Contesting the Uncertain Promises of Rehabilitation: Struggles and Coping Strategies Among Slum Dwellers in Ahmedabad, India

The 'slum-free India' slogan that came to the fore in urban policy discourses in the mid-2000s has marked the draconian shift from in-situ slum improvement to slum relocation. Accordingly, the burgeoning literature on urban governance in India has portrayed slum dwellers as victims of such new, neoliberal forms of development. Despite its unique focus on the socio-spatial configuration of poor people's exclusion, it has not paid due attention to their resilience to such processes. Drawing on qualitative data obtained from two slums in Ahmedabad, an India's globalising mega city, this paper examines the manner in which some residents collectively negotiated with the local state either in defence of their housing rights and livelihood or in pursuit of personal gains through manipulating the compensation for relocation. This paper has three objectives. Firstly, it gives an overview of the Slum Networking Project (SNP), which was launched in 1996 through a partnership between aid agencies, local government bodies, NGOs and community-based organisations, as an example of in-situ slum improvement. Secondly, it portrays the process by which the SNP was replaced with some rehabilitation schemes as evident in the provision of dwelling units in multi-storied housing blocks, which are typically located in urban fringes. Thirdly, it presents the diverse strategies that slum dwellers took to claim their right to housing and livelihood. Some residents sought redress with an NGO and the opposition party. Some residents sought co-operation from their neighbours through coercive means and attempted to obtain more compensation than would be available to them by claiming fake figures on their households and neighbourhood. This paper concludes by stressing that the powerful in a slum can mobilise an 'illegitimate' means of survival when they are at risk of eviction and deprived of access to 'legitimate' channels of claim-making such as NGOs.