ABSTRACT
Delhi state government does not have much power and when Delhi became a state, the state government was grappling with the idea of how to make it viable and one of the ways in which the Chief Minister Sheila Dixit tried to do this is through the Bhagidari scheme— by trying to create a cohesive Delhi identity, the kind that middle-class citizens could potentially take pride in. There is a lot of diversity in the demands and issues that resident welfare associations (RWAs) raise. While to some extent middle-class mobilisations have worked as the demand side of urban reforms, there have been instances where there was resolute opposition to reforms, such as the well known case of water privatisation in Delhi, where it was mostly RWAs of staunchly middle-class neighbourhoods which opposed the privatisation of water. Even people living in unauthorised and resettlement colonies feel that slums should be evicted from the city.
