Chapters-2014

By Gautam Bhan, Geetika Anand, Amogh Arakali, Anushree Deb and Swastik Harish

Housing is many things to many people. The National Urban Housing and Habitat Policy (2007) sees housing and shelter as ‘basic human needs next to only food or clothing’ putting makaan in its familiar place beside roti and kapda. The United Nations agrees, speaking of the ‘right to ad-equate housing as a human right however, the qualifier— ‘adequate’—begins to push at the boundaries of what is meant when talking about ‘housing’. Adequacy here includes a litany of elements: ‘(a) legal security of tenure; (b) availability of services, materials, facilities and infra-structure; (c) affordability; (d) habitability; (e) accessibility; (f) location; and (g) cultural adequa-cy’.2 In the move from ‘house’ to ‘housing’, the materiality of the dwelling unit expands to in-clude legal status, infrastructure, aesthetics, as well as the relationship of the house to the city at large.

By Coen Kompier, Archana Prasad, Sajjad Hassan, Smita Premchander, Sudhir Katyar, Dada Saheb, Divya Verma, Neha Saigal, Ruchika Chaudhary, Sameer Taware

The classic theories of economic production teach us that three ingredients are imperative to achieve the ideals of value addition, economic growth and profits: land, capital and labour. These ingredients are interdependent—one cannot do without the other. In reality, however, the owner-ship of land and capital has traditionally been concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. Vast majorities are left without land or capital and selling off their labour is the only option for survival.

By Warisha Farasat, Amod Shah and Gitanjali Prasad

No other word has been misused more often in the 21st century than ‘terrorism’. Across conti-nents, countries have rede ned many fundamental human freedoms and introduced extraordinary legislations that subvert these basic guarantees. Each time, the pressing need for a strong response to counter terrorist threat has been the alibi. India, in its own ‘war against terrorism’, has been no different. In this chapter, we aim to address some questions central to the passage and functioning of such anti-terror legislation in India. For instance, while the state has the power to enact laws to protect its citizens from violent attacks, has the exercise of this power been within reasonable limits, or does it constitute an unreasonable intrusion of fundamental freedoms and protections guaranteed under the Indian Constitution that impact have these legislations had on the life and liberty of individuals arrested and prosecuted under them Is there an equal and fair application of these laws across communities and classes in India, or is there a bias against some sections of society

By Jawed Alam Khan and Subrat Das

While government expenditure on sectors like health, education and agriculture can be expected to bene t the entire population including the marginalized and vulnerable sections), the develop-ment status of certain groups significantly lags behind that of other sections of the population. Dalits, Adivasis, religious minorities, women, children and persons with disabilities comprise the major marginalized or vulnerable sections of the country’s population. The relatively poor de-velopment status of these groups is due to a number of reasons, including unequal social struc-tures, discrimination, gaps and flaws in public policies, and poor implementation of government interventions.

By Shubha Chacko and Arvind Narain

‘Transgender’ is often used as an umbrella term to signify individuals who defy rigid binary gender constructions, and who express or present a breaking and/or blurring of culturally preva-lent stereotypical gender roles. The term ‘transgender’ has only very recently come into popular and political use, and its definition is critical to the politics that it engenders. The term, as we have used it, is in line with the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity. It includes all those people whose internally felt sense of core gender identity does not correspond to their assigned sex at birth or the gender in which they were raised. This includes people who identify with a gender other than that assigned at birth as well as those who do not identify with any gender at all. It embraces those who feel no need for hormones, surgeries or other body modi cations, as well as those who seek to modify their bodies. Some may identify as transgender, others as transsexual.

By Shikha Sethia

The Indian economy has experienced high growth rates in recent years as a result of a booming services sector that employs skilled workers. The inequity of this growth story, however, often gets sidelined from both scholarly and public attention. Agricultural growth has been minimal, even though it employs half the country’s workforce. The economy has grown in a way that con-tinues to put wealth in the hands of a select few who can participate in the highly productive in-dustries. It is also becoming increasingly apparent that the mobility and opportunity that these select few enjoy are, to a great extent, determined by birth. Sukhdeo Thorat observes: ‘While ex-clusion does result in the denial of economic opportunities— such as access to capital assets, de-velopment of skills, and education—the originating cause is not lack of income, productivity, or merit but rather the individual’s group identity.

By Sajjad Hassan

Musahars, according to some anthropological accounts, draw their antecedents from the Kol tribe of Chhotanagpur (in Jharkhand), having migrated to paddy cultivable areas of what is currently Bihar, probably from the 12th century, and have been the single largest source of agricultural labour in the region since. In their movement from tribal hills to the plains, they came in contact with a sedentary, agricultural, caste-based society, characterized by Brahmanical concepts of pu-rity and pollution, and were incorporated into the caste hierarchy at the lowest rank, becoming untouchable. According to Rafiul Ahmed, from the hills to the plains, the fate of the Musahars appears to have had a clear downward slope. The closer they came to the rice bowl, the deeper they were pulled into indigence and misery. But precisely where they acquired the title usahar is disputed—according to John Nesfield, it alludes to them being a flesh eating community, ‘masu’, meaning flesh and ‘hera’ meaning seeker. On the other hand, Herbert Hope Risley concluded that the word referred to the Musahars’ fondness for eating eld rats. In either case, Ahmed says, it was an opprobrious epithet bestowed on Musahars by caste Hindus.

A consistent finding across the range of public goods and excluded groups looked at in this re-port is the lack of reliable, timely and sufficiently disaggregated data on access to public goods and related human development outcomes. This part of the report attempts to collate relevant sta-tistics on exclusion in India, relying almost exclusively on of cial sources — the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), Census of India and data from government ministries and depart-ments.