‘Privations’ as a Development Concern: A Study of Two Communities in the National Capital Region of India
| DOI | 10.1177/0019556120904035 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
‘Privations’ as a
Development Concern:
A Study of Two
Communities in the
National Capital
Region of India
Devesh Vijay1
Abstract
Development scholars are tracking a wide range of well-being indices across
countries including life expectancy, school enrolment and a wide range of ‘free-
doms’ now. Yet, a critical set of ‘privations’ or collective hardships, that under-
mine general well-being and call for concerted public response, still remain
excluded from the mainstream development discourse.
This article highlights six sets of major ‘privations’ relevant to development
studies based on an extended fieldwork in a village and a slum on Delhi’s periph-
ery. It consists of four sections. The first section elucidates the conceptualisation
of ‘privations’, its principal categories and their distinction from related terms
such as deprivations, poverty and suffering. The next section explains the multi-
method approach used in this study to track ‘privations’ in the studied communi-
ties (called Dhantala and Aradhaknagar) through surveys, interviews and group
discussions conducted since 1988.
The third segment of the article focuses on two specific ‘privations’, namely
safety and health risks experienced by studied subjects over the recent decades.
The article concludes with reflections on reasons for the neglect of the cited
‘privations’ in dominant development discourses. It offers suggestions for their
better coverage in development indices and their mitigation by more concerted
government response and civic action, in future.
Keywords
‘Privations’, development, safety concerns, health environment, Delhi’s periphery
Article
Indian Journal of Public
Administration
66(1) 43–59, 2020
© 2020 IIPA
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DOI: 10.1177/0019556120904035
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1 Associate Professor (Retired), Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India.
Corresponding author:
Devesh Vijay, Associate Professor (Retired), Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi, Delhi,
India.
E-mail: devesh_vijay@yahoo.co.in
44 Indian Journal of Public Administration 66(1)
Rethinking Development
The concerns and scope of development studies have broadened notably in recent
decades. Health and education have not only emerged as major targets of devel-
opment planning (along with economic growth and poverty eradication) but
broader goals such as equity, ‘freedoms’ and climate safeguards have also been
tracked across regions now.1 The call given by Professor Amartya Sen to view
development as ‘expansion of freedoms—instrumental and substantive’ is a
reminder of this discursive shift (Sen, 2000).
Unfortunately, critical challenges such as rising crime, ethnic conflicts, state
repression and dipping public morale that rank high in people’s concerns and are
being tracked separately by some agencies, still remain marginal in the main-
stream development discourse. Surprisingly, not only the primers on development
studies but also the latest overviews of the discipline give negligible space to a
systematic tracking of cited hardships across regions.2 At a time when develop-
ment discourse has broadened its horizons and does not remain limited to counts
of GDP and poverty, such neglect of measurable collective sources of mass suffer-
ing that demand urgent collective response from the state and civil society appears
intriguing.
Key Concepts
This article postulates collective hardships or ‘privations’ as a central concern of
development planning and explores ways of tracking them comprehensively for
spatial and temporal comparisons and policy responses in future. Six major cate-
gories of ‘privations’ that demand further attention include the three that pose
major methodological difficulties for development analysis and the other three
that need systematic correlation of existing data sets. The first category covers: (a)
threats to public health (not only from limited spending and health infrastructure
but also from fake doctors and medicines and pollutants in air, water and food
chain, etc.), (b) atmosphere of fear and insecurity (including threats from rising
crime and/or civil strife, brutalities inflicted by the state and ethnic violence and
hostilities across regions and (c) low morale and interpersonal trust (which can be
glimpsed from changing data on drug addiction, votes cast for hardened criminals
and spurt in mob lynching, etc.). Besides above concerns that remain neglected in
development charts until this day, there are others such as unemployment and
hyper-inflation that are well tracked in existing literature but can still be clubbed
with the study of ‘privations’ for a holistic understanding of collective hardships.
Major categories in this set can be: (a) the state of physical infrastructure in any
district or province, (b) quality of public service delivery and (c) sudden economic
shocks brought by hyper-inflation, crop failures and spikes in unemployment,
etc., especially in populations lacking adequate social security.
The present article maps ‘privations’ and their changing character in two
marginalised communities within the National Capital Region.3 The studied
habitats include Aradhaknagar, a slum and Dhantala, a village. Their proximity
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