[Reader-list] foodcourts and footbridges: conceptualizing space in Vijayawada Railway Station

[Meera Pillai]

hello!
 
my name is meera pillai. i left formal academic settings about two years ago to offer services in research, program planning and development, program evaluation and monitoring, and documentation to non-governmental organizations, particularly those working with children, women, and people with disabilities; and on governance issues.
 
With the support of the Sarai Independent Fellowship program, over the next six months, I will be pursuing a qualitative research study that I have tentatively titled "Foodcourts and Footbridges: Conceptualizing Space in Vijayawada Railway Station."
 
The idea of the study originated when, as part of an exercise with an organization working with street children, I asked three young men to draw "freehand" maps of Vijayawada Railway Station, and to indicate spaces they thought were "safe" and "dangerous" spaces for street children.  When the respondents, former street children now working as rights educators, drew the maps and explained them, I was taken aback.  The spaces in the railway station that they identified as dangerous for street children were ones that I, a middle-class (and middle-aged!) woman, would term "safest" - a well-lit, modern food court and the reservation counter.  On further inquiry, I discovered that it was precisely because these spaces were used by people like me that the police, using sticks and abuse, kept street children away from.  On the other hand, the spaces that were "safest" for street children - the roofs of the footbridges and stairways connecting the different platforms, I had perceived only
 peripherally, and never as a potential living space for people.It was this anomaly that encouraged me to conceptualize this study. 
 
Vijayawada lies in South-Central India, about 275 kilometres north-east of Hyderabad.  Its location has made it a significant travel hub within the subcontinent.  The Vijayawada Railway Station is the largest railway junction on the South Central Railways section, and one of the most important of the Indian Railways network.  Since most trains travelling from the south to the north, north-east and east, and in some instances, even the west of India pass through Vijayawada, the station sees an exceptionally high frequencey of express and passenger train traffic.
 
Every day, the station handles about 30,000 passengers, a number that may go up to a couple of lakhs during important local festivals when people pour into the city to take a dip in the holy river Krishna.  Daily, the station services 135 trains, a number that may increase on occasion to 170.  It is also an important revenue earner for the Railways.  During the 12-day Pushkaram festival in August 2004, the Vijayawada Railway station earned Rs. 5.49 crores.
 
According to a Septermber 2004 survey by a local community organization, an average of 23 children in need of care and protection arrive at Vijayawada Railway Station every day, having left their homes and families because of domestic quarrels, problems in schools and economic hardship.  There is a Child line counter at the station, and about a third of these chidlren are rescued, provided with counselling and other support and persuaded to return home or avail services at one of the city's child care organizations. The others disappear into the city to become child labourers or street children, or carry on travelling.  A good number live at the railway station, a comparatively attractive place to make a living.  They make friends here and become part of a larger peer group, beg for food or money, earn money by cleaning railway carriages, and travel to other big cities.
 
Through the day, the railway station is also used by railway personnel, from senior administrators to Class IV personnel, porters, policement afficilated to two forces, vendors and workers at the different facilities like the food court.  People alight from and board trains, buy tickets, or see off friends and relatives.  Representatives from child care organizations comb the platforms, as do rickshaw pullers, touts, and sex workers.
 
This study will look at whether the use and control of space is part of the process of defining different social categories.  As part of the study, a range of stakeholders (street children, rickshaw pullers, railway officials, porters,  vendors, middle-class passengers) will be requested to draw freehand maps of the railway statuion, using sketch pens and KG cardboard.  Hopefully these maps will indicate spaces that are significant or periperal to diferent user groups, and they can then serve as starting points to discuss which spaces people use or avoid, who they keep in and out, and how these choices are significant.
 
Street children who live at the Vijayawada Railway Station will be provided with cameras and film and encouraged to take photographs that reflect their lives in the geography of the station.  They may be encouraged to make several alternative displays of these photgraphs, to create different orderings of spatiality and clusters of meaning related to their lives and the spaces they live them in.  Individual interviews and focus group  discussions will look at how different "authorities", including the police, leaders of gangs of street children, and railway personnel perceive, invent and/or implement rules for the spatial ordering the different populations that use the railway station.
 
The data resulting from the study will be analysed and coded into categories to try and understand how space is conceptualized within a complex of intersecting social relationships.  It will explore how individuals and groups may try to territorialize and claim spaces within a public utility that is supposedly for the benefit of all citizens, seeking to include some and exclude others from particular areas.  Rationales constructed to justify alternative use of contested spaces, and how rules and rationales relate to differing identities, and assumptions about identity may also be revealed.  The findings will be organized in a report which also incorporates the viusal material derived during the data collection process.
 
Hopefully the findings will shed some light on the following questions:

   How do the uses and perceptions of the spaces in the Vijayawada Railway station differ for street children as compared to middle class users, or those whose presence at the station is legitimized by authority conferred by employment in the railways, the police or in social work organizations?
   What is the relevance of different stakeholders in the geography of this public utility space?
   How does use of this important space in the city reflect and contribute to diversity in the lives of people?

Thanks for your patience. 

		
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