Even after decades of the abolition of such discriminatory laws, such migration patterns have not changed, and human development indicators have not improved and have been hard to measure. (Das, 2015)

Rural-to-urban migration has failed to achieve the expected growth in the living conditions of the circular/seasonal migrant population. However, all studies largely fail to trace linkages between their source of workplace and home, leading to an improper understanding of the push and pull factors and the relationship between circular migration and poverty. (Breman, 2016)

Urban growth in India has been characterized by exclusionary and exploitative practices leading to the formation of newer forms of socio-economic inequalities and persistence of poverty amongst circular migrants. (Mosse, 2007) Roughly 93% of urban livelihoods remain informal and characterized by insecure contracts, long hours of work, and hazardous work-life environment. (Jain & Sharma, 2018) Lack of institutional capacity of urban local bodies and government institutions has thus led to urbanisation being a ‘messy and hidden process’ in India. (Ellis & Roberts, 2015) Poor means of access to platforms of collective bargaining incapacitates circular migrants from gaining legal access to legally mandated facilities, services and minimum wages that are to be provided by the employer. As a result, they are unable to afford formal rental accommodation and subsidize urban areas by living in abysmal living environments. (Shah & Lerche, 2018)

Figure 2 Vulnerabilities in circular migrants’ settlements. Source: Author, Tanya Talwar, Tashi Zaidi

Furthermore, because they lack official identity, they are not counted in the decision-making planning and policy processes undertaken by governments and their intermediaries. They lack any social capital and remain marginalised from the socio-cultural aspects of the city. Having little to no access to the administrative frameworks of urban centres, they lack the provision of basic citizenship rights and facilities that the rest of the population enjoys. Although many slums in Indian cities over time have achieved recognition of citizenship rights, housing facilities and provisioning services, migrant settlements continue to remain illegitimate and at a constant threat of displacement. Thus, over generations, due to lack of avenues, they have failed to improve their work environment in the urban areas or living conditions in rural areas. (Bhagat, 2017)

Figure 3 Vulnerabilities hampering long-term growth of circular migrants. Source: Author, Tanya Talwar, Tashi Zaidi

Lack of enumeration data, along with politics, and lack of tenure security legislations around utilisation of (costly) land parcels of urban centres for affordable housing, coupled with their own temporality, have left circular migrants without a political voice or tool. (Desai & Sanghvi, 2018) Hence, they remain outside the purview of even the fringes of urban planning, disenfranchised, almost criminal, adding a social stigma that makes them an undesirable population for the local population and governmental intermediaries forming the social and spatial margins of the city. (Sugathan & Jayaram, 2018)

Figure 4 Condensing infrastructural issues faced by circular migrants into 6 parts. Source: Author, Tanya Talwar, Tashi Zaidi

Both National Population Census and NSSO over decades have grossly underplayed the importance of circular migration as a livelihood strategy, mostly due to lack of accountable data arising due to inaccuracies in data collection because of empirical difficulties. (NCEUS, 2008) This increases the necessity to create a better understanding of seasonal and circular migration because the migrants forming a part of these patterns, according to surveys, form the weakest socio-economic profile, with social deprivation, lack of capital flows, low education, high mortality and engagement in casual work. (NCEUS, 2007)

It demands exploration of space and place, based on socio-economic indicators of human development, role and limitations of technology to include the community in measurement and improvement of key performance indicators on-site, and co-production strategies and mechanisms for the creation of a web of numerous labour colonies supported of critical policy frameworks. (Marx, 2006)

All this begs the consideration of alternate meanings of citizenship, nature, and means of access and inclusion for a population that does not identify its ‘right to the city’ from the established paradigms of participation in the public sphere of that city or permanence but represent their kinetic form of urban dwelling, one that exists “beyond the control of both state and capitalism.” (Purcell, 2013)

Literature Review: Taking History in Synchronicity

New Delhi: Systematic ‘Othering’ in the Colonial Past

New Delhi was conceived as a spectacle of imperial modernity. Commissioned in 1911 to transfer the capital of British India from Calcutta to Delhi, it sought to embody the rationality of imperialism of the British Raj in its aesthetics, science and politics. It was Britain’s vision of legitimacy and longevity in the late-colonial period. The decision to transfer the capital from east of the subcontinent to its centre was not just motivated by the idea of locating it in a particular physical geography, but to distance the ‘Government of India’ away from the influences of the revolutionary province of Bengal and much closer to the mysticism and traditions of Delhi that had been the seat of power for the subcontinent 11 times since 900 B.C. (Legg, 2007)

However, the imperial will could not realize the utopia of New Delhi. Rather, its administration and governance style came to be dominated by the old walled city of Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi) to its north. The contrast between New Delhi and Old Delhi is apparent. While the former is driven by neo-classical monumentalism where life is conducted in sterile and geometric spaces, the latter boasts of haptic and sensory places, congested and winding streets, where temporal flows are dictated by communities located historically on the basis of their religion and caste. (Legg, 2007)

New Delhi, thus, turned out to be a spectacle of colonial anomalies. “The city lacked both the insolence of conquest and the generosity of concession, and by its deliberate separateness it perpetuated invidious old comparisons.” (Morris, 1983) It soon became a classic example of the exercise of Foucauldian ‘biopower’, where unstable ‘sovereign powers’ representing the free individuals of both the old city and the new city, and their decisions, sought ‘domination and discipline’ of the body, in a structure of force that left subordinates little to no space to maneuver, (Hindess, 1996) through ‘governance or governmentalities’-Government of India-as an exercise and experimentation into the conduct of an autonomous regulation over the economy and society of the colonized. (Foucault, 1979)

Foucault rejects the idea of the interpretation of powers by neat separation and temporal discontinuity, stressing on the ‘dovetailing’ of different rationalities where the seemingly the above mentioned three forms of power entered into a triangulation (as also expressed in the deduction of Franz Kafka’s The Castle), but where the ‘government,’ conceived as autonomous, attained pre-eminence over both, the sovereign powers and the disciplines. (Foucault, 2001) This form of power retained complex relationships, and rather than being successionist, delineated subtle changes through means, modes and events, excluding outside subjects, only to include them later as a transformative part of its exclusionary social order and outcast state. (Dillon, 2004)

The colonial ‘government’ sketched a “seemingly oxymoronic geography of liberalism” (Legg, 2007) where liberty was granted to people closest to be deemed sufficiently ‘normal’ according to the Western ideals of a ‘white, adult, heterosexual, able-bodied male.’ (Mehta, 1999) It served not only as a means of textual representation and institutional mechanisms of authority, control and denial of voice (Thomas, 1994) but a design to produce effects of order, manifested through discontinuous developments and projects of a contingent nature, to ‘improve’ the population by “the systematic redefinition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of the colonized was lived.” (Scott, 1995)

The colonial government operated with violence, exception and enmity towards native rural and tribal territories and people, synthesizing massacres through mercantile and military logic. Space was marked and impressed with boundaries, zones and hierarchies through exploitation and domination. It was construed as a raw material of sovereignty, which was another meaning for occupation, which simply meant relegating native rural and tribal populations into a state ‘between subjecthood and objecthood.’ (Mbembe, 2003) Colonial violence embodied the idea of the state into imagined legitimate territories, as ones over which colonial order exercised, and illegitimate territories, the ones over which it did not. (Mbembe, 2001)

At the centre of its episteme was segregation through ‘race’ that over-lapped with different forms of ‘othering’ already prevalent amongst the colonized. (Chatterjee, 1993) It neglected the democratisation of human rights, and by adopting regional forms of segregation and ‘othering,’ it also created decentralised forms and traditions of colonial power. (Scott, 1995) Religion, caste and community were embedded within laws and governmental programmes, disciplinary systems, penal codes, and urban planning. Based on location, particular castes, communities and minorities were ostracized at the behest of more powerful native communities. (Hussain, 2003)

Demanding control and knowledge of the population, urban reconstruction and planning were used as tools to ensure the political security of the elite, where population censuses and land surveys collected intimate details of their subjects in order to understand the nature and state of affairs of municipalities and the ‘disposition of things’ sovereign powers sought to govern. (Legg, 2006)

Since they were ultimately a part of capitalist world systems, they remained focused on extractive policies to produce cheap exports to boost the economies of the imperial heartland and challenge the manufacturers based in the rural hinterland of the colonies. This resulted in the creation of underdeveloped economies lacking the capacity of services and functions that could ever create robust mechanisms to deliver citizen services. It furthermore created a protracted attitude of the government towards engaging with or investing in the economy of the state for maximising profits. (Goswami, 2004)

To conclude, the economy remained heavily intruded upon by the state but too underdeveloped to be left to free-market forces. Society was thought to be irrational and kept traditional, lacking representation in public institutions. Wide-scale social programmes and education were avoided. The colonial government sought the minutest of details of its subjects but refused to use that knowledge to finance interventions for their welfare. That kept the government confined to the art of regulation and policing rather than the science of security and liberalism. Thus, the colonial Government of India remained unsure of its security to ever trust and develop on its own delivery mechanisms of society and economy, and kept to organising the disposition of its population, but without any investment or recourse into the existing hallowed ground of traditions of ‘othering.’ (Legg, 2007)

In its early period, the colonial state existed as an externality to the Indian society deemed unfit to regulate itself. Its laws that were aimed at guiding the population away from its own despotic forms of incarceration, such as the caste system, failed to penetrate the dominion and reconstitute the subcontinent. (Prakash, 2002) Forms of governmental apparatus of imperialism were put in place, but they remained doubtful on the true ability of the colonized to ever be able to support the very modes and processes of governmentality on which governments of the liberal West relied. Only the institutions that could exercise immediate and direct power remained utilitarian. (Prakash, 2002)

That saw the need for sovereign powers to move towards centralised administration, fixed borders and permanent territorial controls. (Hussain, 2003) As a result, state institutions became more forceful in their desire and needed to infiltrate and conduct society. The state kept expanding on its territory, seeking to map and obtain control over all its territory but lacking the resources or the institutional capacity to do so effectively. It was forced to create newer alliances in order to retain security in the face of rising anti-colonial nationalism and crumbling state sovereignty. In a way, economically and bio-politically, it became more developmental, with an effort to modernise the economic apparatus, making its boundaries more permeable to external influences. This late period of colonialism saw the emergence of a ‘self-destruct state’ as it oversaw the process of Independence of India and the transfer of power to the Government of India. (Darwin, 1999)

“And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell (Orwell, 1948)

The post-colonial analysis of New Delhi is not to privilege the colonial institutions of the city and the embodied state, but an examination of the patterns of colonialism and rationalities of rules established under the colonial Government of India, that may be relevant in the present, in an effort to contest their domination and provide social justice. The idea is to reflect on the nature of social ‘reforms’ and interrogate their modalities that altered the landscape of resistance against governmental domination, altered the lives of colonised, and continue to do so. (Scott, 1999)

Urbanisation: Post-Liberalization Processes of Dispossession

In 1979, the Government of India had launched the ‘The Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1979’. The Act recognised the rapid rate of urbanisation in India, the trend of circular migration, and a careful assessment of the problems faced by circular migrants. It created regulations to normalize minimum wage, work hours, regular pay and equal pay regardless of sex for any work demanding labour from 10 or more circular migrants. The Act mandated provision of displacement and journey allowance within the tenure of the work and to the place of residence at the end of the tenure of work, respectively, to cover the component of expenditure due to travel between urban and rural areas. (Government of India, 1979)

It further made provision of suitable work environments for both men and women obligatory, by mandating all employers to provide affordable rental accommodation, water closets, drinking water and washing facilities, creches and day-care units, canteens, medical and healthcare facilities, and protective clothing, free of charge. This marked a significant moment to streamline the flow of capital towards expenditure on creating income-producing social values and assets.

Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act set up a committee to oversee the implementation of the policies underlying the Act. By authorising a labour representative as an intermediary between local government bodies and businesses, it created administrative mechanisms to ensure liabilities on the part of employers and contractors if they failed to meet the compliances. (Government of India, 1979)

“The policy affixed the idea that an employer had to use the capital not just to create infrastructure that will be utilized in the production of goods, but a portion of the capital must be set aside to create industry infrastructure that would enhance the quality of life of workers that provide their labour for utilization of industry infrastructure to ultimately produce the goods of value, thereby, asserting on the importance to maintain and enhance social capital in the section of the society that remained economically marginalized, deprived of assets and socio-cultural growth.” (Bhasin, 2019)

To evade any cost of compliance to the Act, and to ensure that the labour remained cheap, flexible and accessible, industries created non-standard forms of casual, contract, or daily wage work. Without formal employee-employer contract and relationship, labourers were left incapacitated to demand social security measures mandated by the Act or ask for legal protection from the government in their absence. This led to the proliferation of toxic work environments that constituted unregulated work hours and low wages. (Sankaran, 2007)

This tendency of capitalism was strengthened by the complacency of the state in the implementation of the Act and successive governments in strengthening labour reforms. On the contrary, the country saw gradual dilution of the state’s own regulatory function and bureaucratic oversight of the Act, dilution of labour legislations synonymous to the Act and weakening of trade unions with the Liberalisation Reforms of 1991. (Mitchell, et al., 2014)

The urban-led capitalist growth model, designed to attract foreign technology and capital investments into large urban agglomerations, and enhance product competitiveness in global markets, has since been the main driver of development in post-liberalisation India. (Hoelscher, 2016) It marked the characterisation of urban agglomerations as economic powerhouses, booming with industries in the manufacturing and service sector competing in global value chains. The construction sector came up to meet the needs of the ever-growing infrastructural needs posed by incoming migrants. (Das, 2015) Soon, it not only became infamous for exploiting the urban environment and natural resources but also the swathe of the unskilled manual labour force of the country. (Samaddar, 2016)

Realising the growth in the construction sector and the need for regulating working conditions specifically in that industry, the Government of India launched ‘The Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996’ and set up a CESS Fund under the synonymous ‘The Building and Other Construction Worker Welfare Cess Act 1996’. Although it was a reiteration of almost all the mandates from the previous Act, it added a labour tax on developers equal to 1% of their profits, to be collected and utilized by the government for the welfare of migrant construction workers. (Government of India, 1996a) (Government of India, 1996b)

The BOCW Act mandated all developers to register all their workers (including migrant and casual wage) under it. The districts and state governments were mandated to collect the tax, and the central government took charge of regulating it and reimbursing it to the states for workers’ welfare. However, lack of accountability and identification of workers, on behalf of the state of their residence, due to them being in mobility or at a worksite in another state, created a blockade in development and relief work, as the states refused to spend money arbitrarily. (Roy, et al., 2017)

Despite the underutilization of the CESS Fund, the BOCW Act saw a better adoption compared to its predecessor, but then no other reform happened in two decades to follow. Until, the government in 2018, through Draft National Urban Policy Framework, gave a hint into the direction of utilisation of CESS Fund with two statements “It is imperative to move beyond the family-based housing unit towards communal and flexible modes suited to, for example, migrant workers” and “Labour cess should be utilized for providing rental housing for the construction workers.” (NIUA, 2018)

Circular migration has since the BOCW Act become the backbone of this contemporary exploitative system in the construction industry, based on ever-increasing informalisation of work by hiring circular migrants to accumulate profits. (Mitra, et al., 2017) Construction and other industries prefer to hire them since they do not have to provide them the similar standards of living wages, or accrue costs on health, education, nutrition, household needs, old-age, as they have to do with regular employees. (Shah & Lerche, 2018)

Numerous academic papers and surveys have consistently revealed discrimination faced by migrant construction workers in access to getting higher wages or decent job roles, due to them being entrenched and stigmatised in the Indian job market. (Chandrshekhar & Ghosh, 2014) (Papola, 2012) Data reveals that SC, ST and religious minorities fare worse in urban environments as well, with women and children making the most vulnerable within an already dispossessed population. (Srivastava & Sutradhar, 2016) (Breman, 2013) There has been a proven overlap between the economically weakest quintile of the country and groups historically marginalised under the colonial rule. (NCEUS, 2007)

The situation for circular migrants has been exacerbated by neoliberalisation of the agrarian sector and the ensuing rural distress. The agriculture is seeing lowering productivity levels leading to loss of livelihoods and employment in the sector, as a direct result of the withdrawal of support prices on crops and farm products and the withdrawal of state subsidies on infrastructural components. (Prasad, 2016) Furthermore, rural populations and tribal communities are being increasingly dispossessed of their ancestral lands, food, water and other natural resources, at the behest of the government and judiciary by exploitative environmental reforms giving leeway to large corporations to utilize natural and semi-natural hinterlands of high resource productivity for non-agrarian purposes. (Das, 2015)

This has created swathes of agrarian non-agrarians who are migrating to urban areas and being able to afford jobs only at the bottom rung of the service and manufacturing employment value chains. (Kundu & Mohanan, 2017) Upon reaching urban areas, they will be adversely incorporated by the capitalist economy that keeps them outside the structure and governmental systems of the city. They remain isolated and poorly remunerated with little vertical mobility, forcing them to establish a foothold in the city and, thus, keep migrating. (Srivastava, 2012) The post-COVID labour reforms of the government to condense all existing labour legislation into four codes is the culmination of this agenda that will regularize the cheapening of labour and flexibilization of the employer-employee contract and make it more exploitative than ever, just to get more advantage in the global capitalist markets. (Vaddiraju, 2016)

This transformation of urban areas reflects the priorities of the global capitalist order, as did New Delhi during colonial rule. The model has not limited itself to the reformation of economic policies but has altered the fabric of social spaces and reoriented the relationships that exist within both urban and rural landscapes and has succeeded in influencing democratic and governmental institutions as well. (Banerjee-Guha, 2009) It is an explicit and hegemonic expression of the colonial past of the government’s complacence to align with the sovereignty of the state that is nothing but the security and exploitative accumulative interests of the elite, disguised as the global neoliberal narrative. (Das, 2015)

Urban Governance: Limits to ‘Right to the City’

Although the urban economy’s growth is five times that of the rural economy in India, inequalities prevail in both, especially in upcoming urban centres. Persistent forms of inequality have accompanied urban growth since the colonial period and have been aggravated by post-liberalisation of the economy. The protracted outlook of colonial government towards participation in the state’s economy has been brought forth by alteration of foundational forms of urban governance, shifting the discourse away from the model of a welfare state to base itself on the idea of rapid economic growth achieved by ‘private capital-led infrastructural development’. (Das, 2015) Technical reforms on the lines of market-oriented solutions have replaced the managerial models of urban governance. (Chattopadhyay, 2017) Being termed as inefficient to respond to the needs of fast-growing cities in the country, the idea of urban governance is being structurally transformed and re-marketed as ‘good governance’. (Leitner, et al., 2007)

The intervention of the state in urban governance has been reduced from upholding citizenship rights to merely ensuring the disciplining and prevalence of the rule of the market. This is evident in the increasing gentrification of cities according to the conceptual images reflecting upon the aspirations and interests of the elite, which has led to the re-organisation of urban spaces, land acquisition policies, zoning and land use to facilitate large scale infrastructural and redevelopment projects. Urban planning has been standardised by the emergence of SEZs, smart cities, green cities, SDGs and fast corridors that do not consider the needs of urban populations; but adhere to emerging monopolies of land mafias and builders. Displacement of urban poor from their spaces and resources to the peripheries of cities, and the destruction of their livelihoods, is one of the concessions made for securing financial capital for development. The situation has been exacerbated by the withdrawal of state-led development interventions from housing and provisioning services and the introduction of paid models under Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP). (Banerjee-Guha, 2009)

Democratically elected local bodies are subsumed by autonomous institutions and private bodies through setting up of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) and parastatal agencies to carry out large projects. (Samaddar, 2016) This has created further marginalisation of the urban poor by depriving them of the basic services guaranteed under existing civil rights and then excluding them from the participatory processes which form an integral part of the processes of urban/good governance. (Chattopadhyay, 2017) The 74th Constitutional Amendment that guarantees public participation in local urban governance stands ignored. (Vaddiraju, 2016) Half-decentralisation and institutional fragmentation of state powers and urban local bodies with quasi-public/private/autonomous agencies and non-state actors from the economic, political and social elite, like free individuals representing the sovereignty during colonial rule, constitute neoliberal urban governance. (Kamath & Joseph, 2015)

Within this context, via literature and through practice at micro-level, urban spaces embedded in everyday life of urban poor are turned into their sites of contestation, struggle and resistance. (Benjamin, 2008) The processes of electoral democracies allow urban poor to negotiate with the state publicly and reappropriate the city’s resources to be able to obtain better access to resources to conduct their livelihoods and claim land rights. (Bhide, 2017) However, the idea of cities as sites of contestation is problematic for circular migrants and migrant construction workers. (Chatterjee, 2008)

The tribal populations and lower caste groups within circular migrants, who lack the socio-political and political influence to mobilize themselves, remain outside of the electoral mobilisation of the poor. Although citizenship rights delineating principles of interaction between the state and the people, and within people, are mandated to be egalitarian, interactions on the ground with governmental intermediaries may imbibe different forms of inequality. (Jain, 2018) Migrant construction workers living in inert labour colonies at/near construction sites and facing an ‘internal alien-ness’ in the urban environment fall at the intersection of many such inequalities. This makes it even harder for them emotionally and psychologically to legitimize their presence in the city and make claims. (Shah & Lerche, 2018)

They face structural inclusion due to the sedentary institutional design of the government processes that, due to lack of accounting capacity, is unable to track the movement of people within the country; and data enumeration, which to date faces conceptual and empirical difficulties in deciding, whether or not to and how to include circular migrants within their various categorisations. The ethnic and regional nature of the country’s policies and planning processes for resource provisioning further limit their citizenship rights. (Roy, 2008)

Moreover, Indian states, and districts, following colonial urban planning, remain organised based on ethnicities and languages, and since citizenship experience finds political grounding in socio-cultural similarities, circular migrants face a situation like international migrants. These biases create everyday barriers for circular migrants in their place of work and manifest themselves in several manners, due to lack of identity proof, enumeration, and voting rights. (Abbas, 2015)

Without citizenship rights being granted at the workplace, circular migrants and migrant construction workers cannot find access to public provisioning services, inclusion in the socio-economic systems, and opportunities of the city. Although counter-intuitive, multilocal livelihoods of circular migrants allow for the preservation of rural lifestyle, augments urban-to-rural flows of information, capital and assets. Therefore, its importance as a phenomenon necessitates moving beyond conventional solutions to ‘Right to the City’ to more immediate ones. (Desai & Sanghvi, 2018)

Proposition: A Century of Impermanence

Concept: Emergence of the Kinetic City

If the 20th Century was about the architecture of permanence, then the 21st Century will be its undoing, the architecture of impermanence. The post-colonial landscape of Indian cities has been characterised by a pluralism of coalescence of distinct physical and visual contradictions. Colonialism itself witnessed distinct social, cultural and economic worlds within the same city occupying different spaces and governed by different rules. (Mehrotra, 2011)

This separation helped maximise governmental control and was aimed at minimising conflict. However, the post-colonial landscape allows both these conceptions to occupy the same spaces; still, they continue to use them differently. With inadequate urban land parcels, the emergence of agglomerations and service-based economies, these two worlds are intertwined now more than ever, turning cities into sites for negotiations between the elites and subaltern cultures. This critical arena of contestation has created new spatial domains, much like migrant labour colonies that have woven themselves throughout the urban landscape. This ‘bazaar-like urbanism’ or ‘pirate modernity’ has been created by those that remain outside the formal modernity of the state and its laws, not with the purpose of consciously creating a counterculture but to simply survive in the ‘everyday’ economic and cultural struggles. (Chatterjee, 2003)

Therefore, we arrive at two common states of the city — the Static and the Kinetic, defined by their materiality as well as lived reality. The former is built from permanent materials, concrete, steel and brick, expressed through its two-dimensional conceptual forms, maps and monumentality. The latter is built from recycled plastic sheets, canvasses, scrap metal and waste wood, fragile, temporary, open to modification and innovation. Its spaces are not conceptions but a reflection of associative values that support the residents’ socio-economic fabric. “Patterns of occupation determine its form and perception. It is an indigenous urbanism that has its particular ‘local’ logic.” (Mehrotra, 2013)

Kinetic City represents the articulation of space that is temporal in nature, leading to a deeper sensibility of spatial occupation that is suggestive of expansion of formal spatial limits to accommodate unimagined scenarios. It allows inquiry into the blurred lines of the current state of urbanism and the lives and roles of people that occupy it. Here, entrepreneurship folds the ‘formal and the informal into a symbiotic relationship’ through autonomous and largely oral processes. It leverages social networks and established infrastructure of the Static City, takes them beyond their intended margins, where regulations are made redundant, where local wisdom carries beyond without the ‘fear of the modern.’ It forces the Static City to shun its project of utopia and re-engage itself in contemporary issues, demanding facilitation of robust and flexible environments that allow the Kinetic City to flourish. While the Static City constantly tries to ‘erase or re-codify the local into a macro-moral order.’ (Mehrotra, 2008)

The superimposition of two opposite worlds and perceptions within the same city requires accommodation, juxtaposition and overlapping of the varying uses and physical forms demanded by both through constant evolution, invention and safeguarding of the critical ‘urban hardware’ of the historically important Static City. The idea is not to arrive at cities that are temporary in nature, rather, to shift our policy and planning perceptions to allow reservation of more parcels of urban land better suited to allow the performance of activities of temporal scale. It will require draining of symbolic import in architecture and conservation and constructing forms of significance that deepen their ties with contemporary realities and experiences. This will allow the transformation of urban realities to better position them to service contemporary life and aspirations. (Mehrotra, 2004)

But how do we pursue Kinetic Cities? Is it through the understanding of social and spatial divisions and economic inequalities resulting due to increasing concentration of global capital flows? Architecture, which is the ‘spectacle’ realisation of a Static City, and a tool for its interpretation, fails to achieve the same dominant image in the Kinetic City. A city characterised by an ever-transforming streetscape, constant motion and continuous change in its physical fabric demands a deeper understanding into its wide range of places and the processes of the commemoration of the culture of the excluded. A deeper analysis reveals that festivals have achieved a pervasive presence in everyday life and popular culture of the Kinetic by creating public pathways for realisation of fantasies of subaltern cultures and their organisation into forces of political action. One of them is the ‘Kumbh Mela.’ (Mehrotra, 2017a)

Case Study: ‘Kumbh Mela’ as Big Data

In the 21st Century, change is the new normal, making reversibility and openness two critical attributes for the articulation of sustainable urban development. The robustness of Kumbh lies in its reversibility and lack of technological specificity — non-permanent solutions for non-permanent problems. The whole city is used as a holding strategy for temporary urban processes without any aspiration to be permanent. Its reversibility is examined in two distinct dimensions, i.e., the physical/material reversibility of the entire apparatus of the city and the reversible institutional and political framework that supports the organisation of the city. The city plugs into the existing state-level urban management systems and draws its knowledge from existing institutions and their best administrators. By doing so, it becomes an autonomous agency governed by several state actors that hold jurisdiction over the site for the time of the conglomeration. This process is divided into four stages. The administration of Kumbh Mela has an impermanent and flexible organisation structure that facilitates transversal communication across all hierarchies of actors. Power relations vary according to the implementation stage as expressed in Table 1 below: (Vera & Mehrotra, 2015)

By using low-tech construction and a generic implementation strategy, Kumbh Mela crafts stunning morphologies with the possibility of reversing their operations during or after the festival. The materials and infrastructure are dismantled meticulously and reincorporated into the local material economy for reuse by markets and industries: (Vera & Mehrotra, 2015)

1) Akhara camps (individual settlements of religious sects/groups) are first to be dismantled, right after the religious order inhabiting them has left. It is done by the contractor who constructed them in the first place, under direct payment from the Akhara or indirect payment from the Kumbh Mela magistrate. Specific days for logistics are booked. Tents, plywood, steel sheets and joining components are dismantled and transported via trucks, with each truck carrying one specific material. They are carried to compounds where they are carefully stored, counted and checked for damage, after which they re-enter the vast tent supplier market of the country.

2) Infrastructure comes next with all wastewater and water supply pipes, motors and tap connections are dug up by their suppliers and city water board and reused in other locations. Elements such as water reservoirs and sewage pits are chemically treated or covered with sand, while sandbags, bio-digester toilets etc. are removed. Toilets are provided by the Kumbh Mela administration and are dismantled by the sweeper community, and then all parts like toilet seats, brick and bamboo are sold to contractors to be reused on other sites. Electric poles and wiring are carefully dismantled and put back in storage carefully monitored by a special electricity board.

3) Roads and pontoons take the maximum time since they are dismantled sector by sector and sent back to three main government monitored storage locations. They are often relocated to other areas under the jurisdiction of the government.

4) Other waste is scavenged by a large number of ragpickers, who pick up construction waste, sand, dumped coal, discarded wood and bamboo. Any organic material is left to decompose over time gradually.

5) Agriculture starts taking over once the deconstruction activity is finished. People from nearby villages return to plant seasonal vegetables. All organic material is burned and added to the soil to enhance its fertility. The river bank also serves as a cremation ground, which is also reestablished.

The Kumbh Mela is constructed and disassembled in an equally short period of time using many heterogeneous elements that are organised in a combinatorial fashion using simple and minimal building strategies. The materials and construction techniques chosen for the purpose provide safety and flexibility, offering infinite design possibilities through permutations and combinations. Heavy machinery and advanced technology are rarely used, and highly-skilled specialists are rarely employed. It is the mammoth workforce of untrained low-paid labourers undertaking piecemeal construction who realise the urbanism of Kumbh Mela. The achievement of the entire system is in its capacity to deliver multiple distinct succinct forms with minimal translation and maximum modularity to adapt to any context or situation and to be reused both in the formal and informal economy. (Mehrotra, 2019)

Analysis: Political Economy of the ‘Kumbh Camp’

The physical manifestation of the ‘Kumbh Camp’ is also contested and negotiated upon on the ground, with participation from administrators, Akharas (formalised/political-religious groups/sects), visitors, contractors, labourers and villagers, until the last spatial agreement. This dialogue between numerous agencies and dynamic socio-natural processes of the geography together comprise of the form of the city. Even with the grounding of the project, separations begin to appear as spaces are occupied with diverse functions and meanings in the almost permeable open and closed divide of the festival. This porosity manifests not just in spatial planning but the internal organisation and sense of commune as well. Here, the public, the private, and the sacred are blended in a heterogeneous fashion. (Mehrotra, 2017c)

The material and service cycles happening within the camp, and at its peripheries inform on the generative socio-economic patterns. Major intersections at Kumbh Camp are seen harbouring food stalls, general stores, medicine shops. While food is provided for free by religious orders in communal halls, many vegetable vendors at the periphery of the camp provide the necessary stimulus to fill the gap. Several spots are rented, even for years, which means that several vendors are recurring and are invested in the political and economic cycles of the festival for their livelihoods. Each Akhara has its organisational structure of volunteers tasked for managing visitors, handling supplies, and other related operations. They hold, articulate and aggregate systems and resources at a private level concerning the functional capacity of their tents, all have their own economic processes linked to several other cities. Thus, the capital, material and resource flows of each tent correspond to cyclic processes and allow Kumbh Camp to become a phenomenon during the time period of its existence. (Mehrotra, 2017c)

The Akharas themselves are arranged spatially according to their prominence and interact with each other in their own political dynamics, with their own laws, codes and sacred spaces marked in distinct visual identities forming territorialities in an open landscape. While the planning of the camp changes every year, Akharas try to preserve their internal spatial configurations and relationships as much as possible. In the words of Richard Sennett, “growth in an open city [Kumbh Camp] is a matter of evolution rather than erasure.” (Sennett, 2006)

But, the most important of all is the social transgression and appropriation of the site, its spaces, and material cycles by the devotees and saints, defined by a common religious purpose: to bathe in the waters of the confluence of two rivers. This common utilitarian purpose preserves the identity of Kumbh Camp as an open work based on an implicit contract of confidence, challenging the social, economic and cultural inequalities to create an incomplete fabric that is inclusive, equitable and unifying, with, within and beyond its context. (Mehrotra, 2017c)

Conclusion: How Apparent Finality can emerge

On Heterotopias: The Ephemeral Quest for a ‘Self-Narrative’

Quoting Foucault on migrant construction workers’ colonies, they are heterotopias, “places of this kind which are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.” They create an ‘otherness’ through which the city can reflect on itself socially, politically and morally, and decentre itself epistemologically. These urban encampments are physically, socially, and symbolically representative of heterotopias, and by locating, identifying, and observing them, the limits of the city can come into view. (Foucault, 1997)

In doing so, their second identity, as a refuge, as a shelter from rejection, is highlighted. Here, the identity of migrant construction workers’ colonies and its urban logic of the refuge and of a place ‘in the making’ gains primary importance. It is a place that is ‘tolerated’ by the city at its limits. Since the people of the place, migrant construction workers, already have a socio-economic life (all employed under the same work) and by means of the BOCW act (if registered by their employer under the act), have a political life as well, it is therefore only the cultural specificities that need to be imported in time, in the Spatio-temporal realm of the space to create ‘an auto-perception of own identity.’ (Agier, 2019)

With time and population growth, local conflicts allow learning of forms of intra-urban displacement that can be accounted for in the administration of these camps. An encampment with a lasting internal social organisation will benefit by imprinting from numerous narratives and experiences of assembling and disassembling, and metamorphosis beyond a place of refugee to a heterotropic place assuming its own cultural identity, thus, finally gaining autonomy as a ‘large, dense and permanent settlement of heterogenous individuals.’ (Agier, 2019)

The material and social forms of these camps that are currently defined illegal have the possibility of newer socio-politico-cultural forms unforeseen in urban planning and urban ethnography. While the State may have currently kept these colonies outside its own boundaries, the State has the capacity to localize its own margins and legitimize the identity of migrant construction workers’ colonies over time. Unlike other circular labour colonies that although have an urban logic but lack a political logic to defend the idea of the formation of their place, migrant construction workers’ colonies do not require a relationship with their surrounding limits, and thus, they form an absolute heterotopic space. Therefore, their identity lies in dislocation, in continuous mobility, and lack of centering and transformation in the urban fabric that makes them independent of the political world of the City and of the State. (Boano, 2017)

They are cities within themselves, capable of developing a sense of confinement and social organisation. This potential capacity allows them to welcome humanitarian agencies for sanitary, logistical, and medical support amongst others; and intertwine their programmes within its own operational framework. Even though they are places of transit, and places ‘in-transit’, established hierarchies in the current policy and market dynamics allow the continuity of certain social responsibilities and paradigms of internal social organisation. (Foucault, 1997)

The inherent Kafkaesque phenomenon of migration and its uncertainty will always remain, with three possible outcomes for any colony: disappearance or dissipation; recognition and legitimization by way of centering the colony in the city and struggling to become a ghetto; or to forever remain in waiting, in mobility. Here, the third possibility is a necessity and surety, enforced by way of economic logic (constant movement every one to two years because of change of construction site) allowing migrant construction workers’ colonies to forever find a place in the city, at a distance, and being ‘tolerated’, but also being able to negotiate the limits of this tolerance. It is within this distance and spectrum of ‘tolerance’ that their unique self-narrative will be invented to overcome the narrative provided to them by the city. This self-narrative will allow the migrant construction workers to look beyond the sovereign, the government and capitalism, to claim a unifying story that connects them to other migrant construction worker colonies scattered all across the country and their economies of scale. (Agier, 2019)

On Welfare States: Necessary Mandates and Co-Production

To begin with, the government must act as the guardian of the rights of circular migrants and regulator of systems of access and care; and ensure the upholding of clauses in existing Policy Acts. When the government does not have to micromanage the services better-taken care of by the communities themselves, it then has the capacity to mainstream informal settlements and related populations into formal development of the city and consequently creates better channels to improve the environmental health of such areas. To note, it can then act on correcting the historic systematic delegitimization of the migrant population and the habitats and ‘informal’ environments they occupy and develop an integrated assessment framework for the valuation and co-production of city ecosystem services, functions, goods and socio-cultural values. (Mitlin, 2008)

The integrated assessment approach should fundamentally imbibe the roles and responsibilities of various actors and allow of transversal communication across all hierarchies to respond to contingencies. Table 2 below underlines the most rudimentary interventions required to actualize such processes: (Aajeevika, 2020)

In saying so, at policy level, we need to legitimize the informality and provide it same legal access to the city municipal services such as water, waste, electricity etc. The serviceability of such a model can be ensured by individual advancement of communities through processes of co-production.

Here, it is necessary to explain what is meant by co-production. It means that the people availing the services are given the power and legal means to form organisational structures within themselves responsible for handling the provision of said services of resource access. “Therefore, instead of one central municipal department financing, executing, operationalizing, managing, and refurbishing infrastructure for the provision of water or electricity or sewerage; small self-help groups under the guidance of the municipal department carry out such activities on their own, to develop their area in a phased manner. Not only does it create more economic opportunity by the employment of youth, but it fundamentally empowers the local population by helping them understand processes or urban development and renewal.” (Aggarwal & Bhasin, 2020)

Over time, grassroots co-production movements move beyond local to more contemporary and collective issues based around macro production and consumption patterns. They become a tool for local groups to negotiate a greater control over issues that affect them directly, by creating an informed platform for a sustained, deliberate dialogue with the state. If coproduction as a tool is implemented strategically at policy and planning level, the response to circular migrants and migrant construction workers can be, perhaps, not a narrative of disenfranchisement but one of socio-political self-reliance and empowerment.

“In order to do so, we need to understand that basic services such as water, electricity, nutrition etc. should not require the permission, mandate or heavy hand of the government to be procured under the ambit of ‘legality’ and the government itself must abstain from creating such a definition.” (Aggarwal & Bhasin, 2020)

We need better governance and accountability into providing access to citizen services and newer administrative frameworks that parley with existing ones to ease the burden of arduous governmental processes for releasing new tracts of land or offloading existing governmental lands in costly city centres to be developed for affordable rental housing models. These parcels of land currently occupied voluntarily or out of necessity by informal settlements and people without access to opportunities and deemed unsuitable for human habitation because of environmental or infrastructural vulnerabilities can then be creatively and sustainably remodelled. (Mitlin, 2008)

It involves tapping into the existing social capital, entrepreneurship, innovation and support at grassroots and utilizing them in creating local structures that take care of public microfinancing and management of commonplace self-help activities by encouraging participation at the ‘individual, household, or collective self-help at camp level.’ (Mitlin, 2008)

Grassroots co-production generates a favourable political outcome for marginalised groups and gives them an extension to political practice, leadership experience and subject-matter expertise through socio-economic, environmental and infrastructural matters such as design and logistics of building temporary structures, improvement of artificial and landscape drainage, creation of waste disposal systems, installation of solar electricity, etc. It also nudges the state to act more inclusively and positively towards all of its citizens. (Mitlin, 2008)

Consequently, co-production develops the capacity of communities involved in the process and helps them understand the fundamentals of resource management. The response to any issue indelibly linked to the health of urban ecosystems can be improved upon exponentially, under the mode of co-production, by acutely raising the collective awareness of communities as a direct result of simply involving them in both the consumption and production processes. This generates an ‘ecosystems thinking’ that allows the camps to imagine their environment’s operational value in terms of the output and efficiency of the processes underlying its socio-economic systems. (Aggarwal & Bhasin, 2020)

On ‘The Project’: The Camp as the Open Lived City

To achieve the invention of this assumed narrative is the birth of the project of migrant construction workers’ colonies, not for the purpose of finding its finality, but with the requirement of producing data and knowledge that will allow migrant construction workers to move closer to realising its possibility on their own. (Boano, 2017)

Buildings are designed with permanence in mind, notwithstanding the need for reconfiguration and weathering. A highly articulated sense of construction allows us to handle and implement complex construction processes efficiently, although they do not determine the sustainability of our built environment. Rather, how efficiently we reconfigure our built spaces does. With the help of digital tools in the production of built environments, the most transformation opportunities can arise by aligning them with simple, low-tech tactics. (Vera & Mehrotra, 2017)

Spatio-temporal openness is central to addressing the questions posed by circular migrants. Temporary interventions within the existing density of Indian cities have the capacity to enhance urban experiences by the generation of open-ended systems. Technology now enables designers and policymakers to control form and matter and anticipate forthcoming events by data modelling of natural and human processes that inform complex dynamic planning operations, giving birth to a completely new set of inclusive possibilities. New techniques of planning offer a chance at restructuring our design and planning processes. Within the scope of the project, Kumbh Mela shows us the fundamental importance of design as an “incomplete, circular and intentionally unbalanced operation.” Through its understanding of operations, it provides insights into scenarios where cities might act as or accommodate unfinished open systems to allow diverse temporalities to exist, forming autonomous material discourses, with time at the heart of their function. (Vera & Mehrotra, 2017)

Taking the idea from Richard Sennett’s open city as ‘incomplete, conflictual and non-linear,’ and applying it to the idea of pop-up cities like the migrant construction workers’ colonies, we arrive at systems of negotiation where guidelines of the city are handed over to the people themselves to be developed, materialized and further evolved and transformed. It is in this analogy, where Kumbh Mela, with the lack of a fixed plan, is a practice of conceptualising a set of relationship between state and non-state, legitimate and non-legitimate actors in an organization and progression of sorts, dictated by the socio-natural processes of the shifting geography of the floodplains. (Sennett, 2006)

Figure 5 Project Map of Migrant Construction Workers’ Colonies. Source: Author, Tanya Talwar, Tashi Zaidi

The project will delve into social landscapes of migrant construction workers’ communities to produce kinetic urbanism, which will absolve from all external contexts to become an ‘endosomatic’ system.’ (Fernández-Galiano, 2000) It will build on three different but synchronised cycles of social capital/development, resource-built-efficiency, and finance. It will try to understand the architecture of labour colonies as a source of mediation, identity and constancy; to conclude how any spatial order that has receded to a background condition in the city can be periodically brought to the fore through collective participation and representation. The project will allow generation of infinite combinations of socially inert and resource conservative spatial mechanisms that can be employed as a means of re-conceiving migrant work-dwell communities in urban areas for sustainable resource consumption-generation processes, closed-loop material cycles, spatial equity, economic empowerment and ultimately a balanced social order — through the self-proliferating ritualistic re-enactment of social development practices and their respective spatial recall augmenting urban-to-rural flows.

CODA

Contemporary times have seen urban centers in India undergoing massive evolutions, morphogenesis, and mutations to shed some remnants of their colonial past and for some others to resurface through the wave of neo-liberal reforms. They face increasing flows of rural-to-urban migrants participating in their economies. Within these flows are circular migrants who do not wish for their future to be invested in cities but to develop on their assets back home, augmenting urban-to-rural capital flows. And within this typology lies the construction industry as the biggest employer of countless such aspirants, who keep moving from one urban center to another in search of daily-wage work.

This strata of citizens lack access to urban resources and also to means and institutions of access to urban governance that deliver them. Current mechanisms of access to resources, citizenship rights and recognition remain limited to industry-based trade unions or to informal workers at the neighbourhood level only and have no way of articulating or servicing the needs of those who remain in constant flux. This has created existential dilemmas for the concepts and perceptions of urban governance mechanisms that are required now to be more flexible than ever in trying to juxtapose two seemingly opposing forces of everyday life, one kinetic, in motion, and the other static and rigid.

This friction has resulted in a lack of support being afforded to circular migrants both at the planning and policy level, leading to fragmentation of the idea of the workplace for them and disenfranchisement from getting access to a healthy workplace environment and their benefits. They lack the social capital to enhance their livelihoods and ways of living in either urban or rural areas, and the isolated living condition (especially of migrant construction workers) keeps them in the politically dark areas without collective bargaining power.

Thus, fostering the agency of migrant construction workers and circular migrants will not only require the existing bureaucratic platforms to take cognizance of their unique situation and issues at a fundamental level to form parallel policy mechanisms and ideas of citizenship; but also to re-conceptualise, re-create and re-imagine newer forms of their spatial participation, relationship and negotiation with and within the city itself, to construct a reality that is better able to organize and resist the pressures of the state, of capitalism and of urban governance.

There is a lot that can be learned from spatial forms that are consequences of mobility and displacement, and in recognizing them, not as temporary but ephemeral phenomena, innovation can occur. In the face of ever-increasing mobility and displacement of human settlements due to six primary factors: (Vera & Mehrotra, 2015)

· Natural disasters and climate change creating involuntary displacement necessitating short-term holding strategies and shelters.

· Geo-political tensions creating forced displacement necessitating refugee camps.

· Non-religious cultural commemorations within and outside urban centres demanding deployment of temporary structures and facilities.

· Settlements configured for extractive industrial purposes generating temporary cities for the duration of the extractive activity and the availability of a resource. These tend to generate large complex settlements with a mix of both social and industrial operations, of high environmental consequences with the capacity to modify the topography of the landscape in question on a territorial scale.

· Pop-up cities required for military purposes, or transactional purposes, at the fringes of urban centres (migrant construction workers’ colonies in market ‘nakas’ or on/near construction sites).

· Religious pilgrimage demanding cities to be constructed for religious celebrations. There has been a sharp rise in the intensification of pilgrimage activities such as Hajj in Mecca, or Durga Puja/Ganesh Chaturthi/Kumbh Mela in India in recent years, propelling exponential demand for temporary urban infrastructure.

All six typologies are synonymous in terms of the scale and structure of planning and operations required to implement them, and thus, learnings from one can inform the other. For this purpose, Kumbh Mela, one of the largest historical and contemporary cyclic pilgrimage mobilizations (of more than 100 million people), is perhaps the perfect example to present an alternative understanding of urban planning corresponding to the idea of Kinetic Cities. ‘The Ephemeral Megacity’ helps expand on the nature of gigantic human flows, and helps us understand the function of cities in broader terms. The analysis of its remarkable operational capacity to be constructed and disassembled in a short period of time can benefit the visualisation of migrant construction workers’ colonies. (Mehrotra, 2017b)

The camp itself has the capacity to become a legitimate constituency of inquiry in the improved urban planning and policy frameworks and can be an entity having an equal entitlement to the city’s resources and provisioning services. Simultaneously, it can augment its separate circuits of economy and bargaining in the material markets to further allow informal land and labour markets to gain autonomy over their formation and regulation, giving migrants an unrestrained right to exercise their citizenship in all crucial walks that constitute public life and sphere.

This is a fundamental step towards reassessment and recharacterisation of visions of citizenship and the relationship of a citizen with the city and his/her ‘right to the city’. Kinetic urbanism and the project of the camp are pertinent towards realising universal access to social entitlements and rights, occupation of space, basic consumption, and survival of heterogeneity in the face of a nebula of culturally grey landscapes that exist in the generic cities that are a product of 21st Century urbanisation.

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