The present article builds upon the idea of political society to read a red-light district in the city of Kolkata. The district is the biggest in Asia and it has given its name to the biggest movement of the sex workers—Sonagachi Project. This article is an attempt to view the subaltern space as a resistant space and a political society by highlighting their habitat, economic and political roles. Being outside the ambit of citizenry, these societies exert their aspiration for acknowledgement of their anomaly. Their present situation has a colonial legacy that disempowers them but from which they have started recovering. Though their role of emancipation was also present in the colonial times, it got more explicit in the current decades. However, the emancipator journey is often not linear and shows signs of sporadic bumpiness. Highlighting on such events and histories, the article relies upon archival references, news and informal observation of the place.

Slum and land have a dialectical relationship. A land that is a slum embodies a filthy and dirty territory that hinders the aesthetic competitiveness of a global city. On the other hand, a slum as a land opens opportunities for multiple uses that promise resurrection of world-class ambition. However, in a situation of tight regulation, informal habitations are often could not be forcefully evicted for this dream to come true. In such an event more conciliatory, yet shrewd, practices are adopted to appropriate land from the informally residing community. A number of tools ply to get the work done, among which geography, cartography, and manipulation of statutory laws are more prominent. Taking Kolkata as a case, I wish to situate ongoing appropriation of central urban land as mediated by these three factors. In Kolkata, while forceful evictions take place on informally occupied land both at the fringe and the central part of the city with vague statutory laws, in the tightly regulated central part of the city, appropriation replaces expropriation, accompanied by a more regular invocation of slum in policy and governmental discourses. The study adds to the dispossession literature by underscoring the role of mediating factors in appropriating the central urban land that could not be coercively expropriated, yet needed for claiming a slot in the world-class city register.

This article examines the fifth iteration of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) to determine the state of urban India. We have some surprising revelations. First, regardless of class and caste affiliations, the gap between the higher and lower hierarchies in the NFHS-5 has shrunk since the previous edition, with the exception of provision of on-premises drinking water. Second, in combination with the growing body of literature on caste and ethnicity-based residential segregation in Indian cities, the most recent batch of data asserts unequivocally that such a segregation mechanism has not manifested itself in unequal access to public amenities; this is another positive sign. Third, profound inequality exists along class lines. Because class is only distantly tied to caste or ethnic ascriptions, we can observe a vast swath of wealthless residuals along the caste–ethnic hierarchy. We publish these studies in light of India’s globally attuned aspiration to attain Sustainable Development Goals 6, 7, 10, and 11.