[Reader-list] I-fellow first post

rakshat hooja rakshat at gmail.com
Fri Jan 13 21:52:21 IST 2006


Hello everyone.  Well its first-post time for the new I-fellows of Sarai and
I am pretty excited about sharing my research ideas and progress with
everyone on the list but first one is "required" to get over with the
formalities of introducing oneself. I am Rakshat and I hope to someday live
on my own farm, look after my livestock and write fiction. But at present I
am working on my PhD (at the Center for Studies in Science Policy,
Jawaharlal Nehru University) on commodification and de-facto privatization
of water in urban areas and the role technology has played creating this
scenario (can not remember the exact title at the moment but I am sure it
will be mentioned in some of my future postings!) Earlier in life I was
making a habit of changing universities (Delhi University for graduation,
Jammia Millia Islamia for the Masters, JNU for M.Phil)  as well as research
topics (history of video games, watershed development and management,
livestock, open source software [my apologies to those who use FLOSS or free
software], and now urban water supply. Ok enough about ME, on to introducing
the research.



My proposed research is titled "Urban Stakeholder Activism and the Role of
Resident Welfare Associations". In many of the metropolitan cities of
IndiaResident Welfare Associations (RWAs) have become important social
institutions that play an increasingly significant role in the lives of the
residents of these areas. In New Delhi the RWAs have become very active and
over time most of the RWAs have been registered under the Societies Act. The
Government of Delhi has also launched a "Bhagadari" scheme where the
authorities form partnerships with the local RWAs for carrying out many
activities. The purpose of my planed study is try and understand, or figure
out, what makes the RWAs tick. The plan is to document the activities and
functioning of a few select (selected not randomly but deliberately) RWAs in
order to understand why they are successful/not successful.



The key questions examined will be those of the reasons for participation by
the residents and possibility of the RWA being a viable platform for
stakeholder activism in the existing urban political set-up.



The idea for this research originated while talking to and observing the
activities organized by the RWAs of the C8 and C9 Vasant Kunj localities in New
Delhi as part of planning out my PhD data collection (well sometimes my
research topics do have some connections ;-). It was quite obvious that RWAs
had become important agencies of community and stake-holder activism and I
decided to explore this phenomena further.



The proposed research has started off as a sociological study of the
interactions and interrelations existing within the selected RWAs in Vasant
Kunj, Munirka and R K Puram as well as between the RWAs and the outside
society including the Government, private agencies, other RWAs etc. As the
research progresses questions like the response of and the success in
dealing with the problems faced by the residents by the RWAs as well as the
success of the RWAs as political pressure groups will be looked at. The
organizational set up of the RWAs will also be examined.

* *

It is proposed to use a number of tools and methods to collect qualitative
as well as quantitative primary data for the above mentioned research.
Participant observation will be used to study the RWA of C9 Vasant Kunj.  In
order to study the other RWAs in South Delhi as well as Jaipur (I am living
there for a few weeks right now so this made sense) a survey would be
designed. The survey would be supplemented with focused interviews with key
informants.



The primary data would be complemented with a review of newspaper coverage
of RWA activism in Delhi and over the last two years. For this the Internet
archives of the newspapers as well as the paper copies available in
Libraries would be used.



At the end of the research in August 2006 one hopes to not only have a
presentable research paper but also an audio documentary, which I hope will
be a lot of  fun to record and edit.



Till the next time



Rakshat


--
--------------
Please use Firefox as your web browser. Its protects you from spyware and is
also a very feature rich browser.
www.firefox.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20060113/2e3ac628/attachment.html 


More information about the reader-list mailing list