Research

Slums in the Global South are well-documented with evidence on the weak provision of public services and access to the state. This has made apolitical exercises like accessing water, food, housing, etc. an everyday political task. This introduces us to three important aspects of politics in the slums: 1) citizens engage in collective claim-making on the state, i.e., citizens come together to communicate grievances of rights and entitlements to the state; 2) in a setting where state officials are inaccessible, political brokers are indispensable to liaise between the state and citizens to access resources, and 3) these broker networks are predominantly made of men who are affiliated to political parties.

My research shifts this dominant narrative towards women as apolitical brokers who act as leaders at the grassroots level. My dissertation examines women’s microcredit organizations or Self-Help Groups (SHGs) and SHG leaders who I argue represent a powerful class of apolitical leaders of their slums. I build on my preliminary research where I found that SHG leaders have become crucial to the state as their local agents assisting in policy implementation, to slum residents as their informal representatives, and to political parties for vote-banking.

Broadly, I am exploring the conditions under which SHG leaders compete with or complement traditional political brokers that are male-centric to provide essential services to slum residents. I also ask what kind of public service issues SHG leaders are approached to solve by slum residents; and what are women’s avenues into politics when they lack the resources to join political parties. My research is based in the rapidly urbanizing city of Hyderabad.

Scholars have long argued that urbanization will transform women’s political participation, yet they have largely overlooked a defining feature of contemporary urban growth—informality. Separately, the rich literature on everyday politics in informal settlements has said little about gender. Bridging these literatures, we ask how gender organizes political life in the informal city, highlighting puzzles about how contemporary urbanization trends may augment some forms of women’s participation while diminishing others. Drawing on an original, multi-wave data collection effort of surveys of over 10,000 households in informal settlements across Bengaluru, Jaipur, and Patna, fielded between 2015 and 2023, we present descriptive evidence on where we do and do not observe gender gaps across multiple domains that structure everyday slum politics: resources and networks, policy preferences, voting, claim-making, and community leadership. Descriptively, gender gaps are not uniform but track the structure of the political act: where engagement is collective, local, and mediated through community brokers, gaps are negligible; where it requires autonomy, movement beyond the settlement, or engaging public authorities, they widen. Our aim is less to settle questions about gender and informal politics than to open them: we map what current data can describe and outline a broader agenda for comparative scholarship on gender and everyday politics in rapidly urbanizing democracies.