Review Article Dumped through Technology A Policymaker’s Guide to Disenfranchising Slum Dwellers Tripta Chandola Abstract This article critically examines the position of slum-dwellers as citizens and the entitlements available to them within the transforming urban materiality of Delhi. By undertaking a detailed analysis of the media reportage of the recently released ‘Housing Stock, Amenities & Assets in Slums—Census 2001’, this article argues that there is a systemic and strategic shift in the imagination of ‘marginalized’ groups—here, namely the slum dwellers—as ‘citizens’, which significantly limits their ‘right to the city’. Within this imagination there is a deliberation to consider the ‘marginalized’ groups as proactive ‘consumers’, such that ‘amnesia of the experience of poverty’, is sustained by situating their position as citizens within the topos of their media consumption practices and trends. This article draws upon decade long ethnographic research in the slums of Govindpuri, which is highlighted as a case study. It attempts to situate the shifting position of the ‘marginalized’ groups as ‘citizens’ determined within the particular and peculiar logic of neo-liberalism in developing countries wherein ‘cleanliness’ not only becomes a state of being but essential to ‘being’ a part of the State. The article particularly emphasizes on the deliberately ‘diminishing’ role the State intends to play in the welfare of the ‘marginalized’. Keywords Slums, policy, urban transformations, media politics Introduction In this article I critically examine the response to a recent Government of India publication ‘Housing Stock, Amenities & Assets in Slums—Census 2011’ (GOI 2013) in the mainstream media. I specifically focus on one aspect of the media-reportage which commented on the state of the slums, and its residents, especially vis-a-vis the noticeable increase in the consumption and usage of mobile telephony services in the slums. This increase in consumption in popular mainstream reckoning is a definite indicator of improvement of the living and material conditions of slum-dwellers. In this article I will draw upon decade-long ethnographic research in Govindpuri 1 (hereafter, ‘GP’), a slum settlement in Delhi, India’s capital city, to highlight the fallacy (and limitation) of such an assumption. The everyday materiality of a slum settlement is not only complex, but also situated within its particular and peculiar historicity and cultures of consumption to allow for such a simplistic assertion. Moreover, I will argue, that the inclusion of ‘mobiles, Internet, computers and henceforth’, as assets for the first time in a report of this Journal of Creative Communications 8(2&3) 265–275 © 2013 Mudra Institute of Communications SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/0973258613512917 http://crc.sagepub.com at RMIT University Library on March 4, 2016 crc.sagepub.com Downloaded from