Q.All citizens may be granted equal rights but not equally exercise them. Explain.
Granting all citizens equal rights in the Constitution or law does not guarantee that every citizen can actually exercise those rights equally in real life — a citizen's economic and social position can make a formally-equal right practically unusable, as India's urban poor illustrate.
Equality before the law means every citizen is formally entitled to the same rights — but exercising a right in practice usually needs resources, security, or access that not every citizen actually has. India's urban slum-dwellers and squatters are a clear example: they are full citizens with the same constitutional rights as anyone else, and they contribute genuinely useful labour to the city (as hawkers, domestic workers, plumbers, small traders, and more), but they live in overcrowded conditions with no private toilets, no reliable water, and insecure housing.
This affects even a right as basic and formal as the right to vote — being on the voters' list requires a fixed address, which squatters and pavement dwellers often cannot provide, so a right that is formally 'equal' can be practically much harder for them to use than for a citizen with a permanent home.
T. H. Marshall's theory of citizenship helps explain why this matters: he argued citizenship should mean equality not just in civil and political rights, but also in social rights (like education and employment) that let a person actually live with dignity — and he saw social class as a 'system of inequality' that citizenship is supposed to counter. When social and economic inequality remains severe, formally equal rights are not enough on their own to guarantee genuine equality.
This is exactly why real steps like the 2004 national street vendor policy, or the Supreme Court's Olga Tellis judgment (holding that the right to life under Article 21 includes a right to livelihood, so pavement dwellers cannot be evicted without alternative accommodation) mattered — they were attempts to close the gap between a right that exists on paper and a right people can actually use.
All citizens can be granted the same formal rights, but their ability to actually exercise those rights depends on their real economic and social circumstances. India's urban poor and slum-dwellers show this clearly: though equal citizens in law, their poverty, insecure housing, and lack of a fixed address make even a basic right like voting hard to exercise in practice, and a decent standard of living (a social right, in T. H. Marshall's sense) remains out of reach for many — which is why steps like the 2004 street vendor policy and the Olga Tellis Supreme Court judgment (right to livelihood/shelter under Article 21) were needed to make existing rights more genuinely usable.
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