No abstract

In this article, we engage with the experiences of students in a government-run residential secondary school that enrols girls primarily from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Through an exploration of the history of the programme, secondary evaluations conducted over the years and a month-long engagement with one such residential school, we probe how the categories of disadvantage—caste and gender— continue to operate, even as the state tries to obliterate them in this space. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theorization of ‘practices’, we describe daily informal interactions in the space, highlighting their role in reinforcing and sometimes challenging extant social differences. Drawing attention to the diversity that lies even within the formal category of ‘disadvantaged’, we describe the potential and the limitations of targeted residential schooling. Our work points to the need for greater sensitivity in the planning and implementation of state-run programmes targeted at the most marginalized and a re-imagination of efforts to offer an ‘alternate field’.

Ahmedabad is India's seventh largest city, and host to a cluster of some prominent academic and industrial institutions. From its establishment in 1411, its sultans pioneered a legacy of fine architecture in mosques, temples, and traditional neighborhoods. That trend today is exemplified in modernist buildings by Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, and Charles Correa among others. In the mid‐twentieth century it was a thriving industrial town, but in the fast urbanizing trend of the twenty‐first century it faced an unprecedented challenge with the decline of its textile mills. The fortunes of these mill workers, whose subsequent unemployment turned them into informal workers, became less closely linked to the financial upswing following economic liberalization, which disproportionately benefited the elites. In keeping with the growing disparity, public investment in urban infrastructure and in beautification projects became more salient and politically profitable. This also caused public and private institutional goals to blur at the boundaries, and governance to shift away from visible and transparent institutions, which were accountable to ordinary citizens, to more joint arrangements between private for‐profit institutions and governmental bodies, which were less transparent in their operations. These new institutional forms, for example those in the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project and the GIFT City, have become instruments of public decision, exerting control over Ahmedabad's budgets, and therefore manifestations of elite capture of public resources.

No abstract

No abstract