[Reader-list] First Post from N. Raman

[Nithya V. Raman]

My name is Nithya Raman, and I’m currently living and
working in Chennai. My SARAI proposal is based on a
close examination of one seaside community and its
experience with tsunami relief distribution. In
examining the community’s interactions with the
relevant government agencies, I hope to create a
narrative of how money, boats, houses, land titles,
and with it, rights, recognition, and concessions are
fought for and won from the government. 
 
However, tsunami relief is just one barometer of a
larger relationship between the government and its
citizens which I believe has to be examined in greater
detail. When I was working in Delhi, I remember
feeling a periodic sense of panic. Evictions of slums
and jhuggi clusters were frequent and increasingly
brazen, resettlement colonies were far from the center
of the city and barely livable, and coverage of events
concerning the urban poor in the English media was
almost non-existent. The reality of Delhi was moving
closer to a nightmarish vision of class apartheid, in
which the poor were relegated to dingy outskirts of
cities while the rich lived in gated and guarded
communities in the city center. 
 
Such panic seems unwarranted in Chennai, where I have
been living for the last six months. Posh, middle
class and low income areas are intertwined throughout
the city, and there is a long and vibrant history of
protest and organization. The city has a completely
different feel from Delhi. But here, too, things are
changing. Land prices are increasing and the
government seems always to be making plans to
radically change the face of Chennai. I live near the
new IT corridor now under construction. Corrugated
sheets wall off the huge construction projects inside
from the road running alongside it. Posters have been
placed on these walls exhorting citizens to put up
with deteriorating road conditions with pithy sayings:
“You have to have rain to make rainbows” and “The road
of your dreams is under construction.” 
 
The images on these posters show the road Chennai
hopes to build along the IT corridor—clean and wide,
with hardly any people at all. Contrast the image of
the road on the posters with the roads in the tsunami
affected community where I’m doing my SARAI research:
the road is used as a playground by children, as a
market for vegetable vendors, as a gathering place for
women to talk and get water from a municipal tap, as a
dump for throwing garbage, as a bus stop and auto
stand, and as a place to lay out a cot and take some
rest. For municipal planners, the new road is solely a
means of getting people to their IT jobs as
efficiently as possible. For many citizens, a road
plays a much broader role in their daily lives, roles
which are not acknowledged or encouraged by the
government. 
 
What is at stake, then, in interactions between
citizen and government is a vision of Chennai for the
future, the shape of the modern city as the country
increasingly urbanizes. Over the next six months, I
hope to examine one particular set of interactions,
those related to tsunami relief, in this larger
context. 

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