Faculty Seminar | Persistence of the World-Class City: Good Governance and Slum Rehabilitation in Contemporary Delhi

In this week’s faculty seminar Manish, Assistant Professor, Law, NLSIU will present on his paper titled ‘Persistence of the world-class city: good governance and slum rehabilitation in contemporary Delhi’. The discussant will be Dr. Sushmita Pati, Associate Professor, Social Science, NLSIU.

Abstract

This essay analyses contemporary slum rehabilitation policy in Delhi, India’s capital city—comprising the Delhi Slum and JJ Resettlement and Rehabilitation Policy 2015 and its enabling statute, the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board Act 2010—using the framework of urban international law. It seeks to examine the policy framing of ‘slums’ as a problem needing the solution of ‘rehabilitation,’ and interrogate its assumptions and representations. In doing so, it shows that urban international law influences this framing through the logics of ‘good governance’ and the ‘world-class city’, and that in reproducing these logics the policy perpetuates existing inequalities experienced by the urban poor in Delhi.