Author: cprindia

Watch the full video (above) of the CPR-Lokniti-CSDS Discussion on ‘Opening the Black Box of Election Polling and Forecasting’ as part of the ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ series. The discussion featured Sanjay Kumar, Yashwant Deshmukh and Pradeep Bhandari and was moderated by Rahul Verma.

With elections only a few months away and the campaign trail heating up, the discussion aimed to de-mystify the process of election polling and seat forecasting in India. The panel brought together psephologists and pollsters who broke down exactly what goes into making an election poll – from sample size to poll design to actual analysis.

Sanjay Kumar is Director of Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Yashwant Deshmukh is the Founder-Director of CVoter International. Pradeep Bhandari is the Founder-CEO of Jan Ki Baat. Rahul Verma is a Fellow at CPR.

This was the first panel organised as part of the discussion on ‘Opening the Black Box of Election Polling and Forecasting’. The video of the second panel can be accessed here.

Rahul Verma wrote a chapter titled ‘Elections, Exit Polls and the Electronic Media’ in the book, ‘The Great March of Democracy: Seven Decades of India’s Elections’ edited by S Y Quraishi. The chapter discusses the typology of election-related surveys, reviews the status of opinion polls from a historical perspective, and addresses some of the criticisms leveled against election surveys.

About the Series:

This panel discussion was jointly hosted by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Lokniti-CSDS, and it is the first in a series of events in the run-up to 2019 elections. This collaborative series between the two research institutions – ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ – aims to make academic research more accessible to the general public.

Watch the full video (above) of the CPR-Lokniti-CSDS Discussion on ‘Opening the Black Box of Election Polling and Forecasting’ as part of the ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ series. The discussion featured Rajdeep Sardesai, Surjit S Bhalla and Saurabh Dwivedi and was moderated by Rahul Verma.

With elections only a few months away and the campaign trail heating up, the discussion aimed to de-mystify the process of election polling and seat forecasting in India. The panel brought together journalists from TV, print and online media to discuss the intricacies involved behind the consumption of poll numbers on their platforms and their dissemination.

Rajdeep Sardesai is Consulting Editor at the India Today Group. Surjit S Bhalla is Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, and Consulting Editor, Network 18. Saurabh Dwivedi is Editor at The Lallantop. Rahul Verma is a Fellow at CPR.

About the Series:

This panel discussion was jointly hosted by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Lokniti-CSDS, and it is the first in a series of events in the run-up to 2019 elections.  This collaborative series between the two research institutions – ‘Conversations on Indian Democracy’ – aims to make academic research more accessible to the general public.

This was the second panel organised as part of the discussion on ‘Opening the Black Box of Election Polling and Forecasting’. The video of the first panel can be accessed here.

Context: What is the research about?

In Delhi, as in many other Indian cities, millions of men, women and children who live in slums and informal settlements have to daily confront the lack of adequate sanitation facilities. These sanitation inequalities impact the health and socioeconomic status of women and girls more because of their greater social vulnerability to sexual violence, as well as the role played by biology in their need for privacy, safety and cleanliness.

• Who or what is responsible for such socioeconomic consequences of the lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure in Indian cities, which perpetuate gender inequalities?
• How do issues like gender-based violence impact the everyday lives of women and girls living in slums in particular?

This project report examines these issues using the notion of infrastructural violence and then examines the harms and suffering caused by a lack of sanitation infrastructure in two long-established localities in Delhi: Mangolpuri and Kusumpur Pahari. The study was an ethnographic research carried out over months of extensive interviews and case studies.

What is infrastructural violence?

One approach to understanding the harms inflicted when urban sanitation infrastructures malfunction is to use the concept of infrastructural violence that seeks to identify the political economy underlying the socio-spatial production of suffering in contemporary cities.

This research report focuses on the notion of passive exclusion of women and girls from sanitation infrastructures. When women and girls from slum communities are forced to enter dangerous spaces daily to satisfy their biological needs due to their physical exclusion from sanitation infrastructure (due to various reasons like safety, cost, social norms), they are often exposed to gendered, caste and class-based forms of both physical and emotional violence, which can produce immediate and lifelong multiple harms, sufferings and exclusions.

Who were the participants?

The women and girls who participated in this survey ranged in age from 17 to 60 years. There were five women in the 20-24 age group, eight women in the 25-29 age group, three in the 55-59 age group, two each in the 15-19, 45-49 and 55-59 age groups, and one in the 60-65 age group, which provided a good diversity of experiences.

20 were married, nine were single and two were widowed. They were residents of Kusumpur Pahari, an urban village in south Delhi, and JJC (Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters) pockets of Mangolpuri, which is a resettlement colony in West Delhi.

What were the findings?

• Research findings on how private and community toilets are used in Mangolpuri and Kusumpur Pahari highlight the frequent inaccuracy of statistics collected in household surveys. Persons conducting such surveys generally presume that if a household has a toilet facility there is no need for further questions on other sanitation activities. But as this research’s survey has shown, some members of households with private toilets still use community toilet complexes (CTCs) or open defecation (OD) sites often due to issues such as lack of water in the case of Kusumpur Pahari, or the inconvenient location within a household for an elderly woman.
• For participants from households who use CTCs every day, the patterns of usage are determined by the opening hours. When CTCs are closed during the day, or after 10 pm, residents are left with no choice but OD.
• Design flaws like half-doors or open roofs also dissuade women from using a toilet block due to the fear of being seen.

The research survey and interviews have identified three types of harms caused by this irregular access to sanitation infrastructure:

• Gender-based violence and harassment experienced when going to a CTC or OD site – the greatest numbers of incidents of harassment and violence took place at OD sites (14 responses) followed by CTCs (nine responses). Nine women said they experienced some form of violence or harassment nearly every day.
• Psychosocial stresses – these relate to the fear, stress and shame that women suffer because of the harassment, teasing and intimidation they experience when going about their daily sanitation activities. Some examples of psychosocial stressors that came out of the study include-

1. Fear of being bitten by snakes, dogs and other animals in forest defecation sites in Kusumpur Pahari;
2. Fear of injury when defecating on slopes and hillsides, on roadside or in drains;
3. Fear of sexual assault or rape;
4. Stress of not being able to report incidences of harassment or violence due to bringing shame on themselves and their household, or facing revenge from perpetrators;
5. Stress of having to ‘control’ body functions.

• Economic impacts on individuals and households – economic harms are caused by a lack of adequate sanitation facilities in two ways: i) first, there is ‘lost’ time incurred in having to often walk for 10-20 minutes to reach a CTC, wait in a queue and then return home. Nearly half the participants in this survey who use a CTC said that it took 6 to 15 minutes to walk each way, while another 37 percent said they took 16 to 30 minutes to walk each way; ii) the second economic impact is the cost of fees for the use of a CTC. High user charges were given as a reason for not using a CTC by 23 per cent of participants, which means their only option was OD.

Who is responsible?

This research report therefore argues that ‘passive’ sanitation infrastructural violence occurs in cities such as Delhi because of two factors.

• The first is the lack of political will at all levels of the Indian state to take a systematic approach to the planning, implementation and maintenance of sanitation infrastructure. In the case of CTCs, the failure of urban local bodies and agencies to take responsibility for designing toilets that satisfy women’s biological and socio-cultural needs, along with a lack of regular cleaning, maintenance and water supply, frequently rendered them unfit for use.
• The second is the continuing lack of analysis of gender as a process (based on unequal power relations) in the policy, design and location of public and community toilets. Merely building more toilets to achieve targets set by governments will never solve urban India’s sanitation poverty if they continue to remain unused due to degradation and the lack of safety for women and girls.

Suggestions for future urban policy:

Based on the results, comments and suggestions collected by this research project, certain suggestions are made for addressing the harms and suffering experienced by women residents of informal settlements.

1. Local urban authorities must develop effective maintenance regimes for CTCs before building them and this includes providing a reliable water supply. Clean and well-maintained CTCs will encourage use and reduce OD prevalence;
2. Local women must be allowed to participate in the decision-making process about the design and location of new CTCs in their neighbourhood;
3. CTCs must be open 24 hours a day to prevent the continuation of OD practices;
4. There must be increased lighting along the roads and pathways leading to CTCs so as to improve safety for women and girls at night;
5. There is a need to consider having more than one caretaker per toilet block. This would help to reduce incidents of violence and harassment and could prevent the theft of taps and locks and other forms of vandalism at CTCs.

The full report can be accessed here.

Context: What is the research about?

In Delhi, as in many other Indian cities, millions of men, women and children who live in slums and informal settlements have to daily confront the lack of adequate sanitation facilities. These sanitation inequalities impact the health and socioeconomic status of women and girls more because of their greater social vulnerability to sexual violence, as well as the role played by biology in their need for privacy, safety and cleanliness.

• Who or what is responsible for such socioeconomic consequences of the lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure in Indian cities, which perpetuate gender inequalities?
• How do issues like gender-based violence impact the everyday lives of women and girls living in slums in particular?

This project report examines these issues using the notion of infrastructural violence and then examines the harms and suffering caused by a lack of sanitation infrastructure in two long-established localities in Delhi: Mangolpuri and Kusumpur Pahari. The study was an ethnographic research carried out over months of extensive interviews and case studies.

What is infrastructural violence?

One approach to understanding the harms inflicted when urban sanitation infrastructures malfunction is to use the concept of infrastructural violence that seeks to identify the political economy underlying the socio-spatial production of suffering in contemporary cities.

This research report focuses on the notion of passive exclusion of women and girls from sanitation infrastructures. When women and girls from slum communities are forced to enter dangerous spaces daily to satisfy their biological needs due to their physical exclusion from sanitation infrastructure (due to various reasons like safety, cost, social norms), they are often exposed to gendered, caste and class-based forms of both physical and emotional violence, which can produce immediate and lifelong multiple harms, sufferings and exclusions.

Who were the participants?

The women and girls who participated in this survey ranged in age from 17 to 60 years. There were five women in the 20-24 age group, eight women in the 25-29 age group, three in the 55-59 age group, two each in the 15-19, 45-49 and 55-59 age groups, and one in the 60-65 age group, which provided a good diversity of experiences.

20 were married, nine were single and two were widowed. They were residents of Kusumpur Pahari, an urban village in south Delhi, and JJC (Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters) pockets of Mangolpuri, which is a resettlement colony in West Delhi.

What were the findings?

• Research findings on how private and community toilets are used in Mangolpuri and Kusumpur Pahari highlight the frequent inaccuracy of statistics collected in household surveys. Persons conducting such surveys generally presume that if a household has a toilet facility there is no need for further questions on other sanitation activities. But as this research’s survey has shown, some members of households with private toilets still use community toilet complexes (CTCs) or open defecation (OD) sites often due to issues such as lack of water in the case of Kusumpur Pahari, or the inconvenient location within a household for an elderly woman.
• For participants from households who use CTCs every day, the patterns of usage are determined by the opening hours. When CTCs are closed during the day, or after 10 pm, residents are left with no choice but OD.
• Design flaws like half-doors or open roofs also dissuade women from using a toilet block due to the fear of being seen.

The research survey and interviews have identified three types of harms caused by this irregular access to sanitation infrastructure:

• Gender-based violence and harassment experienced when going to a CTC or OD site – the greatest numbers of incidents of harassment and violence took place at OD sites (14 responses) followed by CTCs (nine responses). Nine women said they experienced some form of violence or harassment nearly every day.
• Psychosocial stresses – these relate to the fear, stress and shame that women suffer because of the harassment, teasing and intimidation they experience when going about their daily sanitation activities. Some examples of psychosocial stressors that came out of the study include-

1. Fear of being bitten by snakes, dogs and other animals in forest defecation sites in Kusumpur Pahari;
2. Fear of injury when defecating on slopes and hillsides, on roadside or in drains;
3. Fear of sexual assault or rape;
4. Stress of not being able to report incidences of harassment or violence due to bringing shame on themselves and their household, or facing revenge from perpetrators;
5. Stress of having to ‘control’ body functions.

• Economic impacts on individuals and households – economic harms are caused by a lack of adequate sanitation facilities in two ways: i) first, there is ‘lost’ time incurred in having to often walk for 10-20 minutes to reach a CTC, wait in a queue and then return home. Nearly half the participants in this survey who use a CTC said that it took 6 to 15 minutes to walk each way, while another 37 percent said they took 16 to 30 minutes to walk each way; ii) the second economic impact is the cost of fees for the use of a CTC. High user charges were given as a reason for not using a CTC by 23 per cent of participants, which means their only option was OD.

Who is responsible?

This research report therefore argues that ‘passive’ sanitation infrastructural violence occurs in cities such as Delhi because of two factors.

• The first is the lack of political will at all levels of the Indian state to take a systematic approach to the planning, implementation and maintenance of sanitation infrastructure. In the case of CTCs, the failure of urban local bodies and agencies to take responsibility for designing toilets that satisfy women’s biological and socio-cultural needs, along with a lack of regular cleaning, maintenance and water supply, frequently rendered them unfit for use.
• The second is the continuing lack of analysis of gender as a process (based on unequal power relations) in the policy, design and location of public and community toilets. Merely building more toilets to achieve targets set by governments will never solve urban India’s sanitation poverty if they continue to remain unused due to degradation and the lack of safety for women and girls.

Suggestions for future urban policy:

Based on the results, comments and suggestions collected by this research project, certain suggestions are made for addressing the harms and suffering experienced by women residents of informal settlements.

1. Local urban authorities must develop effective maintenance regimes for CTCs before building them and this includes providing a reliable water supply. Clean and well-maintained CTCs will encourage use and reduce OD prevalence;
2. Local women must be allowed to participate in the decision-making process about the design and location of new CTCs in their neighbourhood;
3. CTCs must be open 24 hours a day to prevent the continuation of OD practices;
4. There must be increased lighting along the roads and pathways leading to CTCs so as to improve safety for women and girls at night;
5. There is a need to consider having more than one caretaker per toilet block. This would help to reduce incidents of violence and harassment and could prevent the theft of taps and locks and other forms of vandalism at CTCs.

The full report can be accessed here.

Watch the full video (above) of the talk by Christian Schmid, where he presents results of a comparative study of urbanisation processes in eight large metropolitan territories across the world: Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong / Shenzhen / Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City, and Los Angeles.

In the last decades, urbanisation has become a planetary phenomenon. Urban areas expand and interweave, and novel forms of urbanisation emerge. In this process, new urban configurations are constantly evolving. Therefore, an adequate understanding of planetary urbanisation must derive its empirical and theoretical inspirations from the multitude of urban experiences across the various divides that shape our contemporary world.

The main goal of this project is to develop new conceptual categories for better understanding the patterns and pathways of planetary urbanisation.

Christian Schmid is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here.

Based on extensive field work, CPR researchers Neelanjan Sircar, Bhanu Joshi, and Ashish Ranjan share insights on how the Trinamool Congress (TMC) fared when judged for its performance over the last 5 years against 34 years of Left rule. Through her charismatic leadership and by focusing heavily on infrastructural improvement, they analyse how Mamata Banerjee demonstrated the change she promised when she came to power in 2011.

Read the full analysis here.

Philippe Cullet, a senior visiting fellow at CPR, has been appointed as member of three government committees set up by the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation to draft water legislations for India.

The three committees include:

• Committee to Draft National Water Framework Law–set up in December, 2015, to draft a National Water Framework Law on the basis of the two existing drafts.
• Committee to Re-draft the Draft Model Bill for Conservation Protection and Regulation of Ground Water, 2011–set up in October, 2015, to re-draft the said Bill.
• Committee to Draft River Basin Management Bill–set up in December, 2015, to work further on the Draft River Basin Management Bill, 2012.

Cullet has been particularly involved in the drafting of the National Water Framework Law, and the re-drafting of the Model Bill for Conservation Protection and Regulation of Groundwater, 2011.

Watch the full video of the workshop (above), where Jayaraj Sundaresan examines the relationship between the epistemological categories of planning and participation based on his experience of land use planning politics in Bangalore.

Through the workshop, Sundaresan attempts to answer key questions surrounding participation in the planning process, such as: Does participation happen only during the making of key decisions that underlie ‘the plan’ or also in devising appropriate planning instruments? Should it also happen during the implementation and enforcement process? Should participants have a say in every planning application in their neighbourhood and beyond, including in devising the planning system and its governance?

The two-part question and answer session that followed can be accessed here: Part 1, Part 2

More details about the talk can be accessed at the dedicated event listing here.

By Prepcom3, the last of three preparatory meetings to debate the intent and content of UN Habitat’s ‘New Urban Agenda’, member States were expected to agree on a way forward to improve the quality of human life by focusing on cities. Negotiations in Surabaya were to conclude with an outcome document to be signed at the Habitat III conference planned at Quito, Ecuador, in October, 2016.

While the negotiations were unsuccessful in reaching a resolution, thus necessitating informal talks between now and October, discussions at Surabaya reflect global trends and ideas to find solutions to the problems of the urban millennium.

The reflections below share key takeaways from Prepcom3 in general, and from the Centre for Policy Research–Institut de recherche pour le développement (CPR-IRD) event on 26 July 2016, specifically.

Prepcom3: from ‘settlements’ to cities– deliberating estimates and definition

The shift in focus from improving human settlements (Istanbul Declaration of 1996) to viewing urbanisation as one of ‘the 21^st century’s most transformative trends’ appears to be premised on a belief that the world’s urban population will ‘nearly double’ by 2050. The base figure for this is, however, not clarified in the latest draft of the New Urban Agenda, released in July this year.

The earlier zero draft, which was released in May 2016, however, stated that by 2050, the proportion of people in the world living in urban areas ‘will reach nearly 70%’. This whittling down of the extent of urbanisation is a reflection of the concern expressed by member States and stakeholders over the legitimacy of urbanisation estimates.

Indeed, there are pressing concerns on how ‘urban’ is understood given the varying definitions used across the world, and it is unclear whether an emphasis on urban is the best approach to providing sustainable and adequate housing to underserved populations across the world who live in settlements with varying spatial and socio-economic characteristics.

CPR-IRD event on small cities and informal settlements: expanding the notion of the urban

While the thrust of the side and parallel events at Prepcom3 was on discussing solutions and strategies for equitable, sustainable and resilient urban development, the side event organised by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in partnership with Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) on 26 July sought to expand the current notions of what is urban beyond the metropolis to embrace informal settlements and small cities.

Arguing that informal settlements and small cities have similarities in terms of scale, precariousness and lack of basic infrastructure, the event sought to see the urban in fresh ways, moving beyond spaces defined in terms of the legality of tenure, inclusion in plan and stringent governance frameworks.

Using examples of problems related to the provision of basic services like water and sanitation, panellists—Valerie Clerc of IRD, Mukta Naik of CPR, Gopa Samanta of University of Burdwan, Khairul Islam of WaterAid Bangaldesh and Shanawez Hossain on BRAC University—sought to highlight technological advancements in non-sewer sanitation, the successful use of community-based processes to access potable water, and innovative governance models like slab-based water pricing as potential solutions, that could address context-specific urban problems.

The interactive session, attended by over 70 delegates, raised questions on the dovetailing of traditional planning tools with community-based systems of knowledge and implementation. A storified version of the live tweets from the panel and plenary session of the conference can be accessed here.

The return of ‘planning’: the dominant message

That many discussions at Prepcom3, including the CPR-IRD side event, debated the modalities of planning and its role in meeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was no coincidence. In a marked change of stance since the Istanbul Declaration, which had nearly no mention of planning, the centrality of planning as a tool to achieve sustainable urban development is evident in the current draft of the New Urban Agenda.

When Shipra Narang Suri, President ISOCARP, the global association of professional planners dramatically exclaimed, ‘planning is back!’ at a UN Habitat side event at Prepcom3, her tone reflected the struggles and the possibilities of this shift.

The good news is that notions of planning have expanded to address multiple scales–supranational, national, metropolitan, city, and neighbourhood. In fact, the UN Habitat has brought out International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning (IG-UTP), and is developing a comprehensive compendium of illustrative practices to guide national, regional and local governments.

The guidelines, currently available in 12 languages, contain case studies from across the world that demonstrate the successful use of a variety of planning processes that integrate elements of physical and strategic planning in achieving more compact, socially inclusive, better integrated and connected cities that are resilient to climate change.

For Indian cities, this necessitates a relook at planning components and implementation strategies, especially at municipal governance frameworks and capacities. When the journey from Surabaya to Delhi ends in a three-hour traffic jam caused by water logging and poor traffic management, the importance of dovetailing policy and planning with management capacities and implementation is brought home in a rather emphatic manner.

See video of India’s official statement at PrepCom3 and read the Habitat III National Report.

Despite the increasing popularity of participatory approaches in urban planning and design, the voices of children remain relatively unheard by professionals and citizens who contribute to shaping living environments. In India, children are simultaneously seen through the economic lens, as the future workforce, and through a rights-based lens that portrays children among the weak, vulnerable members of society – those without a voice and agency.

In this context, despite the recognition of the criticality of play in the development of children, planned or spontaneous interventions in creating conducive play spaces are rare in Indian cities and society sees play in opposition to ‘useful’ activities such as learning and working.

The world over, researchers and practitioners in an array of fields, including child psychology, education, landscape architecture, planning and design are collaborating to raise awareness and disseminate knowledge about appropriate play environments for children. Some of these global experiences are captured in How to Grow a Playspace, edited by Australian landscape architects Katherine Masiulanis and Elizabeth Cummins.

Mukta Naik’s chapter, titled Of Agency, Participation and Design: Two Contrasting Play Scenarios in Indian Cities in the book How to Grow a Playspace: Development and Design draws from two contrasting situations – a gated upper class neighbourhood and an informal settlement in Delhi – to highlight how children continue to be excluded from conversation about design and public space.

In the first scenario, parks become sites of contestation as they are appropriated by other older citizens who claim a superior form of citizenship and even resort to litigation to impose their idea of a neighbourhood park as a pristine and beautiful place of repose. That court judgements blame the situation on poor planning hardly remedies the situation for children, who must continue to rely on adults to support them in a country where conversations about a Right to Play are only emerging.

In the case of the informal settlement, a lack of demarcated play spaces or poor maintenance of these, results in the creative use of streets, courtyards and corridors especially at certain times of the day. Sadly, where experiments with participative design and planning have been conducted in India, children have likely articulated the concerns they overhear from adults, like the need for better infrastructure like street lighting, water supply or sanitation.

In conclusion, the chapter outlines the need for designers, planners and citizen activists to leverage child-led participatory approaches to design meaningful play spaces through strategic and creative interventions. By presenting these Indian cases in an international publication, the chapter seeks to highlight the complexity of spatial planning in the Global South and seek participatory rather than purely technical solutions for design issues.

The publisher page for the book featuring the chapter can be accessed here.