Publications

This article looks at the nature and patterns of urban livelihoods in India, with a focus on low-skilled migrant workers engaged in the informal sector. It places urban livelihoods in the broader context of structural transformation and livelihood change in India and shows that even though migrant workers contribute significantly to country’s increasingly urban-centric economy, they remain ignored in policymaking. The paper analyses the reasons for this disregard and argues for the need to integrate low-skilled migrant workers in India’s urban policy to promote inclusive and sustainable development.

Skill training has been fervently promoted as one of the primary means to prepare for work at increasingly earlier stages of the compulsory formal education system. In a state such as Karnataka, where diverse linguistic cultures exist in schools, skill-based subjects have encroached upon the space of language subjects and teaching. 

Over the past two decades, Bengaluru’s exploding real estate sector and massive infrastructure investments have led to land speculation targeting working-class neighborhoods and agricultural land for development. Chronicles of a Global City turns Bengaluru inside out to examine its “world-city” transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. Moving the spotlight away from the urban elites and the new middle class, the essays in the volume explore how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change in Bengaluru—from construction laborers, street vendors, domestic workers, and platform delivery workers to small-time property brokers, petty landlords, and local politicians—experience, struggle, aspire, invent, strive and speculate to make a livable city for themselves. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research and activist experiences, Chronicles of a Global City vividly illuminates the multifaceted entanglements of finance capital, real estate markets, livelihood struggles, and fraying ecologies in urban and peri-urban Bengaluru. Its anchoring concept, “speculative urbanism,” provides a powerful, innovative lens for understanding the risk-laden practices of leveraging land, labor, and resources for the promise of future profit. Chronicles of a Global City was first published in 2024 by University of Minnesota Press.