How Will India’s Urban Future Affect Social Identities?

The Promise

While India is urbanising rapidly, only a third of its population lives in urban areas and just one in five live in the country’s 230-odd largest cities, even though urban regions contribute more than three-fifths of the country’s GDP. While a range of factors will ensure that India becomes increasingly urbanised, there are multiple questions on the country’s urban future, ranging from the drivers and pace of this urbanisation, settlement type and economic foundations. One question, however, gets little attention: What might be the consequences of urbanisation for social identities and social cleavages?

It is now widely accepted that urbanisation is as much a social process—transforming behaviour, culture and social institutions over time—as it is an economic and spatial process. It transforms core societal organisations such as the family, demographic structures, the nature of work, and individual freedoms and autonomy. Cities are sites of social change that offer possibilities for social mobility by disrupting the social stratifications of rural societies.

India’s multiple social cleavages—caste and class, region and religion, and gender and generational—have both shaped and haunted its political evolution. Discussions and analysis of these cleavages have occurred against a backdrop of an India that was overwhelmingly rural. But as India rapidly urbanises, these social cleavages are likely to evolve. While some might attenuate, others could amplify and yet others may well transform. Does India’s urban future lie in multiple sites of burgeoning cosmopolitan sensibility riding on waves of economic dynamism; a more dystopian vision of sharpening social, economic and political cleavages; or some complex amalgam of these binaries? What factors might influence this evolution and what mechanisms might shape urbanisation’s effects on social identities and, in India’s case, how are these mechanisms likely to evolve?

Mechanisms

The most obvious aspect of urbanisation is that as the economic base becomes non-agricultural, new and different occupations emerge. Historically, the key mechanisms of the intergenerational replication of caste have been occupation and marriage. The modern urban economy, however, generates new occupations that may well have a correspondence with class but not caste. A bus driver or fast food deliverer may have a modest income, but there is no longer a strict correlation with a specific caste. This diversity of occupations in a large and growing urban economy helps weaken the historic link between caste and occupation.

The economic base of urban areas rests on industry, commerce and services. Economic interests have provided a form of ‘bridging’ social capital, in contrast to the ‘bonding’ social capital that emanates from belonging to specific ethnic and religious groups. In the last two centuries, industrialisation was the key driver of urbanisation, as populations moved from rural areas to find work in factories. These wage earners—often employed in terrible working conditions—gradually coalesced as a class, which Marx identified as the proletariat. The growth of class consciousness with common solidarities cuts across the local identities that migrants had carried from their villages. As unions were formed to fight for their members’ common interests, labour solidarities enabled the forging of new forms of social linkages.

However, labour markets have witnessed massive change, with fewer jobs in large industries such as jute or cotton mills. Most employment in urban India is now in the services sector and in small firms or self-employment, which makes it harder to organise labour across the world. Ironically, the onerous regulatory burdens placed on large firms to protect labour in India have led to the very fragmentation of employment that has made collective action by labour even more difficult, weakening social solidarities and protections. As a result, labour increasingly looks to social protection from the state rather than from the firms that employ them, as was the case in the past (Agarwala, 2013).

An example of the link between industrialisation, unions and communally integrated associational life is Hindu–Muslim relations in Indian cities. The decline of large textile mills in cities such as Ahmedabad and Mumbai in the 1970s and 1980s was a factor in the weakening of inter-ethnic engagement, rendering informal sector workers easy prey for politicians who sought to polarise people along communal lines for electoral advantage (Varshney, 2002).

White-collar unions thrive more in the public sector, and in India this has been especially true in banking. But as the public sector gradually retreats from commercial activities, this is an unlikely site for building solidarities across social cleavages in the foreseeable future. Urban areas are also seats of public administration. In principle, these could be sites of inter-mixing, but in most cases, lower-level public sector jobs are deeply nativist, and reservations have often made them sites of resentment and animosity rather than spaces for building social bonds. Indeed, with formal sector jobs at a premium, growth in urban jobs will take place largely in the informal sector, through self-employment, small entrepreneurship or household support services. The long-term effects of these trends in urban employment on social cleavages remain to be seen.

Commerce provides another channel that binds communities, especially when it provides complementary, non-replicable services. Jha (2013) demonstrates how gains from economic exchange have contributed to building a legacy of communal harmony between Hindus and Muslims in the port cities of western India. In today’s world, this implies that when commerce embeds different communities in supply chains, the ensuing engagement can build and strengthen bonds of trust and economic interest. Stand-alone or parallel and competitive services do not create such bonds and indeed may well align sectarian political interests with economic incentives to reduce competition, as has been observed in incidents of targeted violence directed at minority-owned businesses.

If the distinctive economic base of urban areas provides possibilities for more liminal social identities through industry and commerce, it is also the petri dish of one distinctive social group—the middle class. The Indian middle class has expanded hand in hand with India’s burgeoning urbanisation. The political and social consequences of this expansion will depend on the economic and social base of the middle class and resulting attitudes and policy preferences. Its collective self-identity will also depend on the degree of heterogeneity within this class, given that there are marked differences in income, education, and cultural and social capital between the lower and upper middle class as well as between those in metropolitan cities and small towns. There is considerable uncertainty as to whether the middle class is more likely to emerge as a progressive actor or as a reactionary force, and whether this will differ across social and political issues (Kapur, 2010).

The contemporary Indian middle class is distinguished by three characteristics. First, its primary employment base has shifted from the public sector to the private sector. The Indian middle class’s growth in the first few decades after independence was rooted in the growth of government employment opportunities. In the last quarter century, with the stalling of public sector employment, job creation in urban India has largely come from the private sector—a trend that is expected to continue. Second, there has been a shift in the nature of private sector employment, with modest growth in salaried employment but much greater growth in self-employment, mixed forms of short-term contract and freelance work, and entrepreneurship. This has meant that the stability of livelihoods of the older middle class—with lifetime job security, and safety nets such as health insurance and old-age pensions—is being replaced by variable incomes, self-insurance and risk-taking propensities. And third, the vast majority of the middle class (especially the lower middle class) are part of the first generation of their families to belong to this group, having ridden the escalator of rapid economic growth. Quite often, they are migrants, with weaker rights to full citizenship in the city and modest levels of skills, education and cultural capital.

In addition, however, like middle classes everywhere, a core and influential constituent of the Indian middle class is rooted in the professions—the lawyers and doctors, professors and journalists, architects and managers. Historically, the middle class has carved its social and political role not from its income or consumption per se, but rather from its human capital, and in particular, its hegemony in the professions. The latter in turn depends heavily on the character of higher education—its organisation and function—and on the governance and standards of the professions.

Much of the current conceptualisation of the middle class stems from its consumptive activity—what material possessions it owns or may seek in the future. However, for a putative middle class to act as a class and articulate its interests in any coherent fashion, one must think beyond income or consumption as the defining trait of a middle class and instead examine its role as an outcome—and a driver—of modernity.

Historically, the professions have played an important role in raising the social prestige of their members, largely by granting substantial self-regulation in formal admission and performance standards. Like all clubs, they generate new loyalties and identities. And in urban settings, professionals also have the greatest potential to generate activism and policy change around urbanisation or, conversely, to act as a powerful veto group if their interests are threatened. But the quality, creativity and sensibilities of the professions depend critically on the nature of higher education. If the professions (and their members) are important actors in urban arenas, and if professional norms bring in new forms of identity that transcend ascriptive identities, then the role of higher education and the governance of professions becomes crucial.

Alas, both are ailing in India today, which means that one cannot be sanguine about the social and political role of the Indian middle class. While higher education is the principal entry mechanism to the professions, the social power of professionals (and the middle class) in the long run derives from their capacity for self-regulation (the roots of which date back to the Middle Ages, when guilds instilled professional standards in labour). It has long been recognised (going back to Durkheim’s classic 1958 work, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals) that the state simply cannot perform the function of regulating professions. The legitimacy and social power of professions derives from a certain type of ‘public morality’. But that requires the practice (and enforcement) of strong codes of professional ethics. As Durkheim had argued, ‘professional ethics will be the more developed, and the more advanced in their operation, the greater the stability and the better the organisation of the professional groups themselves’.

However, in India, the rapid expansion of higher education as an industry has been accompanied by a dilution of professional standards and ethics. The broad-based university has largely collapsed, replaced by thousands of small colleges and specialised institutions. Instead of serving as exemplars of cosmopolitan sensibilities, the faculty and staff of many of these institutions are staunch parochialists (Kapur & Mehta, 2017). Consequently, it is not surprising that in debates on urbanisation or higher education in India, the town–gown relationship—the relationship between higher education and their urban environments—is virtually absent.

Thus, even while the material power of the middle class has increased, it has been at the cost of its social power, the result of less prestige and authority in the professions. Key to this is the failure of the middle class to better govern the very professional organisations that have been the source of its social power. Rather than raising standards, they have been a source of rent-seeking. In India (as elsewhere), professional associations (of accountants, lawyers, doctors and engineers), along with business associations and chambers of commerce, service and advocacy NGOs, sports bodies and the like, form a core constituent of civil society. But when the internal governance of these organisations falters, their weaknesses not only place greater burdens on already overburdened state organs but also risk sharpening social cleavages as capturing power within these organisations can undermine professional identities.

In recent years, critiques of the behaviour of the Indian middle class have been confused as to whether it is a politically powerful force that has driven India’s neoliberal reforms or whether, in the face of the power of money and muscle in Indian politics (Vaishnav, 2017), it is gradually seceding from the arena of democratic politics (exemplified, for instance, by the expansion of gated communities in urban India) and has chosen exit as a rational response to a perceived lack of voice.

There can be little doubt that, for the middle class to realise its potential, it will need to ‘aspire to something more than private affluence in the midst of public squalor’ (Singh, 2005). However, while some among the Indian middle classes appear to be disengaging from electoral politics, there appears to be a corresponding shift in their public engagement towards civil society. Urban India in particular is witnessing the mushrooming of a wide range of civic associations, neighbourhood societies and a rise of middle-class philanthropy, especially in areas where the Indian state has performed poorly, namely primary education and health.

Urbanisation and urban growth occur through three demographic processes: villages can grow into each other to form larger, more densely populated habitations, such as the ‘census towns’ in India, which grew from 1,362 in 2001 to 3,894 in 2011 (accounting for about 30 per cent of all urban growth); population growth within existing urban areas; and migration. The possibilities of the transformative impact of urbanisation on social identities would appear especially salient in the case of migration (especially rural–urban and inter-regional) and intergenerational changes in identities in the case of expanding or large urban agglomerations.

However, the effects of migration on social identities can be mixed. Migrants from rural areas form non-familial ties in urban destinations, which compete with family ties in the place of origin. These first-generation migrants are embedded in the new urban environment while continuing to identify and to maintain close relationships with their rural households and kinship groups. Their lower education and incomes and weak cultural capital mean that even if they may have a strong desire to be integrated into urban life, they are largely excluded.

For young rural–urban migrants, the potentially positive impact of migration is inevitably compromised by institutional constraints, with access to rights and services being an arduous climb. In China, the ‘hukou’ system (a household registration system that identifies both the location of a home and its rural/urban type) has ensured that rural migrants to urban areas are legally second-class citizens. In India, citizenship status, rights and belonging are more restrictive for internal migrants than for those who are not. Internal migrants experience a lesser citizenship status and curtailed citizenship rights partly because of their impoverishment and weak and venal urban governance structures, but also because they are migrants per se (Abbas, 2016).

It also matters how migrants come to the city. Institutional and structural exclusion at the destination prevents them from equally and fully participating in the labour market. Jobs linked to high income, better social benefits and housing are usually the preserve of locals, and the relatively low human capital of many migrants ensures their marginal status and concentration in the informal sector and self-employment, or individual businesses.

The influx of migrants to cities frequently provokes antagonism on the part of long-term residents, manifested in labour market discrimination, political nativism and violence. The rise of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai exemplifies this anti-immigrant hostility. While initially its hostility was directed against educated immigrants from southern India, over time this transformed into hostility against Muslims and low-income migrants from northeastern India, with competition in labour markets, material self-interest and political mobilisation as the principal drivers.

The discrimination suffered by migrants from India’s Northeast regions to cities like Delhi and Bengaluru, at first glance, appears to provide a pessimistic prognosis about urbanisation’s impact on social cleavages. However, despite an often unfriendly metropolis, with time they have become active contributors to the vibrancy of these cities and incrementally forced the city to acknowledge them as Indians, even as they still largely live within their own communities (McDuie-Ra, 2012).

Even as urbanisation appears to blunt the edges of caste-based cleavages, discrimination on religious grounds—especially that experienced by Muslims—in fast-growing urban centres appears to be rising. Facing discrimination in cities can result in the activation and amplification of immigrants’ ethnic identities in the political arena. Minority communities facing persistent discrimination view in-migration by members of their group as a means of bolstering their political representation by enlarging their demographic and electoral base, thereby achieving ‘safety in numbers’.

The Effects of Urban Processes and Structures

The aforementioned example of the spatial stratification of certain communities is a reminder that it is not urbanisation per se but the types of urbanisation processes that unfold in India that will affect the trajectory and degree of change in social identities and the intensity of social cleavages. Housing patterns are a good example. Slums standing alongside opulent gated communities exemplify graded citizenship, but the former in particular are sites of co-existence of multiple communities, living cheek by jowl (Auerbach, 2016). On the other hand, middle-class housing complexes appear to be more discriminatory, and could well end up reinforcing rather than attenuating the prejudices and biases prevalent in Indian society.

Housing has other larger ramifications. As the principal asset of most middle-class households, it is also a source of middle-class anxieties. The severe distortions in India’s housing markets have not only sharply increased prices but have also created large incentives for the supply (and demand) of black money and, with it, urban governance writ large. Middle classes everywhere worry about property—how to protect it physically and financially—which can make them risk-averse on the one hand, but also vocal if there are shocks that adversely affect property values on the other.

Public spaces are another feature of urban areas where people with all sorts of social identities can come together as a community and interact without being self-conscious. However, while urban India has seen rapid growth of different variations of private public places such as malls, it has seen much less investment in even simple micro-public spaces such as sidewalks for pedestrians, let alone parks or plazas. This example serves to make a simple point: the degree to which the hard edges of social identities will get blurred in an urbanising India will depend considerably on conscious public action and not simply on urbanisation per se.

It is also likely that the size of a city will matter for new forms of social identities to emerge. The degree of anonymity and the ranges and types of economic activity vary with city size. A female migrant from Northeast India is visible today in service sector occupations in Delhi or Bengaluru, but those occupations are simply absent in small-town India for women, let alone those from Northeast India.

Indeed, while severe social constraints faced by women in rural India are less present in urban settings, here too larger structural variables—such as safe transport systems and types of economic jobs—affect whether the promise of urbanisation can be realised. The absence of labour-intensive industrialisation in sectors such as garment factories or electronics assembly in India has blocked an important pathway for low-skilled women to join the blue-collar urban labour force, leaving them with the home care industry as the principal alternative. Gender is one of India’s most salient social cleavages, but one that is intra-group rather than inter-group. The degree to which this cleavage wanes will, in considerable part, depend on increasing female labour force participation well above the current abysmal levels. However, the spectre of ‘jobless’ growth threatens urbanisation’s promise of greater female autonomy and equality through greater and better employment opportunities for women.

Conclusion

India’s urban population is set to increase by nearly half a billion over the next four decades, the most massive urban transformation in this century in any single country. The implications for India’s future are profound. The society-wide transformations intrinsic to urbanisation have been recognised in the long-standing debate on the effects of urbanisation on India’s social stratification. Mahatma Gandhi, an advocate of the advantages of community-oriented village life, famously remarked that ‘the soul of India lives in its villages’. In contrast, B. R. Ambedkar, the principal architect of the Indian Constitution, argued: ‘What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism?’ As a Dalit, Ambedkar was painfully aware of the degrading effects of ascriptive social identities in rural India, where everyone’s social identity was known and inescapable. He believed that the very anonymity of urbanisation offered escape routes and pathways to social mobility by attenuating spatially-specific social identities—whether through greater social interaction in public spaces such as markets and transportation systems (Anderson, 2012) or in labour markets (Mohan, 1987).

Urban areas have more heterogeneous populations, resulting in greater exposure to non-traditional attitudes, behaviours and lifestyles, which in turn could make urban residents more tolerant than their rural counterparts. The high population densities of urban areas increase the residents’ opportunities for face-to-face interaction. And city size further increases the diversity of interactions.

However, the economic vitality of cities that comes from agglomeration and ‘social tie density’ is by no means guaranteed. Urban planning shapes the social and physical features of neighbourhoods. Poor urban design (such as urban sprawl), weak transport links, segregated housing and the absence of public spaces can reduce a large city to smaller, unconnected and segmented towns. South Africa created the apartheid city, which created such deep divisions that, more than two decades after its fall, its effects continue to persist. India’s gated communities are a sombre pointer to how the possibilities of shifts in social identities can be stymied by weak urban planning.

Groups that raise the frequency and intensity of face-to-face interaction within a city bring both social and economic value. In this realm, India’s robust civil society and NGOs are a limited supplement to feeble government actions. While they do provide tangible benefits in the cities they operate in, many themselves face serious internal challenges, ranging from a limited ability to scale, weak institutionalisation, dependence on state and foreign funds, etc. Civil society can complement the state and provide alternative pathways for building bridges between communities, but it cannot substitute for the state in developing better urban ecosystems in very significant ways.

If urbanisation’s promise in transforming social identities in India is to be realised, the pattern of urbanisation and urban governance must fundamentally change. India needs many more large cities, which are also better funded and governed, but for this, the fiscal base of cities will need to radically change. As the Indian government’s 2017 Economic Survey has pointed out, municipalities across India that generate more resources deliver better basic services. Their resource constraints are partly the result of states circumscribing the autonomy of municipalities to raise property taxes and the inability (or unwillingness) of municipalities to levy all feasible taxes and fees. Moreover, urban governments need far more—and far better—human capital to augment state capacity, which today is sorely lacking.

None of these will occur unless the promise of the 74th amendment to the Indian Constitution decentralising funds, function and functionaries to urban local bodies is realised. The political economy of India has increasingly concentrated power at the sub-national (state) level and with so many rent-seeking opportunities in urban areas, political parties are in no mood to let go. How or whether this equilibrium changes will have profound effects on India’s urban trajectory—and with it, the very nature of Indian society and its social cleavages.