Lockdown lessons: Analyzing food relief efforts in an Indian megacity
Topics: Urban Geography
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Keywords: Governance, service delivery, urban informality, lockdown, Delhi
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 4/9/2021 04:40 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/9/2021 05:55 PM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 5
Authors:
Eesha Kunduri, University of Minnesota
Shahana Sheikh, Yale University
Shamindra Nath Roy, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
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Abstract
This paper analyzes questions at the intersection of governance and service delivery in an Indian megacity, through an appraisal of food relief efforts during COVID-19 lockdown in the National Capital Territory of Delhi. The organization of large-scale emergency relief-efforts was not easy, given the diverse nature of exclusions faced by urban migrants. These exclusions are tied to non-portable registration, and complicated identity-based criteria to access basic social welfare entitlements. We analyze publicly available data on the Delhi government’s food relief efforts, which consisted of cooked food relief and uncooked food (or dry ration) relief, alongside field reports from various informal settlements. The analysis, spread over four phases of lockdown and two phases of ‘unlock’ (or re-opening), demonstrates high demand for service delivery in even the richest districts, pointing to a highly variegated landscape of urban informality in Delhi. We also find a sharp decline in cooked food distribution during the ‘unlock’ phase, with implications for informal workers without formal entitlements, who could not return to their jobs immediately and were relying on these cooked meals for at least one meal a day. Simultaneously, outreach efforts to provide for dry ration by the government ran into severe bottlenecks, owing to issues of governance capacity and technocratic distribution architecture for such entitlements. We argue that the Delhi government’s food relief efforts during and after the pandemic lockdown offer us valuable lessons that can contribute to more nuanced discussions on the nature, scale and spatiality of urban informality.