Equal Rights

This section examines another aspect of full and equal membership: whether it means that all citizens, rich or poor, should be guaranteed certain basic rights and a minimum standard of living by the state. To explore this, the chapter focuses on one group in particular — the urban poor, since dealing with urban poverty is one of the pressing problems facing governments today.

Every Indian city has a large population of slum-dwellers and squatters. Although they often do necessary and useful work, usually at low wages, they are frequently viewed as unwelcome by the rest of the city's population, and blamed for straining civic resources or for spreading crime and disease. Conditions inside slums can be shocking — many people crammed into small rooms with no private toilets, no running water, and poor sanitation, while life and property remain insecure.

Yet slum dwellers make a genuine and significant contribution to the urban economy through their labour. They may work as hawkers, petty traders, scavengers, domestic workers, plumbers or mechanics, or run small businesses such as cane weaving, textile printing, or tailoring. Cities in fact spend relatively little providing slum-dwellers with basic services like sanitation or water supply, even though they depend heavily on their labour.

A widely used way of connecting citizenship to equality and rights comes from the British sociologist T. H. Marshall (1893–1981). In his book Citizenship and Social Class (1950), Marshall defined citizenship as 'a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed.' The key idea in Marshall's account is equality — this means, first, that the quality of the rights and duties citizens are given keeps improving over time, and second, that the number of people who are actually covered by the status keeps growing.

Marshall identified three kinds of rights bundled together in citizenship: civil rights, which protect an individual's life, liberty, and property; political rights, which let individuals take part in the process of governance; and social rights, which give individuals access to things like education and employment. Together, these three kinds of rights are what make it possible for a citizen to live a life of real dignity. Marshall saw social class as a 'system of inequality', and argued that citizenship works to counter its divisive effects, helping to build a better-integrated and more harmonious community.

Awareness of the urban poor's situation is genuinely growing, among governments, NGOs, other agencies, and among slum-dwellers themselves. A national policy on urban street vendors, for instance, was framed in January 2004 — there are lakhs of street vendors in India's big cities, and they often face harassment from the police and town authorities; the policy tried to give them recognition and regulation so they could carry on their profession without harassment, so long as they followed government regulations.

Slum-dwellers are also increasingly organising to demand their rights, sometimes even approaching the courts. In one landmark case, the Supreme Court decided an important matter concerning the rights of slum-dwellers in Bombay, in response to a Public Interest Litigation filed by a social activist, Olga Tellis, against the Bombay Municipal Corporation, in 1985. The petition claimed a right to live on pavements or in slums, since no alternative accommodation was available close to their place of work; if forced to move, they would lose their livelihood as well. The Supreme Court held that 'Article 21 of the Constitution which guaranteed the right to life included the right to livelihood. Therefore if pavement dwellers were to be evicted they should first be provided alternative accommodation under the right to shelter.'

Even a basic political right like the right to vote can be difficult for such citizens to exercise in practice, since being included in the voters' list requires a fixed address, which squatters and pavement dwellers may find hard to provide. …