In 2020, one of the enduring images of COVID-19 and its attendant lockdowns in India was the sight of thousands of urban residents leaving cities. Restrictions on inter-city transport meant that they did so on foot, setting off on perilous journeys of hundreds of kilometres. Journalists met them with bewilderment, asking them why they would risk exhaustion, hunger, police violence, death and infection. Their answer often, stated matter-of-factly, was that each of those outcomes was precisely what they were seeking to escape.
What is the redescribed puzzle about the urban to be told from the footsteps of workers leaving cities during a crisis, arguing that the odds of survival are better elsewhere? What does the urban disposition we have been arguing for tell us to pay attention to? Much has been written about how the pandemic showed us – once more – that the safety net in India’s cities is a patchwork, its threads worn and in need of repair. Many reminded us also that the vulnerability of those walking on highways preceded the pandemic. COVID-19 may have exacerbated the structural inequalities of Indian urbanisation but it did not cause them. Our intent here is different. It is not to reiterate the depth of the gap, estimate the extent of the uncovered, trace exactly how and where the safety net is frayed, or articulate precisely whose weight it can no longer hold. It is to push ourselves to ask the question that must come after: what does repair look like?
The idea of a patchwork is not just a metaphor but a diagnostic. Safety nets around the world struggle to design against “gaps”. The language of social policy asks about exclusions, beneficiaries, benefits, targets, eligibility. Patchworks gesture to something else. They remind us that safety nets are historically layered – different schemes, political histories, experiments and life worlds are intertwined in their present and are the plural foundations of their futures. A household holds a food card from one era, an employment guarantee from another, a recognition as a worker from one scheme with a certification of poverty in another. Needs, rights, claims and demands are simultaneously at play, knotted in ways that are often impossible to disentangle, let alone design. Sometimes, the layers accrue benefits that fight multiple and intersectional vulnerabilities. At others, they cancel each other out with the different patches unable to align or be sewn together.
How does one repair patchwork? Does one incrementally fill in, sewing between two patches, or expand the borders first, knowing the centre may not hold? Does one add layers under specific patches? Which patches go together and which sit uneasily alongside each other? Does one standardise patches, or allow differences that sometimes appear as a needed specificity, a recognition, but always risk falling into hierarchy? Does one throw away the frayed, patchworked net entirely and start anew? The Indian state – at all scales, from city to state to the national government – attempted to reach residents and workers before and even as they took to the highways. They issued directives to not retrench workers, or hold back wages. They appealed to landlords to defer rent and called for a temporary halt to any rent-based evictions. They sought to give crisis cash transfers to poor families and workers to compensate for lost wages. They doubled food rations under the existing public distribution system and expanded food aid. What we must pay attention to is how and why each of these different forms of practice had very different results as they refracted through the patchwork in different ways.
Given that eight of every ten workers in India work without recognised employment contracts, attempts to regulate wages – even just to enforce payment – became utterances rather than mandates. The structure of informal employment meant that it was unclear to whom these policy orders were directed, or how they could possibly be enforced. When the state sought to deliver directed cash transfers to workers, it encountered a similar problem. Databases were fragments across different sectors of the informal economy – construction workers had the most expansive ones, home-based workers and domestic workers the thinnest. For construction, despite a national law that has long existed allowing workers to register as informal workers in the sector, no more than half of all workers are registered, and even fewer of those registrations are current. In Delhi, this meant that only around 10 per cent of the city’s estimated 5,00,000 construction workers received promised cash transfers.
Other sectors of informal work have different densities of recognition and regulation, and the relief efforts fell thickly and thinly corresponding to these arrangements. When these same workers were one of the eight of every ten who live on rent without any written lease agreements, or one of the six of every ten who live in informal housing unmapped on state plans and absent in their databases, moratoria on rent evictions or directives to defer rent went equally unheeded. In the calculus of benefits, this “gap” was enough to render the net unviable. In interviews with workers walking on highways by the Stranded Workers Action Network (SWAN), 41 per cent cited rent as one of the main reasons they decided to leave the city.
What worked better were more universal, place-based efforts such as the expansion of food delivered through the public distribution system or cash transfers to those who held need-based identification such as Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards; income certificates that classified households as Economically Weaker Sections (EWS); or certificates of specific marginalised social status such as being elderly and on state pensions or being a widow. Even here, mobility stymied delivery. In India’s social protection systems, need-based benefits are spatially bound. They have to be claimed in a specific place to which one belongs rather than just where one is. Belonging on a safety net, in other words, requires residence rather than presence. It implies the ability to demonstrate identity and address legibly, convincingly and legally – an often foundational impossibility for an urban majority who live and work informally, or simply live what Indian urbanists Renu Desai and Shachi Sanghvi once called “multi-local lives” stitching life and livelihood across rather than within places.
Urban social protection systems – and many of the theories underlying them – were designed in the context of industrial work and the conceit of full employment, meaning that workers, workplaces and employers all took on specific roles. Claims were based on a person’s identification as a worker, the employer became the delivery agent, and the workplace rooted the transactions in space. How does one reframe this relationship without the employment contract implicit in this imagination? How do we do so when the work itself is hidden under categories of “unrecognised” and “informal” employment, or when the workplace is unrecognised, such as in the case of a vendor on a public street? How do we rethink the employment relationship not just within structural informality but also within the expansion of outsourcing, gig work, (sub)contracting, and a restructuring of the idealised employment relation globally?
A redescription investigating these questions must not just rework them analytically but also take on what COVID-19 relief compels us to think about: the real challenges in delivery when a state wanting to give cash relief to workers cannot find them in a database that allows them to do so. The conditions of informal employment do not just create and shape the nature of need, they also confound processes of delivery. Promised entitlements struggle to reach informal workers precisely because the nature of their work makes them hard to track if they are mobile across regions; if their work is beyond regulatory frameworks or occurs in workplaces that are hard to reach such as landfills, streets and private homes; or if it is beyond the reach of usual delivery channels such as employers or direct bank transfers.
How these challenges in the delivery of social protection can be understood and resolved is not self-evident. Informal housing, work and urban life have always meant a calibration of the terms of recognition and visibility, especially vis-à-vis the state. Informal urban life worlds require enough visibility to allow at least repair and patchwork assistance against precarity and vulnerability, but they resist legibility which means adverse incorporation into terms, norms, standards and rules that reduce flexibility and possibility. How does one repair a patchwork safety net when too much repair could consolidate exclusion, just as too little risks rupture? Thinking in new ways requires us, as our disposition urges, to think operationally as deeply as we do analytically and to sense which sites, methods and archives allow us to do so. How to hold on to the lessons that COVID-19 relief efforts offer “postcrisis” – or “post-this-particular-crisis” – social protection is one such site.
Doing so also means to hold on to our insistence in this book on reading across rather than within, linking seemingly disconnected questions to each other. One temptation to answer the question of delivery of social protection has always been to think universally – to root social protection in place rather than work or workplace. Here, the challenges of mobility, residence/presence and legibility do not disappear, yet possibilities of more effective delivery suggest themselves. Databases that include everyone offer the possibility of solving the problems of targeting and delivery by bypassing them, akin to putting an entire new cloth under a patchwork net to reinforce it. The question is: at what cost? By cost, here, we do not mean a fiscal or monetary outlay – we mean a social and political cost. The claims of citizens to rights and entitlements are not just the delivery chains of material resources needed for a dignified life. They are also sites where the categories of citizen, rights, entitlements, work, workers, labour, resident and dignity are built. When cash transfers are given to residents rather than workers, on the basis only of need rather than contribution, social protection can be a site of deep depoliticisation. When entitlements are received by beneficiaries rather than citizens, workers or residents, the outcomes to be measured are not just (much-needed) efficiency gains in material delivery but also political losses concerning the ramifications of particular kinds of urban social and political fabrics, relations and publics.
The urban disposition we describe in this book must, in its redescription, evaluate this “cost” as rigorously and openly as it does the financial and monetary costs of an easy prescription to “universalise” social protection. It is imperative, then, that we grapple with the terms, temporalities and processes through which social protection systems repair their patchworks. That the need to expand sector by sector, database by database, settlement by settlement may be preferable even when technology-enabled, portability-promising, universal delivery systems are on constant offer is to recognise two fundamental things about repair. First, it is repair that can hold a negotiation of the terms and pace of recognition and visibility that is actually sustainable in complex and unequal urban contexts. Second, it is repair that can straddle not just the economic but also the socio-political consequences of how we understand and deliver social protection in our cities, constantly holding to the distinction between rights and benefits. Yet, for this repair to not evade the operational promises of silver bullet solutions, it must find structures and processes at a scale of its own, so that – eventually – the outcomes it creates are not seen as a compromise even as the pathways to get there take longer, albeit possibly with other unmeasured but equally invaluable gains.
Excerpted with permission from Cities Rethought: A New Urban Disposition, Gautam Bhan, Michael Keith, Susan Parnell, and Edgar Pieterse, Westland.
