ABSTRACT
In the wake of economic liberalisation in the early 1990s, the Indian city has displaced the village in public imagination as the quintessence of India as rising, modern global power. The nature and rate of urbanisation and urban growth have elicited multiple interpretations, notwithstanding an emerging consensus about the importance of the city in India’s future. With cities, especially larger ones, being seen to propel economic growth in post-liberalisation India, they have come to be the focus of extensive, and arguably unprecedented, development policies. If urban development policies have seen a sea of change in post-liberalisation period, these have been matched with the introduction of new forms of urban governance. Indian cities are often represented as a melting pot of people, spaces and cultures. Cities, as configured by institutions, practices and ideas of governance, relating to both private and state actors, remain exclusionary spaces from the perspective of the poor, despite the upsurge of ‘inclusion’ as a stated public commitment.
