In my book manuscript titled Permanent Slums: Poverty, property, and the production of second-class citizenship in Hyderabad, I argue that urban governance has reached an impasse, where policy imaginations and governmental practices are practically and epistemically framed and limited by the idea and material form of the slum. I ask, how did slums shift from being a problem to be eradicated to becoming a technique of governance? What does this slum governance entail for the governance and political economy of the city at large? Finally, from the perspective of slum residents, what are the structural opportunities and obstacles posed by slum governance in pursuing economic mobility and a politics of citizenship? Building on fieldwork conducted between 2014 to 2024 in Hyderabad, India, I argue that prevailing modes of governing poverty through slums attempt to permanently inscribe poor groups into racialized regimes of property and caste-stratified markets, thus legally producing second-class citizens

See more.

In this collaborative project, Pullanna Vidyapogu and I examine how caste shapes and mediates politics, ideologies, and processes around urban lake management. We describe the role of caste in the political ecology of urban water bodies at two scales; firstly through caste politics and governmentality at the local scale, and secondly through structures of environmental casteism at the municipal scale. We argue that marginalized caste communities grasp at a diminishing and increasingly polluted commons through divergent and non-co-operative strategies, which prevent them from effectively generating livelihoods, value, or other ecological benefits from the lake. Further, this identitarian, divergent and non-co-operative politics is not a result of ignorance or myopia, but rather results from a squeeze on the political agency of lower caste communities enacted by the environmental casteism of larger structures of municipal governance and real estate expansion.

See more.

As a Research Associate at Hyderabad Urban Lab, I conducted ethnographic research and contributed to collaborative projects addressing a range of topics related to sanitation such as public toilet management, the politics of community toilets, and the gendered differentials of access to sanitation. I helped coordinate and organize an online campaign called #DontHoldItIn to spread awareness on the massive shortcomings in public sanitation facilities for women. I also worked with community based organizations to support their advocacy programs and their movements to demand better infrastructures.

See more.

Image: Christoph Niemann

Between 2012-2014, while pursuing an M.A. in Development Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences - Mumbai, I completed a dissertation project titled "Networking Change? The Culture of Free and Open Source Software Communities in India". My research was aimed at revealing the actually existing political and ideological positions that inform the everyday discourse on the fora of open source software developers. Based on interviews with thirty key-informants and discourse analysis of publicly archived online discussion groups, I argue that FOSS developers espouse a pragmatic politics interested in defending certain fundamental ideals and infrastructures such as open standards and net neutrality, while being agnostic about others such as intellectual property rights. A very early version of my research and academic writing, this dissertation is about about information technology, knowledge, collective action, community ethics, and other things in between.

See more.