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
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2023. “Waiting for Dignity Housing: Slum Redevelopment, Cruel Governance, and Unaccounted Time in Hyderabad.” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 41 (1): 69-86. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2022. “Of Political Entrepreneurs: Assembling Community and Social Capital in Hyderabad’s Informal Settlements.” Urban Studies 59 (4): 717–33. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar, Ryan Stock, and Karan Misquitta. 2021. “Titling as a Contested Process: Conditional Land Rights and Subaltern Citizenship in South India.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45 (3): 458–76. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2018. “Citizenship as a Communicative Effect.” Signs and Society 6 (3): 531–57. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. “I’m not there – A Hyderabad / Philadelphia Parallax,” Ethnographic Marginalia, September 7, 2021,
K., Manav, and Indivar Jonnalagadda. “Affordable Rental Housing Complexes for Urban Migrants: Problems and Prospects,” India in Transition, March 1, 2021, https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/manavk-indivarjonnalagadda.
Minhaz, Ayesha, and Indivar Jonnalagadda, “Urban Local Bodies are critical in the fight against COVID-19.” Hyderabad Urban Lab Blog, March 30, 2020, https://hydlab.in/blogposts/strengthen-urban-local-bodies.
College of Arts & Sciences Research Grant, Miami University (2024)
Thomas Zwicker Memorial Fund Award, University of Pennsylvania (2023)
Graduate Fellowship, The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy (2021-2022)
Mellon Graduate Student Research Award, Penn Humanities+Urbanism+Design Initiative (2021)
Dissertation Research Grant, The Wenner-Gren Foundation (2020-2021)
Joseph W. Elder Social Sciences Fellowship, American Institute of Indian Studies (2019-2020)
Geo L. Harrison Graduate Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania (2018-2019)
Summer Field Research Grant, Penn Department of Anthropology (2017 & 2018)