How public transport reshapes cities | The Caravan 01/09/24, 5:35 PM

MUMBA
IMONO
RAI

COMMUNITIES / BOOKS

Shifting Spaces
How public transport reshapes cities

A monorail train travels along a track in the Wadala area of Mumbai, in January 2017. DHIRAJ SINGH BLOOMBERG /
GETTY IMAGES

ANKUSH PAL

01 September, 2024

THERE ARE contradictory narratives about the Delhi Metro and its relatively
recent, but significant, place in the life of the city. Rashmi Sadana’s new book, The
Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure, sheds
light on this. Her interlocutors see it variously as a “manifestation of India’s image,
the India shining bit;” as transportation specifically for “bade aadmi (big men)”
and the public vehicle that prevented the collapse of a “city on the brink.”

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The metro rail being seen as the default solution for problems of urban mobility is
rarely contested. Though Kolkata was the first site of a functional city metro in
India, the Delhi Metro is hailed as the shining example, garnering praise in the
country and abroad, encouraging similar projects in other cities. In the recent
general election, the Bhartiya Janata Party promised to “expand the metro network
in major urban centres ensuring last mile connectivity,” while its ally Nitish Kumar
also announced metro projects in Bihar. The public image of the city has become
inextricable from the light-rail system. And, as Sadana notes, it has reshaped not
just the physical but also the cultural geography of the city, with its residents often
articulating it as a matter of pride.

A lot of academic literature that focusses on segregation and displacement in

urban contexts has examined how caste, religion and class shape, in insidious
ways, who gets to live where in Indian cities. More recently, who can travel, and
where to, has also formed a considerable part of this body of work. Though
Sadana’s ethnography of the Delhi Metro tracks how the transport system has
become synonymous with a new form of social mobility, it is at its sharpest when it
pauses to question cracks in the narrative about the metro as an unparalleled
social leveller. An older work, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets,
offers answers to one of Sadana’s guiding questions—“Who gets to take up more
space and move faster through the city?”—as it tries visualising what Indian cities
might even look like if women could claim space the way men do. Smriti Singh’s
The Middle Class in Neo-Urban India: Space, Class and Distinction, meanwhile,
examines the newer reconstruction of city spaces ostensibly designed to be future-
facing, with an emphasis on modern “global” aesthetics tailored to the middle class
and the elite, while undermining the legitimate and glaring concerns of those in
the present.

BEFORE THE DELHI METRO, buses were the main form of public transport in
the city. “By the 1990s, the landscape of the public transport system in Delhi had
begun to change,” Sushmita Pati notes in Properties of Rent: Community, Capital
and Politics in Globalising Delhi, tracing this trend back to a dramatic increase in
public investment in roads in the 1970s, with retail chains for two-wheelers, buses,
trucks and jeeps beginning to grow. The Delhi Transport Corporation ran its own
buses but began giving permits to private companies; eventually transport was
largely outsourced to the private sphere.

Red Line Buses were formalised in the early 1990s. Within a year, there were
several cases of accidents as a result of speeding. The buses, later renamed Blue
Line buses, continued to be in demand over the next decade, but fierce competition
between operators, particularly with the entry of new ones, increased. “Bus
drivers, under pressure from bus owners, began to drive recklessly to overtake
other buses, pick up more passengers and make more trips in a day to maintain

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profit margins,” Pati writes. “And once again, quite like the proverbial repeat of
history, the Blue Line buses, like the Red Line buses, turned into ‘killer buses’.
After a spate of accidents by these buses, it was evident that neither courts nor
public opinion was in their favour.” The buses were subsequently phased out. By
the end of the 1990s, according to Sadana, the percentage of people using public
transport in Delhi fell by fifteen percent. Meanwhile, multiple flyovers cropped up,
and, in the aftermath of liberalisation, there was an influx of new, and foreign-
made, cars.

Though it was first proposed in 1969, in the fourth five-year plan, the Delhi Metro
was inaugurated in December 2002, transforming the physical geography of the
city. Civil servants and politicians publicly expressed their simultaneous support
for the metro and their condemnation of public buses, with the reasoning that the
Delhi Metro constitutes a globally recognised symbol of modernity that offers the
key to various problems plaguing the city. In Delhi is Doomed Without Metro, for
instance, the former Congress leader Jag Parvesh Chander notes that road
congestion had made commuting in Delhi a nightmare, whether by DTC buses or
personal cars. He attributes most of the rising air pollution to motorised vehicles
and the incapacity of buses to deal with growing demand. A metro rail, according
to him, would not just facilitate urban mobility but, in its absence, the city would
be doomed.

As one of the cheapest metro services in the world, Sadana explains, the Delhi
Metro “is also one of the few spaces in the city, and certainly the largest, that offers
a measure of equal access across many lines of social division.” But, when she
interviews Sheila Dikshit, she hears this fact amplified into a perception of the
metro as a “social binder,” a harbinger of “cultural change.” “Like many in Delhi’s
power elite, Dikshit found this to be a welcome aspect of all the technology,”
Sadana writes. “The Metro would make Delhi better.” Dikshit also asks her, “Have
you heard of any incident which is unpleasant as far as the Metro is concerned?”
Sadana’s book does, in fact, describe several such instances, including the 2014
mob attack against students from Burkina Faso and Gabon, where, she notes, what
made it a big news story was not the racism of the attack “but rather that it
happened on the Delhi Metro, which has been cast as a liberal, disciplined space …
a new social order, and the Metro itself a kind of governance.”

Besides support from bureaucrats, Sadana examines impressions about the metro,
articulated in the mainstream media or by commuters who believe that the light-
rail system is a matter of pride. “The image of the Delhi Metro as a liberating space
has become part of Indian popular culture, even cinematic shorthand for the
development of characters,” in films such as Delhi-6. Although the metro had the
total, unquestioning support of the press, she spoke with several figures who
disagreed with this popular perception. For instance, Dunu Roy of the Hazards

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Centre “sees the Metro as a real estate project and emblematic of the new social
divisions of the city … The Metro is on the ‘rich’ side of the dichotomy … and
reveals who the city is ultimately for.” Sadana interprets a Delhi Metro Rail
Corporation architect’s explanation of the metro’s origins as stemming from Delhi
needing mass transit to “the kind of office and other jobs created by economic
liberalization.” The people she interviews living in settlements near the metro echo
this view, saying it was envisioned to cater to those who can park their cars and
hop onto the metro: “There may be some chhota aadmi who ride the Metro, but
really, they tell me, the Metro is to increase the power and mobility for those who
HINDI
already have some.”

Meanwhile, Sadana also revisits the research conducted at Delhi’s Transportation

Research and Injury Prevention Programme—studies highlighting the urgency of
a comprehensive bus system that could potentially serve more of the population in
a cheaper, more effective way:

They used data to show three key points: that the Metro doesn’t serve a large-
enough swath of the city’s population to justify the cost; that the Metro doesn’t
cover enough acreage of the city; that the cost of the Metro and its future
maintenance hoards capital investment to the exclusion of other forms of
transport, namely buses.

Geetam Tiwari, a transport researcher at TRIPP, tells Sadana that fewer than five
percent of trips in the city are made by metro; sixty percent are made on buses, and
the rest on private cars, taxis, motorbikes and autorickshaws. According to the
ministry of housing and urban affairs, around half the population in Indian cities
commute on foot, by bicycle or autorickshaw, and three-quarters rely on non-
motorised transport for a portion of their total commute. This varies widely from
place to place, of course—for instance, a 2022 Ease of Moving survey showed that
active (walking and cycling) and shared transport comprises 75 percent of the
modes of transport chosen in Chennai. On the other hand, the National Family
Health Survey states that only eight percent of families in the country own cars.
These statistics indicate that more than half of the people in the country depend
on non-motorised means of transportation, demonstrating precisely that our cities
should emphasise being walkable and bicycle-friendly instead.

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Commuters hanging off a Red Line bus. Before the Delhi Metro, buses were the main form of public transport in the city. Red
Line Buses were formalised in the early 1990s. Within a year, there were several cases of accidents as a result of speeding.
ROBERT NICKELSBERG / GETTY IMAGES

ON THE SURFACE, the Delhi Metro seems like it is delivering seamless

connectivity. But it is planned as a detached system that relies on the commuter
figuring out a string of steps to access it. The lack of feeder buses and shuttle
services mean that people often resort to autorickshaws, e-rickshaws, walking or a
combination of these. Studies have found that the Delhi Metro has a limited
coverage that caters to the people living within a 500-metre radius of the metro
network, which exacerbates problems in accessing the metro.

As the metro has grown, localities on the city’s outskirts now find themselves
seemingly integrated into the city, but reports have shown that commuters often
end up spending around half the time and money getting to the metro as they do
on the metro itself. Research by scholars and policymakers working in transport
geography has shown that an increase in the time and cost to access public
transportation is inversely proportional to the number of people encouraged to
commute by it. “The Metro had been imagined and built as a stand-alone project,”
Sadana writes, “yet for any urban mass transit system to work, it had to enable
commuters to connect to other forms of transport, such as buses, vans, jeeps, cycle
rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, or taxis in order to get to their final destinations, to

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achieve ‘last mile connectivity.’” These issues have cropped up for metro systems
across India.

In July this year, Kailash Gahlot, Delhi’s transport minister, announced the trial
run of a mohalla bus service on two routes—Majlis Park to Pradhan Enclave and
Akshardham Temple to Mayur Vihar Phase III—in an attempt to boost last-mile
connectivity. According to him, this caters to areas not served by 12-metre buses.
While the final fares are yet to be disclosed, for now they are charging the same as
DTC buses. The reception by commuters has largely been positive because they do
not have to spend as much as on autos or e-rickshaws, nor change multiple buses.
There is more point-to-point connectivity, which is essential for many daily
commuters.

Although car ownership is below ten percent, a significant number of families own
multiple vehicles, and, before the transport department’s 2023 order suggested
scrapping and re-registering old vehicles, Delhi was infamous as one of the Indian
cities with the highest number of private cars. (Bengaluru has now surpassed it.)
In August, the Times of India reported that buses would not be allowed on the
Noida expressway to Pari Chowk for two hours in the evenings. This decision to
pause public transport at peak rush hour to prioritise car travel underscores the
fate of city buses, and the clash between buses and cars—both of which make for a
recurring point of inquiry in Sadana’s book. She recounts the scrapping of the Bus
Rapid Transit corridor, asking questions about whose mode of conveyance is
privileged in the city.

When the BRT corridor, which was to arrange dedicated lanes for buses on the
lines of the metro, opened in 2008, it was considered to be a victory for urban
planners over the city’s car owners. A 2014 paper notes that over eighty percent of
the commuters surveyed were happy with the BRT and wanted it to continue. “The
media, supported by a powerful and antagonistic car lobby quickly joined forces
with resident welfare associations along the corridor, to criticize the ‘corridor of
chaos’ and demand that it be removed,” it said. Contrary to media reports, only
eight percent of motorists and two-wheeler commuters advocated for it to be
stopped. The NGO Nyaya Bhoomi filed a case in the Delhi High Court, demanding
that the corridor be removed, which it lost in 2012. But, Sadana notes, “even the
Delhi High Court’s judgment, which called public transport ‘a bitter but necessary
medicine’ for the long-term health of the city, was telling in its narrative spin.” Car
drivers, however, claimed that, as “the city’s wealth creators,” their mobility had to
be prioritised, since they needed to move around the city quickly.

Yet Sadana indicates that there was more to this than was acknowledged: “The
data on the BRT showed that it is not that vehicles were slowed down, but rather
that buses could be speeded up.” Car drivers complained to her that the BRT was

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disastrously managed. The Delhi government eventually scrapped the BRT

corridor in 2016. She concludes that, while narratives surrounding the metro’s
success portray it as a rite of passage in Delhi becoming a global city, the metro did
not disrupt the city’s existing class dynamic, unlike buses.

Other than increased traffic around some stations, the Metro does not slow
down car drivers. The upper classes like having a metro in their city, even if
they don’t use it; and if it takes others off the road, all the better. The BRT was
always cast differently. It’s not just that it redistributed the space of one six-
kilometer stretch; it’s that buses visibly moved faster than cars, and that they,
packed with dozens of passengers, were given the right of way.

Even the vaunted Delhi Metro has a ridership lower than 50 percent of what was
projected, according to a report prepared by the Indian Institute of Technology,
Delhi. The News Minute reported, in 2022, that the metro services in Hyderabad,
Kochi, Chennai and Bengaluru had all recorded low ridership and not broken
even, even after more than five years of operation. Meanwhile, the presence of the
metro in Agra, Jaipur and Lucknow has been viewed as a sign of development, but
reports indicate that they have low ridership, so much so that the Jaipur Metro
advertises itself as a venue to celebrate occasions for an exchange of a sum of
money.

For many commuters, the bus offers more connectivity, is more affordable and, for
women, also free of cost. Geetam Tiwari, for instance, estimates that the average
household monthly income has to be at least thirty-six thousand rupees for one
person to use the metro to commute every day, as opposed to twelve thousand for
the bus. But opinions vary from place to place. According to the Ease of Moving
survey, Bengaluru respondents found the bus more affordable than in Chennai. In
Telangana, Larsen & Toubro, the infrastructure corporation managing the
Hyderabad Metro Rail in a public–private partnership, declared that it had
considered backing out of the project because of low ridership. It blamed the state
government’s Mahalakshmi scheme, which provides free bus rides for women,
although the firm had apparently been struggling long before the scheme was
introduced. Shankar Raman, the president of L&T, also suggested that such free
schemes are not sustainable—even though they have been proven to help women
save expenses and experience increased mobility, particularly since their access to
spending is disproportionately less than men. He claimed that these measures are
done for appeasement. “Some of these sops are done on the back of political
promises, which is not going to help the state finances because what is the point in
making the state’s transport corporation go bankrupt,” he said, adding that “there’s
no fun in doing that.” This overlooks entirely the fact that public transportation is
not a profit-making venture in the first place.

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The tendency to view large-scale infrastructure or megaprojects synonymously

with development is not judicious. At any rate, it reflects a myopic take on what
development looks like. Sadana raises other possibilities for this, while recounting
how she heard, from bus proponents and even metro project managers, a quotable
quote attributed to the former Bogotá mayor Gustavo Petro following his city’s
successful creation of a cost-effective BRT corridor: “A developed country is not a
place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

The construction site of the Lucknow Metro in the Hazratganj area of Lucknow. The presence of the metro in Agra, Jaipur and
Lucknow has been viewed as a sign of development, but reports indicate that they have low ridership. PRASHANTH
VISHWANATHAN / BLOOMBERG / GETTY IMAGES

BUSES HAVE, in the recent past, been horrific sites of sexual violence. And so,
the Delhi Metro has undoubtedly “been especially consequential for women,”
Sadana writes. The idea of a women-only coach had sparked disagreements in
2010—“many women in the city were against it, saying it countered the idea of
women as equal citizens with the right to be treated respectfully in public places.”
And yet, she says, it also appeared to have made commuting possible for women
who said they would otherwise have found it challenging.

When she spoke to members of the Unified Traffic and Transportation

Infrastructure (Planning and Engineering) Centre, one of the teams behind the

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envisioning of the metro, it was clear that they held a myopic view. Although they
repeatedly expressed concern about women’s safety, Sadana notes that their
conception of women was limited only to “middle-class, office-going women or
students.” Economic analysis also suggests that the metro largely caters to the elite:

Delhi’s Metro, like most mega-infra-structure projects, represents capital

interests in the city that favour property owners and the already upper class
and upper caste. These larger structural issues have become more entrenched
with the coming of the Metro; the Metro does not shake up this order.
Economic analyses showed that a fraction of what it cost to build the Delhi
Metro (11.3 billion USD for the first three phases) would have been more
effectively spent on making a world-class bus system, serving more people,
especially poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class people traveling to more
intermediate destinations.

There needs to be, then, an earnest attempt to view questions of mobility beyond
the horizon of elite concerns and ensure mobility for a broader spectrum of people
whose access is disproportionate because of their caste, religion, class and gender.

Caste has historically segregated rural and urban spaces, with oppressed castes
forbidden from accessing public space in the same way as dominant castes; the
accounts of Mahars being forced to tie a broom around their waists so they clean
the streets as they walk and an earthen pot around their neck so that even their
saliva does not touch the street, are reminders. Juned Shaikh’s Outcaste Bombay:
City Making and the Politics of the Poor returns several times to the misconception
of caste discrimination not being as rampant in the city. “Caste was obscured in the
discourse that focused on the built form, such as elite concerns about slums,
sanitation, garbage, filth, and illegal space,” he writes. Studies such as Ghazala
Jamil’s Accumulation By Segregation: Muslim Localities in Delhi and Naveen
Bharathi, Deepak Malghan, Sumit Mishra and Andaleeb Rahman’s “Residential
segregation and public services in urban India” examine how caste and religion
determine access and living in urban spaces. A study on the provision of public
services, published last December by Development Data Lab, notes that

public services are systematically allocated away from neighborhoods where

marginalized groups live. This holds for both Muslims and SCs, and for almost
every local service that we could measure, including primary and secondary
schools, medical clinics, piped water, electricity, and closed drainage. Private
providers are not making up for the reduced service access of marginalized
groups; in fact, private services also systematically locate away from MG
neighborhoods, in part because these neighborhoods are poorer. The
magnitude of the disparities is large. For example, compared with a 0% Muslim

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neighborhood, a 100% Muslim neighborhood in the same city is 10% less likely
to have piped water infrastructure and only half as likely to have a secondary
school.

In his 1974 book The Production of Space, the French Marxist philosopher Henri
Lefebvre observes that, under a capitalist system, the production of space, just like
any other commodity, leads to fragmentation and homogenisation. “Strategic
space,” he writes, “makes it possible simultaneously to force worrisome groups, the
workers among others, out towards the periphery; to make available spaces near
the centres scarcer, so increasing their value; to organize the centre as locus of
decision, wealth, power and information.” Lefebvre argues that space is not
something that we merely inherit or something naturally given but something we
produce and reproduce through our interactions. He makes a distinction between
those who produce space for domination and those who do it to facilitate human
needs, and issues a call for challenging the state “in its role as organizer of space,
as the power that controls urbanization, the construction of buildings and spatial
planning in general.”

Class plays a central role in who can access certain space beyond the confines of
home and work. Privatisation has ensured that few people can claim the city as
their own. Instead of developing areas for greater public use, priorities are given to
constructing malls and cafés, which cater to a small elite. Parks are usually open
access, but many are within residential blocks, where a watchful eye is cast on
individuals who may look like they do not belong. When class is entwined with
gender, the question of access becomes still more complicated.

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The women’s compartment in the Delhi Metro, in July 2013. The Delhi Metro has undoubtedly “been especially consequential for
women,” Rashmi Sadana writes. PRIYANKA PARASHAR / MINT / GETTY IMAGES

While public spaces have historically been viewed as sites of fear for women,
feminist scholarship since the 1990s has argued that they can offer emancipation
and liberation. Besides, positioning strangers as sole perpetrators of violence
against women ignores the equally grave kinds of violence women are subjected to
at home.cted to at home.

Urban sociologists such as Sneha Annavarapu have looked at how taxi drivers, as
largely working-class men from Bahujan backgrounds, are seen as the perpetual
threat, “the ideal criminal” to the safety of the “ideal victim”—that is, an upper-
caste middle-class urban woman. This perception does not match empirical
research that has demonstrated that women are at a higher risk of violence within
the confines of their homes, making it all the more necessary to make public
spaces safer. In City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public
Transport, Romit Chowdhury points out the same dichotomy in the context of taxi
services. “Letters written by readers to the editors of prominent English-language
dailies,” he notes, “convey the great dissatisfaction of the urban middle class
toward public transport workers.”

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In their book Why Loiter?: Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets, Shilpa Phadke,
Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade examine the same pattern across different
divides in Mumbai. For instance, they note, the stereotype of the Muslim male
aggressor, and Muslim neighbourhoods as dangerous, becomes “not just the reason
to exclude Muslim men from public space, but also justifies increased policing of
all women.” Why Loiter’s starting point is the question of whether women can
occupy space without having to rush from one place to another unless
accompanied by a group of other women or accompanied by men. Generally, they
argue, women are divided into two broad groups: respectable women and those
who are not. The former may not be forbidden from going out but are often
expected to ensure that their interaction is restricted to necessary movements, such
as getting to college, school or work. The 2015–16 National Family Health Survey
noted that fewer than half of the women respondents were allowed to visit
markets, healthcare facilities or places outside of their village on their own.

Though the book is based on interdisciplinary research by the three authors, it is

aimed at general readers, trying to engage with what it means to occupy public
space as a woman, and interrogate why, although women may be present in public,
they are primarily expected to use spaces to get from point A to point B, and not
“loiter.” They ponder an alternative way of things:

Imagine an Indian city with street corners full of women: chatting, laughing,
breast-feeding, exchanging corporate notes or planning protest meetings.
Imagine footpaths spilling over with old and young women watching the
world go by as they sip tea, and discuss love, cricket and the latest blockbuster.
Imagine women in saris, jeans, salwars and skirts sitting at the nukkad
reflecting on world politics and dissecting the rising sensex. If you can imagine
this, you’re imagining a radically different city.

In the closing chapter, the authors revisit the argument with which they started the
book, the importance of loitering and the various legislations to criminalise it,
such as the Bombay Police Act of 1951, and suggest that loitering might work to
access public space when other strategies fail:

Our desire to have all people loiter is not rooted in any altruism, but in the
simple understanding that no one group can claim access for itself without
claiming it for all others. The competing claims to public space of different
groups are founded on the parochial and discriminatory classification of
people into ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ persons, and based on their being
identified as male, female or transgender, rich or poor, upper or lower caste,
young or old, Hindu or Muslim, Christian, Jain, Buddhist or other, able-bodied
or not, heterosexual, lesbian or gay.

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The writers recognise that loitering may pose risks of violence, beyond just being
labelled as a non-conformist act, highlighting the role of infrastructure, public
transportation, walkable streets and street lights. They also point out that the
notion of pleasure is mainly absent in much discourse on public space, even
among feminist researchers, since it seems a “frivolous” demand when people are
unable to access necessities or face the constant possibility of violence; however,
they ultimately argue that these categories cannot be so neatly compartmentalised:

The quest for pleasure actually strengthens our struggle against violence,
framing it in the language of rights rather than protection. The ‘right to
pleasure’ must always include the ‘right to live without violence’. The struggle
against violence as an end in itself is fundamentally premised on exclusion and
can only be maintained through violence, in that it tends to divide people into
‘us’ and ‘them’, and actually sanctions violence against ‘them’ in order to
protect ‘us.’

A major impediment to women accessing public space continues to be

infrastructure, and a feminist approach to studying gender and space posits that
while gender shapes infrastructure, it goes the other way too. For instance, the
authors write, “The provision of more public toilets for women and other marginal
groups, the disabled and children among them, is an important statement of the
recognition that they belong and have rights as citizens.” Politicians also often
claim to work for the welfare of women, with measures such as the installation of
security cameras across the city, but we seldom question the efficacy of these
measures when it comes to women’s safety. “The inextricable connection of safety
to respectability, then does not keep women safe in the public; it effectively bars
them from it,” they note, arguing that this status quo results in a limited form of
citizenship.

The book’s engagement with the right to access space is as relevant as it was when
it was published over a decade ago, with one of its chapters, “The Unbelongers,”
looking at exclusion across caste, religious and gender lines in Mumbai. As Sadana
astutely observes, at a time when “the idea and practice of citizenship is being
hotly contested and fought over in the streets, a study of urban citizenship in the
space of public transit points to the everyday, often slight, nuances of belonging
and not belonging.”

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The Delhi Metro train on track during a trial run near the Azadpur metro station. The metro rail being seen as the default
solution for problems of urban mobility is rarely contested. ZUMA PRESS INC / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

THE SOCIOLOGIST Smriti Singh, in The Middle Class in Neo-Urban India Space,
Class and Distinction, looks at “citizen” initiatives in Gurugram to examine how
they “reflect a very exclusionary sense of citizenship” and speak to how the
reconstruction of spaces in India today often focusses on aesthetics and aspirations
that suit the middle class and elite.

She notes that the new middle class has different consumption patterns—it is
credit-based but globally oriented, and fits into global circuits of capital. This
means that infrastructure looks less at local needs and more towards constructing
world cities, mimicking the West at the expense of accessibility and affordability.
Singh studies the example of the “IamGurgaon” initiative to highlight how middle-
and upper-class interventions express claims to the city. Started in 2007, it
describes itself as comprising “residents, the administration, corporate
organisations, schools, RWAs, NGOs and developers”—Singh notes the absence of
labour or worker associations or local panchayats from nearby villages—who want
to “make a true ‘Millenium City.’” One of its several initiatives, its proposal to
ensure the “cleaning of Gurgaon streets through mobilising the municipality to
enable closer surveillance and supervision of sweepers” clearly indicates who gets
to make claims over the city’s public space, and exercise discipline and control.

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This is not isolated to Gurugram, of course. In his book Installing Automobility,

Govind Gopakumar made note of “the significant voice the ‘new middle classes’
have acquired in advocating the reshaping of urban space and infrastructures,”
following Bengaluru’s massive expansion in urbanisation. And, pointing to the
Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority’s shifting focus, from improving
urban slum conditions to housing complexes for the middle classes, shopping
malls and new townships at the edge of the city, Romit Chowdhury underscores
how this is also influenced by the notion of the 24-hour global city. This has
further widened existing inequalities: “Urban restructuring in India, especially in
the postliberalization period, has proceeded by systematically reducing the
visibility of the working poor while ensuring their availability to provide essential
services to the middle classes.”

Singh makes another related point about global aspirations driving urban
transformation—“Urban restructuring lately has witnessed a shrinking of the role
played by the nation-states’ active participation of global corporations, empowered
by relaxation of land use regulation policies.” She examines specific instances of
this reconfiguration. “The real estate company DLF actively mobilised local caste
dynamics to acquire land in Gurugram, to eventually build specialised
infrastructure that appealed to the global taste, absolutely sanitising it of local
dynamics … The shift was largely driven by a massive influx of migrant middle
class that is integrated into global circuits of capital.” This is visible in the metro as
well: “the insistence on a corporate-business-globality is so marked” that the
names of stops were combined with the names of the business in privately owned
metro stations—such as Vodafone Belvedere Towers Station, IndusInd Bank Cyber
City station, or Micromax Moulsari Avenue Station.

In the present-day rush for shiny new things, planning is guided not by pre-
existing legislation but, rather, by aesthetics, as the urban scholar Asher Ghertner
argues in Rule by Aesthetics. His study of the restructuring of Delhi before the
Commonwealth Games revisits the logic behind the demolition of slums in the
2000s, which displaced around a million people. Of course, the largescale
demolition of slums is hardly specific to the twenty-first century. During the
Emergency, Sanjay Gandhi’s family-planning campaign notoriously melded with
beautification drives for the capital, leading to slums being cleared and their
residents forcibly sterilised—for instance, around Turkman Gate, where police
opened fire, in 1976, against those protesting the demolition of their homes.

But Ghertner, like Singh, interrogates, more specifically, the cultivation of a newer
“world-class aesthetic” as an explicitly mentioned goal, including in the case of the
Delhi Metro. “It is precisely this vague sense of an improved, more beautiful urban
future, without planning benchmarks or even mutually agreeable definitional
criteria, that gives the world-class city its efficacy,” he writes. The state and the

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judiciary instituted a “mode of governing space on the basis of codes of

appearance.” Consequently, “Land uses that conform to dominant aesthetic codes
thus appear as sensible features of the urban landscape, even if they violate the
law.” His and Singh’s inquiries into the rapid shifts in urban planning and design
do in a more panoramic sense what Sadana’s scrutiny of public narratives about
the metro, as well as how it falls short, attempts as well. The books present
assessments of infrastructure that, in being attentive to major, ongoing and urgent
reconfigurations of public space, focus on who gets excluded within the city.

ANKUSH PAL is a sociology graduate based in New Delhi. His research and writing explore
caste, capitalism, cities, development under neoliberalism and identities. He is currently
working on subaltern religious practices and the construction of religious identities in post-
secular societies.

public transportation bus Delhi Metro Metro station Metro cities

urban development urban planning urbanization

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