State, Governance and Urban Poor: Insights from Visakhapatnam City

Abstract

In the post-liberalization period in India, the state has undertaken ventures in collaboration with private actors in the name of development and urbanization. People losing land, livelihood and being uprooted from their settlements is quite common in the context of states with emerging urban spaces, whether in the form of infringement on farm lands for the setting up of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) or the removal of slums for city development. While doing so, the state often invisibilises the concerns of a particular section of the population who then becomes victims to the process of ‘development’. The attempt in this chapter is to capture these ideas within the framework of statehood, governance strategies and the people by invoking both primary and secondary sources of data in the context of a fast growing urban centre, i.e. Visakhapatnam in the state of Andhra Pradesh.