How does India govern its cities?

LSE’s Praveen Priyadarshi charts the history of urban governance in India and finds it key to understanding democracy and economic growth in contemporary India

Gujarat: how an exclusionary political pact is also a durable one

As the Indian state of Gujarat prepares to go to polls in December, most commentators agree that the chief minister Narendra Modi and his BJP party will be voted back to power yet again. Dr Neera Chandhoke argues that the electoral performance of the BJP government is based on a Hindu majoritarian political pact that sustains itself by excluding and marginalising the Muslim community. This exclusion, and its relationship with the majoritarian political pact, can best be understood by looking at the plight of victims of the 2002 pogrom and the resettlement colonies in Ahmedabad that they continue to inhabit. (Dr Chandhoke’s working paper, “Some Reflections on the Notion of an ‘Inclusive Political Pact’: A Perspective from Ahmedabad”, has been summarised here by Praveen Priyadarshi)

Gender-based violence and reproductive health in India

Ernestina Coast, Tiziana Leone, and Alankar Malviya find that gender-based violence is consistently under-reported and point to flawed government policies that assume married women are safe from violence

Political determinants of municipal capacity: a study of urban reforms in Ahmedabad and Kanpur, India

This thesis asks why major urban reforms in India between 2005 and 2015 were more successfully implemented in some cities than in others. It undertakes a study of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), launched in 2005 by the Indian government, which aimed to implement governance reforms and urban infrastructure renewal across 65 Indian cities, but finished with only modest success. The implementation outcome of the mission also varied across cities. This thesis focuses on the differential implementation outcomes of the reforms in two Indian cities, Ahmedabad and Kanpur, and identifies historically constituted political capacity - located in municipal organization at the city level - as the key determinant of divergent trajectories in the JNNURM implementation. The study adapts John Kingdon‟s framework of „policy windows‟ to explore the formation of municipal capacities and municipal organisations in the two cities. The research identifies two historical „windows‟ that were crucial in the shaping of municipal organizations in Ahmedabad and Kanpur: the first episode was the colonial formation of municipal organisations; the second episode was the period of neoliberalisation. Following Kingdon, in each window, the problem, the policy and the politics have been identified and spelled out. The process of “coupling” between the problem and the policy has then been analysed by looking at the nature of politics and the principal political actors. The analysis demonstrates that while in Ahmedabad, the coupling was achieved during the two historical episodes, the problem and the policy remained unattached in the case of Kanpur. This variation led to two different architectures of municipal organisations in the two cities, resulting in different levels of municipal capacities at the time of the inauguration of the JNNURM. The thesis concludes that the specific histories of urban governance systems matter, and a policy insensitive to this, is likely to fail

In Search of a “Social-AQI”

Globally, datafication is being adopted as a solution for socio-environmental issues, with the belief that it will democratize decision-making by simplifying knowledge through data. However, this process can further alienate marginalized groups from governance by disregarding practical exposure levels and the sociopolitical contexts in which people live and engage at the community level. In this paper, we use community participation as a tool to develop the Social Air Quality Index (S-AQI), which shapes neighborhood air pollution mapping and monitoring in Delhi. We first question the impact of datafication on air pollution quality measurements and challenge the claim that air quality governance is possible simply through the deployment of high-tech devices and AQI standardization, which is often used to produce and share data about air pollution across Delhi. Instead, we propose an alternative community-oriented methodology and incorporate an interactive approach that relies on public workshops, offline questionnaires, and low-cost sensors to engage with six neighborhoods. Through this intervention-based approach, we seek to explore how to develop AQI understanding among local stakeholders and identify pathways to build greater social awareness and knowledge of AQI as a means of dealing with the pollution crisis

Pfcrt haplotypes and in-vivo chloroquine response in Sundergarh district, Orissa, India

The Plasmodium falciparum chloroquine resistance transporter (Pfcrt) K76T mutation and haplotype (amino acids 72-76) were analyzed as markers of chloroquine (CQ) resistance in the blood samples of patients from two sites of different intensities of malaria transmission (high, n = 70; low, n = 68) in Sundergarh district of Orissa, India and correlated with the in-vivo response. Early treatment failure (ETF) was significantly more frequent in the high endemic area (32.9 vs. 7.4%, P < 0.001), with children below 5 years suffering more. A high frequency of pfcrt K76T mutation was observed in both the areas (87.1 vs. 79.4%, P = 0.22). Patients carrying pfcrt 76T were the most likely to develop ETF (odds ratio 36; 95% CI 3.35-1653.3; P < 0.001). The ratio of 76T:K76 was 22:9 and 11:14, respectively, in high and low endemic areas (odds ratio 3.1; 95% CI 0.9-11.03; P = 0.04), which may be used as a measure of drug pressure. Sequences of pfcrt codons 72-76 showed 16 of the CQ-resistant haplotypes to be SVMNT, 5 CVMNT and 12 CVIET. The CQ-sensitive haplotypes were mostly CVMNK in 10 samples; CVIEK in 2 samples. Both Southeast Asian and South American haplotypes were present, with the latter predominating