Infrastructure, Conflict and City: Understanding Agartala (India) through Its Paratransit

Infrastructures have been instrumental in resolving conflicts as well as creating conflicts. States like India has used it as a tool of social governance in conflicted regions where it could not solve the problems with other means. As a result of that, many regions that were unreachable for the state before has now become the focal point for infrastructure development. The city of Agartala is one such case. Having a history of ethnic conflict, the people of the Agartala has been divided into different identities. With different identities come different demands towards the government as well as the capitalist, making it difficult to negotiate between different actors. Thus, this research seeks to understand the conflict that has been there in Agartala, by taking paratransit, especially tomtom, as an urban infrastructure and analyse how different actors such as the state, capital and the local people of the place interact with each other through this. By doing an ethnographic study and participant observation, the study proposes to analyse the tomtom service, a three- wheeler based electrical vehicle, in the city which has become one of the major mode of travel for a larger section of the society in the recent years. Even though an informal transit, this can be studied as a site to understand how a small transport infrastructure in a rapidly growing urban centre with conflicted past and present can either disrupt or facilitate socio- political harmony.