Executive Summary

Along the dimensions above, here is what this study has discovered. 

There is significant variation in the quality of basic services delivered across cities. Bhavnagar, Kochi and Vadodara had the best services, and Chennai and Mumbai had the worst. 

The unevenness captured above, first of all, covers availability of water. In many cities, more than half the households get water for 2 hours or less a day.  This is compounded by the fact that in some cities large percentages of citizens only have buckets to rely on for storing water. 

The quality of sanitation also varies substantially by city. While Kochi, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, and Delhi provide good sanitation to the vast majority of their populations, a majority of households in Mumbai have compromised sanitation.

In explaining the unequal distribution of services within cities, we found that the primary determinant was housing type, which is our indicator for class. Indeed, not only does class have the strongest effects on basic service delivery, but it also has the highest explanatory power across all our models. Class determines the availability of public services in India’s cities more than any other variable.

Long ago, Ambedkar had suggested that cities were going to be a site of liberation from the fixed and corrosive quality of caste identities in villages. Though we have not compared villages and cities in this project and thus we can’t precisely estimate how much weaker, compared to rural India, the impact of caste on group welfare in urban settings are, we can certainly say that the Dalit and Adivasi households, with very isolated exceptions, are systematically underserved by public and infrastructural services.  Ambedkar’s insight may well turn out to be true in the longer run, but if his point is only about Dalits, then the fact that Dalits are badly served in cities does not fully affirm his argument. However, if we read Ambedkar more broadly, meaning that he is speaking of Dalits as well as lower castes in general, then he is partially vindicated. This is because in some cities, the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) do as well as the Upper or General Castes (GCs), and sometimes even better. 

In another sense, urban India seems to be partly deviating from Ambedkar’s projections–  at least as of now, if not in the long run.  With very few exceptions, social life in urban India is still heavily governed by caste.  Social ties, as seen at least via friendships, are marked by strong bonding (intracaste togetherness), as opposed to bridging (inter-caste networks).  Again, since this project does not compare urban and rural India, we are unable to say whether urban bonding is weaker than rural bonding.  However, it is clear that so long we are confined to urban India, the prevalence of bonding ties outweighs bridging ties.  In our project, only Chennai and Kochi are partial exceptions to this.  

Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), on average, receive lower levels of basic services than Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and Upper or General Castes (GCs), but the effect has more to do with their class position than their caste status.  That said, patterns of housing segregation are highly pronounced for SCs and STs.  In a majority of cities they are dramatically over-represented in informal shacks and significantly under-represented in middle class and higher class housing. It is notable that in Bhavnagar, Mumbai and Kochi, there is far less caste-based housing segregation. 

As for religion as a factor in urban life, Muslims are generally underserved by public services and infrastructure.  However, if we disaggregate this overall result by city, we find that in some cities (for example, in Mumbai, Lucknow, Bhubaneswar, Jalandhar and Ajmer), this is not true.

Housing segregation on religious lines is not uniform across cities.  Although Muslims are not concentrated in shacks (HT1) as much as the SC and STs are, they are significantly underrepresented in upper class housing.  The pattern also varies across cities.  In Ahmedabad, Ajmer, Bhavnagar, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Mumbai, Vadodara, Jalandhar and Kolkata, Muslims are more likely to live in informal slums (HT2) than Hindus.  But the pattern is reversed in Chennai, Kochi, Bhopal and quite dramatically so in Delhi, where Hindus are more likely to live in HT1 and HT2 than Muslims. 

As far as Muslim participation in political and civic life is concerned, we observe that compared to the Hindus, their participation is systematically greater.  Contrary to the literature that says Muslims participate less than Hindus in the polity and civil society, we find that not be true.

On the whole, very few citizens have friends outside their religious community.  Most friendships are of a bonding nature.  Smaller cities do tend to deviate from this trend, but among the larger cities, only Chennai does.  One might add that this is also partly true of inter-caste bridging ties.  Except for Jalandhar, the other smaller cities have greater bridging ties and Chennai, yet again, is the only big city, where such bridging caste networks are substantial. Remarkably, Delhi is among the most insular cities for friendships, both in caste and religious terms.

Does city size matter?  We have already spoken about the greater bridging networks of smaller cities.  In addition, unsurprisingly, the bigger the size of the city, the greater the level of informality.  But we should also note that even though shacks are in lower proportions in small cities, the adverse effect of informality on public service provision is greater.  In short, the spatial reach of informality is narrower in smaller cities, but the negative effect is greater than in larger cities.

We also want to draw attention to a relatively new and important political phenomenon in Indian cities – namely, the role of the municipal corporator or councillor.  Across our cities, the municipal corporator is viewed as the most important person for facilitating public service provision in the neighbourhoods.  The exceptions are Vadodara and Hyderabad, where the concerned government office is viewed as more important.  (In Chennai, too, the corporator is not important.  But this may well be because the municipal government was in a state of suspension during the time of our survey.)  Everywhere else, the corporator has emerged as the most important facilitator of public services. Across our cities, the municipal corporators are also mostly viewed as serving the interests of all communities (“constituency service”) as opposed serving their own community (“group patronage”) or serving their personal interests through quid pro quos (“clientelism”). Delhi, Chennai and Bhavnagar are partial exceptions. We also find that with the exception of Bhavnagar, as the city size decreases, the favourable view of the corporator increases. 

Let us now turn to migrants arriving in cities.  In almost all cities, most of the recent migrants tend to settle in informal settlements (shacks and slums).  Migrants who have been in the city for longer tend to be in higher housing types.  Kochi seems to be the only exception.  This is perhaps because informal settlements in Kochi are, in and of themselves, significantly fewer. 

On the citizen-felt discrimination, we have an important finding.  Our respondents say that the poorer citizens are treated worse than the richer citizens by the police.  Class turns out to be a much greater determinant of police conduct than religion or caste.  On the greater salience of class, there are no exceptions across our cities.

If we compare our models for public service delivery and infrastructure (BSDII) on one hand and citizen participation (CPI) on the other, we find that on the whole, socio-structural variables – caste, religion, class – are better able to explain BSDII than CPI. As variables, caste, class and religion go quite far in explaining the provision of public services and infrastructure.  One might ask why socio-structural variables (class, caste, religion) do not matter much for citizen participation.  Perhaps the reason is that unlike the basic services and infrastructure, participation is action based and highly contingent. Such actions may well be linked to some city-specific contextual factors, which vary from one place to another and are likely to have affected our participation results in complex ways.  These contextual factors require deeper probes into a few cities, as opposed to a comparative survey of many cities.