TheRight To Be Counted

Award-winning author: Dr Sanjeev Routray received a USF Knowledge Mobilisation Award in November 2021.Dr. Sanjeev Routray is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He is a sociologist-anthropologist, critical urbanist, and migration specialist of South Asia and beyond. His areas of expertise include urban poverty, political and legal mobilizations, transregional migration, and caste and labor market negotiations. He is currently writing his second book tentatively titled The Plumbers of Delhi: Migration, Caste Sociality, and Citizenship in an Occupational Community. Dr. Routray has received fellowships from the Urban Studies Foundation (UK), The Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (UK), Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Foundation (Germany), and International Development Research Centre (Canada) for his research.In the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available-but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.This book examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state stake their claims to a house and life in the city.The Right to Be Counted presents a rich ethnographic analysis of the range of strategies adopted by displaced populations crowding into urban slums to stake their claim to belong to the city. Routray's depiction of 'numerical citizenship' is persuasive and enlightening. This is a valuable addition to the growing literature on popular politics in megacities.This is a "how things work" book of top quality. With deep, analytical, thoughtful scholarship, Routray provides one of the clearest and most accessible accounts of how the poor fight to make a home in Delhi