Neighborhood Associations and the Urban Poor: India’s Slum Development Committees

•Neighborhood development committees are common in the slums of two Indian cities.•Development committees provide an associational medium for making claims on the state.•Registered development committees provide slums a degree of organizational formality.•Slum dwellers use associations and patronage networks to demand public services.•Slum development committees are often multi-ethnic yet under-representative of women. How do slum dwellers organize and demand development from the state? The politics of urban slums has primarily been examined through the lens of clientelism. In contrast, associational activity has gone relatively understudied in these spaces, reserved instead as a focus of inquiry for middle-class neighborhoods. Drawing on twenty months of fieldwork and an original survey of 1,925 residents across 80 settlements in the north Indian cities of Jaipur, Rajasthan and Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, I find that local associations are prevalent features of political life in India’s slums. These associations—colloquially referred to as katchi basti vikas samitiyaan, or slum development committees—afford residents a degree of organizational formality in otherwise informal spaces. They provide a medium for making individual and collective claims on the state. While patron–client networks do pervade slums, this study demonstrates that vertical ties co-exist with horizontal associations, producing a multi-dimensional space in which residents mitigate risk and demand development.