Devanathan Parthasarathy

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay | IIT Bombay ·  Department of Humanities & Social Sciences

Climate-related hazards, urban development and changing vulnerability patterns compel cities across the world to deal with new and emerging forms of risk. Academic literature and recent international policy documents suggest potentials of conceptually and practically linking the fields of climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction...

Cities are changing globally because neoliberalism demands so. But the impacts of these changes do not remain confined within urban limits only. Kolkata similarly is attempting to change itself in leaps and bounds because it has to keep up with the demands of neoliberalism. However, along with the city, the wetlands in the eastern vicinity of Kolka...

India's National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and its constituent eight National Missions stress on devising plans for climate change action at regional and local scales; these cater to various agro-ecological environments and address the different socio-economic situations prevalent in these. These as well as the various State Action Plan...

Looking at the larger history of deindustrialisation, gentrification, and change in patterns of land use in what was known as Mumbai’s Girangaon area, the article seeks to explain the recent tragic fire accident in the Kamala Mills compound as an example of the multiple risks in a chaotic and perilous landscape.

This chapter attempts to bring out the rising aspirations of different populations and the state in the gentrifying textile mill lands of Mumbai. The chapter argues that rising disparity and everyday contrast and contestation in the gentrifying mill land areas also offers the scope for negotiation. Whether it is locational advantage of the textile...

In recent years, the discourse regarding the relationship between urban growth and environment/nature has come to the forefront, raising critical questions pertaining to the challenges of ecological limits and the governance paradigms. Unavailability, scarcity, and shrinking of resources like water, jeopardize urban life and processes resulting in...

Uneven and combined urban development is a hallmark of the changing Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). Mumbai’s coastline urbanism is markedly different from the dominant urbanisms in the city centre. The growth that makes the city centre a global destination is experienced as phantom violations of nature at the edges. The effects of CRZ (Coastal Re...

The paper interrogates the nature of rapid transitions of urban space in a country like India using a case study of a dumping ground located at Kanjurmarg in Mumbai. The land in question was a dense mangrove wetland which was speculatively reclaimed for a landfill. It looks at the protests and contestations around the site to raise questions on the...

Coastal Regulations in India are traced back to the UN Conference on Human Environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. The Environment Protection Act (EPA) 1986 was enacted to implement India’s commitments as a signatory. The Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification of 1991 was made under the provisions of the EPA in order to protect coastal environm...

A critique of the Coastal Regulation Zone rules studies their implementation, and violations in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, which has experienced massive growth due to rapid economic transformation and urbanisation, resulting in degradation of and damage to sensitive coastal ecologies. Mumbai’s artisanal fishers, especially the Kolis, are inten...

This paper examines the wari as a discursive terrain produced by the interface of folk and Hinduised cultures. We focus on socio-religious interactions and divergences as crucial sites for the production of a discourse on the economy of worship, devotion and social equality. Popularly understood as a procession to Pandharpur, wari is understood her...

Tools for assessing vulnerability to climate change

Article on Slumdog Millionaire and its critics

Coastal urban cities frequently face multiple hazards, including potentially disastrous extreme events. To combat this, vulnerability assessment is essential to developing an effective mitigation strategy. This study proposes a framework to assess the vulnerability of any densely populated urban area to disasters by considering both the population...

Informal sector actors played a key role in Mumbai's resilience to disastrous floods in 2005. Members of small-scale retail and service-sector businesses, the city's underclass, its waste workers and scrap dealers, and sundry individual tradespersons such as electricians, plumbers, masons, and sanitary workers were at the heart of recovery and reha...

This paper critiques the three interlinked but distinct processes of pluralization, decentralization, and balkanization in relating urban planning and governance problems to disaster mitigation and governance. Using flood-related disasters in Mumbai as a case study, the paper analyzes the disaster governance initiatives of urban and regional instit...

This paper maps the geographical contours of socio-economic transitions that are currently underway in India that link caste and capital, rural and urban, peasants and the state in diverse ways. It explains regional variations in the emergence and impacts of provincial capital and how these affect patterns of (primitive) accumulation, and argues ag...

The changing milieu of research-increasingly global, interdisciplinary and collaborative-prompts greater emphasis on cultural context and upon partnership with international scholars and diverse community groups. Ethics training, however, tends to ignore the cross-cultural challenges of making ethical choices. This paper confronts those challenges...

There is abundant literature and information produced regarding social networks and the specific roles that women play and benefits they receive through them. However, much is left to be explored and understood on the role of social networks in increasing women’s and men’s access to resources and opportunities, and to establish means to map and me...

While studies on corporeal beauty – the ‘body beautiful’ – constitute a mini academic industry, everyday practices of ‘beauty work’ are somewhat underresearched. This paper engages with notions and practices of beauty in a context of socio-cultural transformation and global flows in urban India. The ‘beauty parlor’ emerges as a socio-cultural space...

The chapters in this volume concern the politics of place in four Asian nations: India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. They are about the ever-evolving relationship between and across rural and urban places. The categories of rural and urban are deeply embedded and naturalised in our imagination and in the cultural schemes of places across all t...

The debate over India’s economic liberalization has dwarfed significant social transformations and political changes since the late 1970s/early 1980s, with non-Brahmin upper castes and other backward class castes rising to power in several Indian states, irrevocably altering the political landscape of symbols, language, styles of mobilization, and...

Opposing certain dominant perspectives within urban studies, which give prominence to the role of capital in determining social space and urban social processes, there has been an emerging trend among scholars to develop Foucault's idea of heterotopia. This idea has been appropriated to explain spaces that have several levels or tiers of significan...

This chapter examines the implications of the rise of Bhojpuri cultural production for our understanding of globalization and urbanisms, of transnational and translocal flows, processes, and practices that link cultural formations and population migrations. It proposes that the spread of Bhojpuri cinema can be better understood not in terms of the...

Mumbai is in reality a city of places that are not a part of the current set of fantasies that rule the minds of urban planners but are yet integrally linked to capitalist processes, to urban practices of place-making and to urbanism itself. From this perspective, this enquiry seeks not only to better understand and explain the processes that are f...

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This paper seeks to critique the majority opinion among Indian and Indian origin intellectuals who largely criticized the film 'Slumdog Millionaire' for what was seen as a stereotypical portrayal of poverty and slums. Instead I seek to read the film in a different way based on research on urban aspirations and mobility in Mumbai.The paper adopts a...

Influential scholars such as Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells have mapped the spatial reconfigurations of global economic integration and rapid flows of capital, technology, information, and goods across countries and regions. However their studies have mostly been on cities in the developed north, rather than in the south. Drawing...

From an economic perspective that understood it as a spillover of development, migration is now also the subject of socioeconomic investigation incorporating the problems of assimilation, relative deprivation and isolation. The corollary is an increased emphasis on economic and social understanding of migration and its consequences. This entails st...

Ability to respond positively to climate hazards (also called adaptive capacity) first requires a perception of the risk due to that hazard and then formulation, evaluation and implementation of response by the exposed units with the view to reducing impacts. From a policy perspective, facilitating the process of perception of risk (and sometimes f...

Indian sociology has been considerably influenced by an early skepticism towards rural-urban distinctions – reflected in a relatively minor contribution to urban studies in India, despite some high quality work. The reasons for the skepticism have however neither been elaborated nor followed up in terms of setting and implementing research agendas....

Over the last few years Mumbai — India's financial and cammercial capital — has been affected by adverse climatic events leading to flooding and landslides resulting in high loss of lives and property. While different sections of the population were affected, the poor and the socially marginalized — living in environmentally risk prone areas — were...

This paper discusses the livelihood dynamics in the fragile landscape of the semi arid tropics (SAT) of Andhra Pradesh. SAT is home to the poorest of the poor who live in conditions of persistent drought, subsistence agriculture and poor access to markets. This paper is a case study focusing particularly on labour migration, its role in influencing...

Women's role in food security may have earned acknowledgement, but there is no measure of how much and in what ways women actually contribute to household food security. The absence of a suitable methodology of assessment means that not only does their contribution remain vague but there is also a lack of solid data to draw policy inferences in ter...

Background, Aim and Scope: In India, household waste (HW) forms a major part of municipal solid waste (MSW). Mismanagement of MSW is mostly attributed to the rising population, rapidly changing consumption patterns, negligence and lack of participation of people, low environmental awareness among masses and under-performance of concerned authoritie...

This inductive study offers an examination of 23 cases in which informants from firms engaged in large-scale global projects reported unforeseen costs after failing to comprehend cognitive-cultural, normative, and/or regulative institutions in an unfamiliar host societal context. The study builds on the conceptual framework of institutional theory....

If it is true that the swastika is an integral aspect of Hindu culture, it is so by being a symbol of discrimination, hatred, religious bigotry and fundamentalism, rather than anything inherently sacred about it.

This report is of a study to assess the efficiency and sustainability impacts of a seed-based technology for pigeonpea in semi-arid central India. The problem of integrating environmental assessment with economic and social impact assessment arises from an artificial separation of the social and natural sciences, and the ‘disciplinization’ of the s...

The BASIC Project is a capacity strengthening project – funded by the European Commission – that supports the institutional capacity of Brazil, India, China and South Africa to undertake analytical work to determine what kind of climate change actions best fit within their current and future national circumstances, interests and priorities. Additio...

Paper to be presented at the XIIIth International Congress of the Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism, 7-10 April 2002, Chiang Mai, Thailand. 2 Law, property rights, and social exclusion: A capabilities and entitlements approach to legal pluralism * … the focus on entitlement has the effect of emphasizing legal rights. The law stands between...

In this seminar Prof. Parthasarathy offered a sociological perspective in looking at the issue of vulnerability with regard to climate-related disasters. The speaker sought to address the issue of vulnerability caused by environmental insecurity and the way society dealt to mitigate and manage these risks. The speaker based his case study on Mumbai...

"The paper seeks to develop a broad framework for analysing the implications of changes in intellectual property rights regimes deriving from both new international legal mechanisms and conventions, and from new agricultural technologies based on modern biotechnology and genetic engineering. The framework can function as a model for analysis and fu...

"Debates on legal reform and legal pluralism with respect to the role of law for sustainable development and poverty reduction have mostly focused on natural resources such as land, water, and forests. Despite the fact that millions of the poor in India eke out livelihoods by mining and processing major and minor minerals, this is an area that has...