The Right to be Counted: The Urban Poor and The Politics of Resettlement in Delhi

In this talk Dr. Routray will present on his book The Right to be Counted: The Urban Poor and The Politics of Resettlement in Delhi, which examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and citizenship entitlements in the city.

The book illustrates how the quest for documenting the numerical presence and visibility of the poor is linked to tactics and countertactics, including the mediated politics of the intermediaries, documentary and inscriptive struggles to prove existence and authenticity, legal battles to contest state categorization and classification, and numerous cultural idioms and resistance strategies.

Analyzing social, political, and economic relationships alike, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi.

Along with analyzing the fraught process of calculative governmentality and an array of political idioms, the book also offers a bottom-up perspective on how the politics of the poor intersects with spatial arrangements, social cleavages, and activists in the city.