Darshini Mahadevia
Biographic Data
| ID | 1399456 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Darshini Mahadevia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Darshini |
| FAMILY NAME | Mahadevia |
| SIGNATURE | MAHADEVIA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ahmedabad University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5597-7228 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Governing Covid-19 in India’s cities
Conceptualising public authority as continually performed, this paper traces the interplay between modes of legitimation, state capacity and scalar politics in governing the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite attempts to unify COVID responses nationally, governance practices differed across India’s cities: Ahmedabad (Gujarat) heightened policing, Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) engaged its decentralised governance institutions, and Chennai (Tamil Nadu) sough…
To Plan or Not to Plan
Urban planning is essential for sustainable urbanization, its practice in India, has often translated into legitimizing exclusions, deepening inequality, and declining ecological resources. Based on our reading of the objectives stated in the spatial plans prepared over time for six Indian cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Jaipur, and Kolkata, we find, responding to broad development ideas of the period, two broad themes around which t…
SDG-enabled decarbonisation transport pathways for mid-sized Indian cities
All international agreements recognise that sustainable development, equity and poverty alleviation are preconditions for the substantial societal and technological transformations required to limit global warming to 1.5°C. A growing body of literature indicates that while climate change undermines the progress of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), climate actions also pose several trade-offs with them. Climate adaptation has a largely synergi…
Urban governance in the pandemic and beyond
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
(Im)mobility at the margins
Expanded state-subsidised housing programmes in middle-income countries raise questions about the displacement and socio-spatial marginalisation of poor households. Examining these questions through people’s experiences of resettlement indicates the importance of mobility to their lives. Drawing on a mixed-method comparative study of Ahmedabad, Chennai and Johannesburg, we ask: How does the relocation of low-income households to urban peripheries…
Covid-19 and the public transport conundrum in India
As a response to COVID-19, India locked down for a continuous 68 days starting on Mar 25, 2020, during which inter-city/state and intra-city public transport was totally suspended for the first fifty days Subsequently, the trains started on the 51st day, and informally buses began carrying inter-state and intra-state migrants fleeing cities not just in fear of COVID-19, but of unemployment and thus income loss, and subsequently made homeless by t…
Towards New Urban Agenda
An urbanizing country such as India has its own development challenges given the conditions of dystopias and discontent in the urban areas. In addition, three global agendas, namely the New Urban Agenda, Sustainable Development Goals and the Nationally Determined Contributions towards climate change mitigation also demand actions in the cities. The traditional urban planning approach, based on master/development planning, and stemming from it, ur…
Megaprojects, mirages and miracles
Large-scale inter-city infrastructure projects are proliferating across the Global South as industrial policy-makers have used spatial planning to purposefully transform regions’ economic and urban geographies. The Make in India policy and its promotion of industrial development corridors is emblematic of these trends, and this paper explores the relationship between this emergent national spatial vision and the subnational governance restructuri…
Climate Change, Heat Waves and Thermal Comfort—Reflections on Housing Policy in India
Housing ideally supplies many physical comforts, social and economic benefits, as well as forms the basis for the right to the city. It also addresses an additional challenge of adaptation to the current as well as expected impacts of climate change—one of them being heat waves—especially in the context of developing countries like India. Few studies in the Indian context have explicitly examined the experience of heat on the indoor temperatures …
Safe and inclusive cities
Urban planning, exclusion and negotiation in an informal subdivision
Urban planning as conceptualised and practiced in the global South has enacted inequitable distribution of resources, produced social and spatial exclusions and denied substantive citizenship to low-income groups. This article examines urban planning as one of the key drivers of exclusion and conflict by unpacking the ways in which it has produced layers of informalities over the years in Bombay Hotel, a low-income Muslim locality in Ahmedabad. A…
Gender Responsive Budgeting for Indian Cities
Women contribute significantly to the prosperity of cities through their paid and unpaid labour. However, limited or lack of access to essential infrastructure services such as water and sanitation, restricted mobility, tenure security and so on increase their burden of unpaid care work, thereby aggravating gender-based disadvantage and resulting in ‘time poverty’, which is largely overlooked by policymakers. This article assesses whether metropo…
Private Sector in Affordable Housing? Case of Slum Rehabilitation Scheme in Ahmedabad, India
The trend of involving private sector in affordable housing segment is observed globally. In India, it has been mainstreamed through the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) under which one component deals with in-situ slum redevelopment through the public–private partnership (PPP) mode in which the private sector brings in finance and skills to construct housing while the public sector provides land. Taking case study of one slum site, wherein the …
Decentralized governance or passing the buck
This paper describes the very large numbers of low-income households displaced by development or infrastructure projects in Ahmedabad and their relocation by city government to housing on resettlement sites. It discusses the involvement of the Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) in setting up the required resident welfare associations (RWAs) in eight of these resettlement sites and the difficulties MHT faced in getting residents to follow the many ti…
Diversity and Dynamics of Informal Rental Housing in a Mid-sized City in India
Informal housing predominates urban housing options in developing countries, including India, in both its metro and its mid-sized cities. Within urban housing, two-fifths is rental in India. This study is located within one mid-sized city (Guwahati) in one of the least developed states (Assam) in India. The processes of supply of rental housing in the informal sector are linked with the processes of overall supply of housing identified in Guwahat…
Translating Science and Technology Policies and Programmes into Grassroots Innovations in China - A Case Study
Purpose – Grassroots innovations (GRIs) can contribute greatly to inclusive development and reach out populations and areas not reached by or ignored by the formal sector. The purpose of the paper is to study how China’s science and technology (ST the government support is continuous and all-round; the grassroots innovators’ leadership is important to get the support; the research and diffusion projects that grassroots innovators received are int…
Housing of Urban Migrants in India and China
In high growth economies, continuous rural to urban migration has put forth a large challenge for the housing planners. In particular, China has witnessed much higher rate of rural to urban migration and hence provides an interesting case for research. In India, rural to urban migrants are at great dis-advantage with regard to housing and access to basic services. This article is a comparative research on housing conditions and mobility of the mi…
Institutional architecture for grassroots innovations
In the context of growing disenchantment with modern technologies in agriculture, it is often argued that the grassroots innovations play a significant role in rural development in general and improving agricultural productivity and incomes of farmers in particular. But our understanding on the institutional architecture needed for promoting grassroots innovations in developing countries like China at best remain rudimentary. The present paper ad…
Tenure Security and Urban Social Protection Links
Guaranteeing tenure security to the households living in informal settlements (slums) has not seen any progress in urban India. This is because the policymakers have failed to see land tenure status as a continuum from insecure tenure to a legal status. In general, the poor in the cities move from informal to quasi?legal ( de facto ) tenure through various processes, and then to legal tenure ( de jure ) in cases of a public policy intervention th…
Sustainable urban development in India
The mainstream debate on urban development addresses issues of economic growth, and the debate on sustainable cities focuses on environmental problems. Both exclude the development concerns of the poor. A new inclusive approach to sustainable cities in the South puts the perspective of poor and marginalized sectors at the centre of its vision. This chapter presents such a holistic and synergetic approach to sustainable cities in India, and descri…
(Im)mobility at the margins
Expanded state-subsidised housing programmes in middle-income countries raise questions about the displacement and socio-spatial marginalisation of poor households. Examining these questions through people’s experiences of resettlement indicates the importance of mobility to their lives. Drawing on a mixed-method comparative study of Ahmedabad, Chennai and Johannesburg, we ask: How does the relocation of low-income households to urban peripheries…
Megaprojects, mirages and miracles
Large-scale inter-city infrastructure projects are proliferating across the Global South as industrial policy-makers have used spatial planning to purposefully transform regions’ economic and urban geographies. The Make in India policy and its promotion of industrial development corridors is emblematic of these trends, and this paper explores the relationship between this emergent national spatial vision and the subnational governance restructuri…
Sustainable urban development in India
The mainstream debate on urban development addresses issues of economic growth, and the debate on sustainable cities focuses on environmental problems. Both exclude the development concerns of the poor. A new inclusive approach to sustainable cities in the South puts the perspective of poor and marginalized sectors at the centre of its vision. This chapter presents such a holistic and synergetic approach to sustainable cities in India, and descri…
Urban planning, exclusion and negotiation in an informal subdivision
Urban planning as conceptualised and practiced in the global South has enacted inequitable distribution of resources, produced social and spatial exclusions and denied substantive citizenship to low-income groups. This article examines urban planning as one of the key drivers of exclusion and conflict by unpacking the ways in which it has produced layers of informalities over the years in Bombay Hotel, a low-income Muslim locality in Ahmedabad. A…
Tenure Security and Urban Social Protection Links
Guaranteeing tenure security to the households living in informal settlements (slums) has not seen any progress in urban India. This is because the policymakers have failed to see land tenure status as a continuum from insecure tenure to a legal status. In general, the poor in the cities move from informal to quasi?legal ( de facto ) tenure through various processes, and then to legal tenure ( de jure ) in cases of a public policy intervention th…
Decentralized governance or passing the buck
This paper describes the very large numbers of low-income households displaced by development or infrastructure projects in Ahmedabad and their relocation by city government to housing on resettlement sites. It discusses the involvement of the Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) in setting up the required resident welfare associations (RWAs) in eight of these resettlement sites and the difficulties MHT faced in getting residents to follow the many ti…
Sustainable urban development in India
The mainstream debate on urban development addresses issues of economic growth, and the debate on sustainable cities focuses on environmental problems. Both exclude the development concerns of the poor. A new inclusive approach to sustainable cities in the South puts the perspective of poor and marginalized sectors at the centre of its vision. This chapter presents such a holistic and synergetic approach to sustainable cities in India, and descri…
Tenure Security and Urban Social Protection Links
Guaranteeing tenure security to the households living in informal settlements (slums) has not seen any progress in urban India. This is because the policymakers have failed to see land tenure status as a continuum from insecure tenure to a legal status. In general, the poor in the cities move from informal to quasi?legal ( de facto ) tenure through various processes, and then to legal tenure ( de jure ) in cases of a public policy intervention th…
Housing of Urban Migrants in India and China
In high growth economies, continuous rural to urban migration has put forth a large challenge for the housing planners. In particular, China has witnessed much higher rate of rural to urban migration and hence provides an interesting case for research. In India, rural to urban migrants are at great dis-advantage with regard to housing and access to basic services. This article is a comparative research on housing conditions and mobility of the mi…
Institutional architecture for grassroots innovations
In the context of growing disenchantment with modern technologies in agriculture, it is often argued that the grassroots innovations play a significant role in rural development in general and improving agricultural productivity and incomes of farmers in particular. But our understanding on the institutional architecture needed for promoting grassroots innovations in developing countries like China at best remain rudimentary. The present paper ad…
Diversity and Dynamics of Informal Rental Housing in a Mid-sized City in India
Informal housing predominates urban housing options in developing countries, including India, in both its metro and its mid-sized cities. Within urban housing, two-fifths is rental in India. This study is located within one mid-sized city (Guwahati) in one of the least developed states (Assam) in India. The processes of supply of rental housing in the informal sector are linked with the processes of overall supply of housing identified in Guwahat…
Translating Science and Technology Policies and Programmes into Grassroots Innovations in China - A Case Study
Purpose – Grassroots innovations (GRIs) can contribute greatly to inclusive development and reach out populations and areas not reached by or ignored by the formal sector. The purpose of the paper is to study how China’s science and technology (ST the government support is continuous and all-round; the grassroots innovators’ leadership is important to get the support; the research and diffusion projects that grassroots innovators received are int…
Decentralized governance or passing the buck
This paper describes the very large numbers of low-income households displaced by development or infrastructure projects in Ahmedabad and their relocation by city government to housing on resettlement sites. It discusses the involvement of the Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) in setting up the required resident welfare associations (RWAs) in eight of these resettlement sites and the difficulties MHT faced in getting residents to follow the many ti…
Private Sector in Affordable Housing? Case of Slum Rehabilitation Scheme in Ahmedabad, India
The trend of involving private sector in affordable housing segment is observed globally. In India, it has been mainstreamed through the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) under which one component deals with in-situ slum redevelopment through the public–private partnership (PPP) mode in which the private sector brings in finance and skills to construct housing while the public sector provides land. Taking case study of one slum site, wherein the …
Gender Responsive Budgeting for Indian Cities
Women contribute significantly to the prosperity of cities through their paid and unpaid labour. However, limited or lack of access to essential infrastructure services such as water and sanitation, restricted mobility, tenure security and so on increase their burden of unpaid care work, thereby aggravating gender-based disadvantage and resulting in ‘time poverty’, which is largely overlooked by policymakers. This article assesses whether metropo…
Climate Change, Heat Waves and Thermal Comfort—Reflections on Housing Policy in India
Housing ideally supplies many physical comforts, social and economic benefits, as well as forms the basis for the right to the city. It also addresses an additional challenge of adaptation to the current as well as expected impacts of climate change—one of them being heat waves—especially in the context of developing countries like India. Few studies in the Indian context have explicitly examined the experience of heat on the indoor temperatures …
Safe and inclusive cities
Urban planning, exclusion and negotiation in an informal subdivision
Urban planning as conceptualised and practiced in the global South has enacted inequitable distribution of resources, produced social and spatial exclusions and denied substantive citizenship to low-income groups. This article examines urban planning as one of the key drivers of exclusion and conflict by unpacking the ways in which it has produced layers of informalities over the years in Bombay Hotel, a low-income Muslim locality in Ahmedabad. A…
Covid-19 and the public transport conundrum in India
As a response to COVID-19, India locked down for a continuous 68 days starting on Mar 25, 2020, during which inter-city/state and intra-city public transport was totally suspended for the first fifty days Subsequently, the trains started on the 51st day, and informally buses began carrying inter-state and intra-state migrants fleeing cities not just in fear of COVID-19, but of unemployment and thus income loss, and subsequently made homeless by t…
Towards New Urban Agenda
An urbanizing country such as India has its own development challenges given the conditions of dystopias and discontent in the urban areas. In addition, three global agendas, namely the New Urban Agenda, Sustainable Development Goals and the Nationally Determined Contributions towards climate change mitigation also demand actions in the cities. The traditional urban planning approach, based on master/development planning, and stemming from it, ur…
Megaprojects, mirages and miracles
Large-scale inter-city infrastructure projects are proliferating across the Global South as industrial policy-makers have used spatial planning to purposefully transform regions’ economic and urban geographies. The Make in India policy and its promotion of industrial development corridors is emblematic of these trends, and this paper explores the relationship between this emergent national spatial vision and the subnational governance restructuri…
(Im)mobility at the margins
Expanded state-subsidised housing programmes in middle-income countries raise questions about the displacement and socio-spatial marginalisation of poor households. Examining these questions through people’s experiences of resettlement indicates the importance of mobility to their lives. Drawing on a mixed-method comparative study of Ahmedabad, Chennai and Johannesburg, we ask: How does the relocation of low-income households to urban peripheries…
SDG-enabled decarbonisation transport pathways for mid-sized Indian cities
All international agreements recognise that sustainable development, equity and poverty alleviation are preconditions for the substantial societal and technological transformations required to limit global warming to 1.5°C. A growing body of literature indicates that while climate change undermines the progress of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), climate actions also pose several trade-offs with them. Climate adaptation has a largely synergi…
Urban governance in the pandemic and beyond
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Governing Covid-19 in India’s cities
Conceptualising public authority as continually performed, this paper traces the interplay between modes of legitimation, state capacity and scalar politics in governing the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite attempts to unify COVID responses nationally, governance practices differed across India’s cities: Ahmedabad (Gujarat) heightened policing, Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) engaged its decentralised governance institutions, and Chennai (Tamil Nadu) sough…
To Plan or Not to Plan
Urban planning is essential for sustainable urbanization, its practice in India, has often translated into legitimizing exclusions, deepening inequality, and declining ecological resources. Based on our reading of the objectives stated in the spatial plans prepared over time for six Indian cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Jaipur, and Kolkata, we find, responding to broad development ideas of the period, two broad themes around which t…
Economic growth (17 works) · Economics (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Geography (14 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (14 works) · Business (11 works) · Politics (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (7 works) · Development economics (6 works)