On 25 April 2023, India hosted a ‘Track 1.5’ discussion on the Myanmar crisis with government representatives from Myanmar’s neighbouring countries – India, China, Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh – as well as Cambodia and Indonesia, the previous and current ASEAN chairs, respectively. It also included think-tank representatives from these countries.
Notably, representatives from only the military junta in Myanmar, which calls itself the ‘State Administration Council (SAC)’, were invited to the meeting hosted by the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), a think-tank funded by India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). According to a report in Nikkei Asia, these were “midlevel” officials. The National Unity Government (NUG), the civilian government of Myanmar composed of elected lawmakers, was not invited.
The MEA hasn’t put out any official press release on the meeting, which was a follow-up of the first iteration hosted by the Thai government in Bangkok on 13 March. Much like the first one, the participant governments have deliberately kept the second edition under wraps. There was no public consultation or calls for participation in the run up to the meeting. A Reuters report rightly characterised the Track 1.5 as “secretive”.
Why was it convened?
The Track 1.5 may be seen as a joint Thai-Indian initiative to navigate the Myanmar situation. Alternatively, it may be see as an attempt by both to demonstrate their convening power in cobbling together an issue-specific regional coalition. At the outset, it is the outcome of growing frustration in Delhi and Bangkok with the virtual failure of the ASEAN Five-Point Consensus-cum-Special Envoy process, which remains awkwardly stuck between censuring and engaging the SAC. However, there’s more to it.
The meeting’s composition shows that the co-hosts seek to create an exclusive regional platform for countries that share a border with Myanmar and have been affected by the crisis in some manner. India, Thailand and Bangladesh have all seen the instability in Myanmar spill over into their territory in the form of stray bombs, fighter jets, and refugee waves. The crisis has also allowed transnational criminal networks to expand the ambit of their activities. For instance, the UN has reported a sharp spike in opium poppy cultivation along the India-Myanmar and Thailand-Myanmar borders after the coup.
At the same time, the dialogue’s narrow composition is instructive. With the exception of Indonesia, every single participating country continues to undertake routine diplomacy with the SAC in one form or the other. The two frontline hosts – India and Thailand – have, in fact, ramped up their own bilateral engagements with the Burmese coup regime over the past one year. While the Indian foreign secretary, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, visited Myanmar and had an amicable meeting with the junta leadership in November, the Thai deputy foreign minister, Don Pramudwinai, recently toured Nay Pyi Taw in what is being seen as a warm rendezvous with the Generals.
Similarly, China, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Laos too have refrained from calling out the SAC for its undemocratic conduct and brutality against civilians. Their officials continue to meet junta ministers using official diplomatic channels and participate in junta-hosted events in Myanmar. Beijing, especially, has significantly expanded its bilateral track with the junta with the aim of securing its strategic interests and resuming Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects.
Nikkei Asia, citing sources, reported that during the meeting, India “agreed with Myanmar to send a delegation to Naypyidaw to help push for a ‘full resumption of dialogue’ between the regional governments.” This is a pointed reflection of what the dialogue is meant to achieve: a broader legitimation of the coup regime. It remains to be seen if the rest of ASEAN plays ball, but it is clear that the whole dialogue, at a minimum, is designed to rationalise and formalise diplomatic engagement between the participating governments and the SAC. In fact, it reflects their desire to go around ASEAN’s arguably vague approach towards the junta and solidify their working relationships with the SAC to preserve their own political, strategic and economic interests. Indonesia, which received an invite only because it is the sitting ASEAN chair, remains an exception here.
What was discussed?
Given the secretive nature of the dialogue, the full spectrum of the discussions remains unclear. But, one report published by the Press Trust of India, citing “sources”, outlined some of the points raised. These include “reduction of violence, countering transnational crimes, national reconciliation, and delivery of humanitarian aid.” According to Reuters, the issue of “creating space for dialogue” was also discussed.
It is noteworthy that this meeting comes just weeks after the Myanmar junta’s air force bombed Pazi Gyi village in the southeast of Sagaing Region, which borders India. According to The Irrawaddy, 175 people were killed in the aerial bombing, making it the bloodiest single incident of mass murder by the junta since the 2021 coup. The junta claimed that the bombing targeted an NUG-led opening ceremony of the People’s Defence Force (PDF), the civilian government’s armed wing. It justified the huge civilian casualties by linking to those killed with the PDF and by arguing that the bombs hit a “weapon’s storage”. The Irrawaddy estimates that between just 20 March and 18 April, 210 people were killed and 60 injured in junta air strikes “targeting civilian populations” in Sagaing Region, Bago Regions, Chin State, Kayah State, Kachin State and Karen State.
It is likely that the Track 1.5 participants brought up these airstrikes, especially the Pazi Gyi massacre, given its scale and proximity to the Indian border. However, it is unclear how strongly, or whether at all, the government and think tank representatives condemned it or demanded any accountability from the junta. None of the discreet “sources” quoted by the Indian media so far have mentioned the airstrikes, either because it wasn’t discussed or was done so in passing. It is noteworthy that none of the participating governments, except Indonesia, has issued any official condemnation of the deadly bombing so far. The spokesperson for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, during a recent press briefing, only called for a halt to violence “by all sides” when a journalist sought his reaction on the incident.
The participants also reportedly “felt Myanmar’s capacity to fight transnational crimes need to be supported.” The implicit subtext of this position is that the governments agreed to work with the SAC to check the spike in transnational crimes after the coup. This is despite evidence of SAC-linked elements – such as the Zomi Revolutionary Army-Eastern Command (ZRA-EC) and the Karen Border Guards Force (K-BGF) – themselves being involved in transnational criminal networks along the India-Myanmar and Thailand-Myanmar borders.
Will this dialogue work?
In itself, the idea of creating a joint coalition of ASEAN member states and Myanmar’s neighbours under a Track 1.5 discussion format is a good idea. For long, countries like India and Bangladesh have only passively watched the crisis unfold next door. So, this initiative marks a refreshing turn of imaginative and proactive diplomacy. But, in its current form, the dialogue process is rife with serious contradictions, structural faults and a damaging lack of transparency.
One source familiar with the meeting told Reuters that the initiative will “not supplant” and “only complement” ASEAN. However, by inviting only certain ASEAN members while leaving out others, the dialogue risks subverting the Southeast Asian bloc’s centrality and in turn, widening internal differences over the Myanmar crisis. This is especially because except Indonesia, all the other ASEAN invitees are amenable to engaging the junta despite the latter’s non-compliance with the Five-Point Consensus. This may not sit well with other influential members of the bloc, such as Singapore and Malaysia, who remain averse to working with the junta. In fact, it may also disrupt relations between Delhi and ASEAN, which might feel blindsided by this parallel process.
Further, if the idea is to really help ASEAN implement the Five-Point Consensus, then the Track 1.5 should have included all stakeholders from Myanmar, including the NUG, which is what the consensus stipulates. By including just the SAC, in fact, the dialogue negates, not complements, the ASEAN-led Consensus. There is little sense in putting together an informal gathering of government and non-government stakeholders to facilitate freewheeling discussions on a delicate regional crisis if a major party with direct stakes in that crisis is completely left out.
Reuters, citing yet another “source”, indicated that the participants hoped to officially rope the NUG in at some point. Yet, it remains unclear how they would do so given that the junta has designated the NUG as a “terrorist organisation” and continues to actively, sometimes violently, persecute the democratic opposition. In any case, the NUG has on several occasions indicated that it is willing to talk to its neighbours to end the crisis in Myanmar. So, one hopes that they are invited in the next iteration of the dialogue to be hosted by Laos.
Most of all, the core intent of the dialogue facilitators remains suspect. Currently, it appears that they are more keen on using the Track 1.5 format to build bridges with the junta than foreground the aspirations of the Myanmar people. They seek to justify their engagement with the junta through specific pivots of cooperation – most prominently, delivery of humanitarian aid and transnational crimes. But, both these issues require multi-pronged engagements, not one-sided diplomacy with the military regime. The junta, which has its own predatory interests to protect, cannot be trusted to either crack down on transnational criminal networks along Myanmar’s borders or ensure equitable humanitarian aid delivery. We don’t know if the participants talked about ways to diversify aid delivery networks in Myanmar to allow non-junta actors to participate without the fear of retribution.
Finally, the overall opacity around the process is detrimental to the initiative’s credibility. It diminishes the space for public engagement and accountability over a serious political and humanitarian crisis that is harming the lives of real people, fuelling geopolitical volatility, creating economic uncertainty, and destabilising an entire region. By shrouding itself in a cloak of secrecy and keeping out Myanmar’s democratically elected representatives, the coalition ends up looking like an exclusive, elite and self-interested clique of governments and individuals who have no real interest in listening to the voices of the people most affected by the situation in Myanmar. One hopes this changes in the next iteration.
Dr. Amita Bhide is Chair Professor, National Jal Jeevan Mission, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She works closely with issues related to urban poor communities, community organisation and housing rights movements, and advocacy groups. Professor Bhide’s recent work at the School of Habitat Studies concerns urban transformations and their link to inclusive and sustainable development. She has conducted extensive research in the fields of urban local governance and planning, water and sanitation, housing and land issues. She seeks to develop a theoretical and actionable model of urbanisation that is relevant for the global south through an engagement with several transformative groups at the city, provincial and national scales. Her recent publications include – ‘Colonising the Slum’, ‘ The regularising state’, ‘ Comparing Informalities’, ‘Directed Decentralisation- the experience of JNNURM in Maharashtra’. She has also co-edited a book co-edited along with Professor Himanshu Burte on ‘Parallax: Contemporary Urban Policy in India’. Apart from this, articles have been featured in multiple international and national journals of repute.
Dr. Anant Maringanti is the Executive Director of the Hyderabad Urban Lab. He is a geographer with a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota, a multi-disciplinary research programme run by the Right to the City Foundation. He has taught graduate courses at the National University of Singapore and University of Hyderabad. His research and teaching interests centre on questions of urbanisation and globalization from the South Asian vantage point. He is widely published in national and international academic journals on social movements, politics of development and urbanisation. He has co-authored articles in reputed journals including The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Geography, Economic and Political Weekly, Environment and Planning, Duke University Press, Taylor & Francis, and many more. In the early stages of his career, he has also worked as a Correspondent with the New Indian Express.
Dr. Ashima Sood is an Associate Professor and the Co-Director of the Centre for Urbanism and Cultural Economics at the Anant National University. Dr. Sood’s work has combined qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the forms and origins of informality in Indian cities. Her work has received funding and/or fellowships from the Urban Studies Foundation, the India Foundation of the Arts, the Azim Premji University Foundation, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study and the Centre de Sciences Humaines. Her research has been published in various publications such as Urban Studies; Cities; Territory, Politics, Governance; Journal of Institutional Economics; Marg, the Economic and Political Weekly; the India International Centre Quarterly, to the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Urban and Regional Research and the World Social Science Report 2013, and others. Dr. Ashima is also a prize-winning fiction writer.
Dr. Champaka Rajagopal is practitioner and researcher in urban policy, planning and governance. With over twenty years of experience of having worked with national, state and local governments in India and abroad, her work cuts across multiple scales and sectors of urban and regional development. She is a visiting faculty at the School of Policy & Governance, Azim Premji University, and also Coordinator, the Hub f\or Law and Policy. Her research primarily focuses on cities and regions, urban policy, governance, and planning, planning for integrated spatial, economic, and social development, urban data governance, participatory planning and decision-making, relationships between states & firms, and intersections between urban & infrastructure governance and planning. She has published several articles in The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, ISOCARP Net (A Paper Platform), and a book chapter “Mapping India’s Capitalism: Old & New Regions” in the book Reciprocity as Regulation, Methodologies for Urban Design for the Informal Economy of the Historic Pete, in Basile, Elisabetta, Harriss-White, Barbara, Lutringer, Christine (Ed).
Dr. Gautam Bhan is an urbanist whose work focuses on urban poverty, inequality, social protection, and housing. He is currently Associate Dean, School of Human Development, as well as Senior Lead of Academics and Research at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) in Bengaluru, India. Gautam’s previous research has focused on evictions, citizenship and inequality in Delhi, and at IIHS, he has continued to work on questions of access to affordable and adequate housing. He anchors IIHS’ role as a National Resource Centre with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, and is part of IIHS’ work in affordable housing policy and practice having worked with housing rights movements across the country as well as state governments in Karnataka, Delhi, Rajasthan and Odisha. His new work engages with regimes of urban welfare and social security, including work on urban health. At the School of Human Development, he is building research and practice on questions of the design and delivery of social protection entitlements within urban India. He also has a deep and abiding interest in new urban and planning theory from the south. He has authored articles in Orient Blackswan and Yoda Press, and was a co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South (2018).
Dr. Gopa Samanta is a Professor of Geography at the University of Burdwan. Her research interests include Urban development and the changing economic, social and cultural spaces in small cities, Urban Environment and the Water in Cities, Watery Environments – River, Delta and Char, Gender studies – Wo\rk and Emancipation. She has received external grants from Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) France, French ANR, Australia India Institute, World Bank, Ford Foundation, Indian Council for Social Sciences Research, and University Grants Commission, India. She has co-authored three books on suburban rail commuting, freedom & barriers to women councillors in India, and life on the chars in South Asia (published by Springer and Yale University Press). She has also published Bengali books in Gangchil Publication. Apart from this, she has published in peer-reviewed journals including GeoJournal, Environment, Development, and Sustainability, Space and Culture India, The Hill Geographer, South Asian Water Studies, Jindal Journal of Public Policy, Economic & Political Weekly, Oriental Geographer, etc.
Dr. Himanshu Burte is an Associate Professor, Centre for Urban Science and Engineering (C-USE) in the Ashank Centre for Policy Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His research areas include urban policy and planning, infrastructural space, urban informality, urban public space, housing, and small cities. He currently teaches courses on urban design and urban space. He has practiced architecture in Mumbai and Goa and published extensively across the professional, popular and academic press for almost thirty years. He has written books, book chapters, journal articles, and reports in publications such as Yoda Press, the Special Issue of Marg, Sage, Economic & Political Weekly, Area and Development Policy, National Centre for Advocacy Studies, Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), and others.
Dr. J. Devika is a Professor at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) (under the aegis of Government of Kerala & ICSSR, Government of India). She specialises in the History of, and present developments in, Gender, Politics, Development, and Culture in Kerala; the history of Migration and Cosmopolitanism in Kerala; local self- government in Kerala; translations and translation studies; Malayalam literature; and contemporary politics. She was the editor of the CDS Chronicle from 2005 to 2011, and is currently in charge of the Research Unit on Local Self-Government, CDS. She has published books in English and in Malayalam, in Penguin India, Zubaan, Orient Longman, Readme Books, Olive Books, Women’s Imprint, and DC Books. Her journal articles have been published in South Asia Chronicle, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Writing in Academia, Review of Development and Change, South Asian History and Culture, Modern Asian Studies, Economic & Political Weekly, Development & Change, History and Sociology of South Asia, Environment and Planning, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Labour and Development, etc.
Dr. Karen Coehlo is an Associate Professor of the Madras Institute of Development Studies. She works on urban transformations in India, urban reforms, informal labour, urban ecologies and urban civil society. She is currently a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee for Review of Urban Affairs (RUA), EPW. She is an avid speaker in a number of national and global conferences and seminars. Her publication expertise spans both newspaper / media articles as well as academic publications – including the Scroll, the Op-Ed page in The Hindu, The Caravan, Routledge, International Journal of Housing Policy, INSEE Journal, Review of Development and Change, Cambridge University Press, Economic & Political Weekly, Issue on Urban Poverty, Hong Kong University Press, Elsevier Press, etc. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Arizona.
Dr. Lalitha Kamath is an Associate Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She is also the Chairperson, Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, School of Habitat Studies at TISS. Trained as an urban planner, her first book was a co-edited volume titled Participolis: Consent and Contention in Neoliberal Urban Governance Subsequent work has focused both on the violence and dispossession of property urbanism in the global south on racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines, but also the bottom-up agency of marginalised groups in unsettling dominant urbanisms. As part of this work, she is engaged in ethnographic study of two kinds of urban frontiers – peripheries and coasts – in Mumbai. Her recent research was on reclaiming fishing commons in Mumbai, slow violence and administration of urban injustice, a short film called “Sagarputra”, and changing concepts of habitation among the indigenous fishing community in Mumbai. Her publications have been featured in journals such as Area Development and Policy, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, International Journal of Housing Policy, Urbanisation, Economic & Political Weekly, and others.
Dr. Marie-Helene Zerah is a senior researcher at the Institute of Research for Development, Paris, currently deputed to the Centre for Policy Research as Senior Visiting Fellow, where she is focusing on the role of small towns in India in the urbanisation process and urban energy governance. Having published a book on the question of water access in Delhi and co-edited a book on the ‘Right to the City in India’, she has worked extensively in the area of urban infrastructure, urban governance and urban democracy in Indian cities. She is also part of the editorial board of the journal Geoforum, and the series editor of ‘Exploring Urban Change in South Asia’ with Springer. She was previously headed the urban dynamics research team at the Centre de Sciences Humaines of New Delhi between 2009 and 2013. She has also worked with the Water and Sanitation Program of the World Bank and the Suez Group in the past, and completed consultancies with various organisations, including the European Union. She received her PhD in Urban Studies from the Paris Institute of Urban Studies.
Dr. Mona Mehta is a political scientist by training and an Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the School of Arts and Sciences in Ahmedabad University. Her research focuses on Urban transformations and the remaking of city spaces, Youth aspirations and Skill development discourses, Democracy and its vulnerabilities and the political thought of M. K. Gandhi. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines youth aspirations and urban transformations in post-liberalisation India. She is the co-editor of Gujarat Beyond Gandhi: Identity, Conflict and Society (Routledge 2010) and has authored scholarly articles and book chapters pertaining to her research interests. Her work has appeared in journals such as South Asian History & Culture, South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies, Contemporary South Asia, Contributions to Indian Sociology, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Contributions to Indian Sociology, etc. She is the coordinator of the new interdisciplinary PhD programme in Humanities and Social Sciences at Ahmedabad University.
Mukta Naik, a Fellow at CPR, is an architect and urban planner. Her research interests include housing and urban poverty, urban informality, and internal migration, as well as urban transformations in small cities. At CPR, she focuses on understanding the links between internal migration and urbanisation in the Indian context. Ms Naik has written widely in the print and digital media and has also run a market research and media services company. As trustee for a Gurugram-based NGO and a Board Member for a Netherlands-based Foundation, she is also deeply involved with community-based initiatives. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Urban Development and Governance from the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her journal articles have been published in Shelter, Routledge, Social Change, Urbanisation, Sage, Radical Housing Journal, Urban Studies, Economic & Political Weekly, Environment & Urbanisation Asia, Urban India, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Connected2Work, Money Control, The Print, The Indian Express, and others. She has authored / co-authored two book chapters in the JustJobs Network Annual Publication, and Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
Dr. Neha Sami is the Associate Dean, School of Environment and Sustainability and Senior Lead, Academics & Research at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements. She studies urban and regional development and governance in post-liberalisation India. Her research focuses on the governance arrangements of mega-projects, regional planning and on environmental governance questions in Indian cities, particularly around issues of climate change adaptation. She is currently studying industrial corridor development projects between Indian cities like the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, focusing particularly on governance issues. She is also interested in regional approaches to land use planning. Neha is also a member of the Editorial Collective of Urbanisation (published by SAGE). Her publications have been featured in Environment and Urbanisation, Geoforum, Area Development & Policy, Economic & Political Weekly, International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, Land Use Policy, etc.
Dr. Partha Mukhopadhyay is a Senior Fellow at CPR. has published extensively, writes frequently for the national media and has also been associated with a number of government committees. Most recently, he was chair of the Working Group on Migration, Government of India and member of the High-Level Railway Restructuring Committee, Ministry of Railways and of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. His research interests are in urbanisation, infrastructure, and the development paths of India and China. He has written journal articles in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, IIC Quarterly Journal, India Seminar, Economic & Political Weekly, Environment & Urbanisation ASIA, and opinion pieces for The Hindu, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, and the Indian Express.
Dr Ratoola Kundu is an Assistant Professor, Mumbai Campus, Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She works on urban informality, urban theory, political economy of urban restructuring, urban contestations and politics over land, housing and participation in planning, sustainable and accessible urban transportation, informal urban livelihoods and claims to the city, new towns and the politics of planning and development of urban peripheries. She has published articles in the Review of Urban Affairs (EPW), the University of Minnesota Press, and has published a book chapter in the book “Mega Urbanisation in the Global South” (Routledge).
Dr. Rohit Negi is an Associate Professor, School of Global Affairs, and Director, Centre for Community Knowledge at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University. He mainly works on socio-ecological vulnerability, development and urbanisation (intersection with health, education, infrastructure), urban spaces, political ecology of air, and urban environment & ecology. He is a member of the International Advisory Board, Antipode, and a member, Steering Committee, Association of Asian Studies in Africa (A-Asia). He has written / co-authored several books, chapters in peer-reviewed books, and articles in peer-reviewed journals including: Routledge, Springer, Science, Scientists, and Society, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Urbanisation, Journal of South African Studies, Geoforum, African Studies Quarterly, Review of African Political Economy, African Geographical Review, Oxford University Press, Palgrave-Macmillan, Economic & Political Weekly, The Scroll, & others.
Dr. Sushmitha Pati is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National Law School of India University. She teaches course on politics and society in India, political science, and politics & the global world order. She is a political scientist who has taught previously at Delhi University and Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Her research interests include Urban politics, Political Economy, State and Democracy, and Gender. Her upcoming book is titled “Properties of Rent: The Political Economy of Urban Villages in Delhi”, which is to be published by the Cambridge University Press, New Delhi. Her articles and working papers have been published in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Sage, Springer, Economic & Political Weekly, Journal of Indian Law & Society, SOAS South Asia Institute Working Papers, Policies & Practices, Contemporary South Asia, Café Dissensus, Syntalk, The Wire, and others.
Dr. Venugopal Maddipati is the Dean In-Charge, School of Design, at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University. He specialises in art history and architectural design. He is a referee for the Art Journal and the Open Library for the Humanities. He works on community art projects and architectural projects: in 2004, he directed a short film called “Wounded City: A Global New Zealand” with the contemporary artist Alfredo Jaar, 2004. He has written books, newspaper articles, and journal articles in Routledge, The Tribune, Ecologies, Aesthetics and Histories of Art, Marg, Liquescent Materiality: Water Histories in South Asia 1500 to the Present, Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Blog for Transregional Research, Nehru Memorial Library Occasional Paper Series, and Ashgate Press. He has taught a variety of courses including Technology and Society, History of Indian Art & Architecture, Gender, Sexuality, & Design, Theory of Design, World Architectural History, and others.
Suruchi Kumari is a PhD candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is working on the exceptions and continuity in Industrial Model Townships in India (for her Ph.D. thesis). Her work is principally focussed on the relationship between the state, society, and market in the contemporary urbanisation processes using urban politics and governance as analytical points. She has also received the ICSSR Doctoral fellowship 2019-2021 for her Ph.D. Program.
Dhiren is a Ph.D. candidate at IIT Madras. His interest lies in Land tenure, Bureaucracy, Technology led governance, party politics, and local-level governance. He has done his Master’s in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad. His research concerns the JAGA Mission in Odisha. Through his work, he seeks to understand the transformation of land tenures, and the creation of new knowledge through drone-based land titling.
Raina is currently a PhD Research Scholar and ICSSR Doctoral Fellow (2021-’22) at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She works on the themes of urban political ecology, spatial politics, and water-society relations. Her thesis studies the everyday city-making processes around ‘Ghats’ of River Hooghly in Kolkata. She has worked extensively in the field of urban (on the CACIM-Nagar-Nadi Fellowship 2021, with Azim Premji University, ESRC-University of Bristol, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung-CES Delhi, IIT Kharagpur, etc.). She has contributed to Op-Ed pieces in LiveWire and Beejpatra (People’s Resources Centre).
Archana Singh is an MPhil research scholar at the Department of Geography, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Her current research focuses on mapping the spatialities of young women’s leisure experiences in Lucknow city. She also works on the political ecology of large infrastructure projects, particularly the riverfront development projects which have witnessed a renewed push as a part of Urban river management in India. She has produced numerous reports and articles analysing issues with infrastructure projects on floodplains, with a special focus on river Ganga in Patna and Sabarmati in Ahmedabad.
Balbir Singh Aulakh is a PhD Scholar at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. He has completed his M.Phil. in Social Sciences from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and graduated in public policy from the University of Mumbai. His broad research interests include sports development, land transformations, aesthetic politics and community development.
Shruthi Ramesh is an architect, urban designer and researcher from Kerala. She holds a Masters in Architecture with a major in Urban Design from CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Her research, vested in critical explorations of urban studies in intersectional feminist and subaltern geographies, has been showcased in various international conferences and publications. She was one of the top finalists of the CEPT Essay Prize 2021-22 for her essay “Colour as Embellishment: The Transforming Culture of Aesthetics in the Realms of the Urban Poor”. Her latest co-authored article, “Geographies of Incineration: The (In)visible Aides of the Tenebrous Urban Networks” was published in the Harvard Urban Review 2022.
Shreyasi is a faculty at BMS School of Architecture, Bangalore, teaching B.Arch and M.Arch (Urban Design) courses. She is also a Research Scholar at School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, with her thesis tentatively titled “Spatial History of East-Bengali Refugees in Post-Partition Kolkata: Mapping Spatial Relationships in a Jabar-Dakhal Refugee Colony”.
Siddardha Darla holds a PhD in Sociology from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). His research interests include understanding resistance and persuasion to neoliberal regime of land dispossession in India and the development agenda that encapsulates it. His PhD thesis investigated the instrumental role played by Land Pooling Scheme in framing politics to land procurement for locating Amaravati city in Andhra Pradesh state of India. He has published in Economic and Political Weekly and presented at national and international conferences.
Sila Mishra is a research scholar in the Department of Economic Sciences at IIT Kanpur. Her area of interest primarily lies in applied microeconomics and the economics of family and gender. As part of her research work, she has explored the efficiency of the Indian banking sector, network readiness of countries, and technical efficiency of the Indian judiciary. She is currently exploring India’s Time Use Survey.
Ankur is currently working with India Labourline as a state coordinator in Delhi-NCR. During the course of his current and earlier work and research experiences, he has travelled across India, interacted with migrant workers across states and documented their life histories. These interactions shaped crucial questions of space and belongingness of migrant workers and their significance in contributing to a life of love and dignity for them. He has co-authored an ethnographic account of the same (Currently in Press), emerging from an ethnographic project. He has also contributed to a photo essay and a documentary based on these narratives.
Sarfras is a final year Post Graduate student pursuing MA in Society and culture from IIT Gandhinagar. He is working1 on the everyday lives and practices of young Muslims of Jamia Nagar (a marginalized neighborhood in New Delhi) for his thesis. He has done an ethnographic observation along with some semi-structured interviews with the young people of Jamia Nagar to know about their perspectives and experiences, based on which he seeks to build a writing output.
Ritika is an independent researcher. Her research interests are small towns, rural-urban entanglements, urban water and climate change. She has three years of research experience. She is academically trained in Environment Studies. She holds a Master’s in Ecology and Environment Studies from Nalanda University, Rajgir. She was an Urban Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (2020-2021) and an Indian Smart Cities Fellow at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (2021-2022). She seeks to write on how ‘urban’ as a category operates in India.
Urmila Sahoo is a PhD scholar from Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha. She is currently working on the topic of the Elderly in Urban Setups. Her interest lies in studying elderly people and conducting research to inform policies and programmes that concern their welfare. She seeks to publish her work in reputed journals in order to promote more discussion & debating around this topic.
Vidya Mary George is a UGC Senior Research Fellow at the School of Sanskrit, Philosophy and Indic Studies (SSPIS), Goa University, India. Her area of research is 20th Century Continental Philosophy. In her research work, she tries to understand the relation between selfhood and space, specifically the constitution of selfhood, its identity, and sense of belonging in space, as theorised by the thinkers Michel Foucault, Paul Ricoeur, and Jürgen Habermas. She has worked as a teacher, dialogue facilitator, counsellor, copyeditor, editorial assistant, and science communicator. She volunteers for Wisdom’s Edge Inc., an outreach organisation that brings philosophy to the edges of society.
Shahana Purveen is a doctoral researcher at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her Ph.D thesis focuses on internal migration in Mumbai, specifically concerning the livelihood and identity issues of migrant taxi drivers in Mumbai. She has qualified for the UGC-NET exam conducted by the University Grants Commission. She has been awarded the Erasmus Mundus PhD Exchange Scholarship to visit the University of Oxford. She has presented her research at various national and international conferences. She has also published her work in edited books and journals. Her area of interest is ethnicity, integration, migration, and labour.
Meenakshi Dubey is an architect and urban historian engaged in exploring what architectural and urban history can contribute to shaping our contemporary building cultures. She is currently an Independent Researcher based in Delhi, with teaching and working experience of more than a decade across Delhi, Bhopal & Kerala . She teaches graduate courses on History Theory Criticism and Urban Conservation along with architectural design studios associated with historical and sociological inquiry of urban settlements.
Manjula Bahuguna is an independent consultant with expertise in conducting research studies. She is currently working with Mumbai-based non-governmental organization SNEHA (Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action) on a study about non-communicable diseases and related healthcare services in informal settlements of Mumbai. She is deeply passionate about health systems strengthening and would like to continue participating in research studies that can inform health policies and improve evidence-based decision-making. She seeks to use the health system and policy research (HPSR) lens for future work in the field of public health.
Chandanapriya is an early-stage Urban Researcher and Practitioner. She is working as Research Associate in collaboration with Dr Devanshi Chanchani from Brunel University, London, and Hasiru Dala on a research project to understand the dynamics of Informal Waste Management in Bangalore City. Stemming from her understanding of Symbolic Anthropology and Grounded theory she has developed an interest in understanding urban cultures and their meanings, symbolisms, and politics through extensive fieldwork, with a focus on – social identity, urban planning, governance, and social practice. Her academic aspirations are driven by grassroots community-based work and social change.
Vikas recently completed his Ph.D. titled “Political Ecology of Urban Flooding: Mapping Psycho-social Vulnerabilities”, at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development (CSRD), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. His Master’s thesis was titled “Kaleidoscopic Cities: An Exploration of Mental Health And Quality of Life In Slums”, and his M.Phil. thesis focused on “A Comparative Study of Hyderabad and Jaipur: Contextualizing Quality of Life in Changing Perspective of Governance.” His research interest is in Urban Studies, Disaster Studies, and Social Psychology.
