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Papers by Swasti Vardhan Mishra

International Journal of Health Planning and Management, 2020

of the total cases were experienced in cities spanning over 210 countries. India was in the same ... more of the total cases were experienced in cities spanning over 210 countries. India was in the same league; 79% of its total cases on May 17, 2020, were from only 30 cities. 2 With more than 5000 cities and 170 cities with a population of more than 1 lakh, this figure was startling. Sensing this, the federal government announced a countrywide lock-down from March 25, 2020. After 68 days of unabated lockdown, India initiated its lifting in a phased manner. The Unlock 1 started on the first of June 2020.

Habitat International, 2020

The global pandemic has an inherently urban character. The UN-Habitat's publication of a Response... more The global pandemic has an inherently urban character. The UN-Habitat's publication of a Response Plan for mollification of the SARS-CoV-2 based externalities in the cities of the world testifies to that. This article takes the UN-Habitat report as the premise to carry out an empirical investigation in the four major metro cities of India. The report's concern with the urban character of the pandemic has underlined the role of cities in disease transmission. In that wake, the study demarcates factors at the sub-city level that tend to jeopardize the two mandatory precautionary measures during COVID-19-Social Distancing and Lockdown. It investigates those factors through a Covid Vulnerability Index. The Index devised with the help of Analytic Hierarchy Process de-marcates the low, moderate, high, and very high vulnerable city sub-units. Secondly, UN-Habitat's one of the major action areas is evidence-based knowledge creation through mapping and its analysis. In our study, we do it at a granular scale for arriving at a more nuanced understanding. Thus, in harmony with the UN-habitat's we take the urban seriously and identify the gaps that need to be plugged for the pandemic cities of now and of the future.

Urban deprivation is an epistemic tool to study the geographic concentration of deprivation in di... more Urban deprivation is an epistemic tool to study the geographic concentration of deprivation in different neighborhoods of a city. Studies have long associated with neighborhood research and have viewed it from multiple perspectives. Most of these researches look into ways how other factors affect a neighborhood or how a neighborhood affects other factors, commonly using global statistical measures to make inferences that only give a summation of local variations. However, in tune with Lewis Mumford' contention, this article proposes a local measure based index of deprivation that not only gives a neighborhood level results but also takes neighboring effects into consideration. Neighboring effects maintain that a locality seldom exists as a discrete entity rather its characteristic is made up as an amalgamation of multiple characteristics of the contiguous localities. Thus, in this study, an Index of deprivation is devised for the municipal wards of Kolkata city using Geographically Weighted Principal Component Analysis (GWPCA) loadings and compared to that devised from Principal Component Analysis (PCA) loadings. It is found that GWPCA accounts effectively for local variations and neighboring effects at the neighborhood scale. However, both the Indices have pinpointed particular wards that are at the extreme end of the urban deprivation scale irrespective of the measure used.

Slum and land have a dialectical relationship. A land that is a slum embodies a filthy and dirty ... more Slum and land have a dialectical relationship. A land that is a slum embodies a filthy and dirty territory that hinders the aesthetic competitiveness of a global city. On the other hand, a slum as a land opens opportunities for multiple uses that promise resurrection of world-class ambition. However, in a situation of tight regulation, informal habitations are often could not be forcefully evicted for this dream to come true. In such an event more conciliatory, yet shrewd, practices are adopted to appropriate land from the informally residing community. A number of tools ply to get the work done, among which geography, cartography, and manipulation of statutory laws are more prominent. Taking Kolkata as a case, I wish to situate ongoing appropriation of central urban land as mediated by these three factors. In Kolkata, while forceful evictions take place on informally occupied land both at the fringe and the central part of the city with vague statutory laws, in the tightly regulated central part of the city, appropriation replaces expropriation, accompanied by a more regular invocation of slum in policy and governmental discourses. The study adds to the dispossession literature by underscoring the role of mediating factors in appropriating the central urban land that could not be coercively expropriated, yet needed for claiming a slot in the world-class city register.

The present article builds upon the idea of political society to read a red-light district in the... more The present article builds upon the idea of political society to read a red-light district in the city of Kolkata. The district is the biggest in Asia and it has given its name to the biggest movement of the sex workers—Sonagachi Project. This article is an attempt to view the subaltern space as a resistant space and a political society by highlighting their habitat, economic and political roles. Being outside the ambit of citizenry, these societies exert their aspiration for acknowledgement of their anomaly. Their present situation has a colonial legacy that disempowers them but from which they have started recovering. Though their role of emancipation was also present in the colonial times, it got more explicit in the current decades. However, the emancipator journey is often not linear and shows signs of sporadic bumpiness. Highlighting on such events and histories, the article relies upon archival references, news and informal observation of the place.

从政治社会角度解读加尔各答性交易空间本文从政治社会的理念出发解读加尔各答城市中的红灯区。该地区是亚洲最大的红灯区，而且规模最大的性工作者运动——索纳加奇项目——也以它的名字命名。文中通过突出它们在居住、经济和政治等方面的作用，试图把底层空间（subaltern space）看作一个抵抗性空间和政治社会。在普通公民范围以外的这些社会阶层愿意承认他们的差异。他们目前的情况是殖民遗留问题让他们失去信心，当然他们已经开始慢慢复苏。但是，他们的思想解放作用也停留在殖民时代，这在过去十年中表现得更加明确。然而，解放思想的过程往往不是线性的，而是呈现出分裂的迹象。本文通过引用存档的参考资料、新闻以及对地方非正式的观察来突出这些事件和历史。

The viewpoint is about understanding the way ideas of grey space and crypto urbanism converge to ... more The viewpoint is about understanding the way ideas of grey space and crypto urbanism converge to define multiple spaces of urban living. Studying the spaces of prostitution in the city of Kolkata (former Calcutta), the paper situates the convergence of both the ideas to understand such spaces. Being at the threshold of acceptance and unacceptance, and whiteness and blackness, the studied space sustain itself through its political agency role – thwarting, engaging and contesting the prevalent order of things.

Looking at maps as instruments of sovereignty and evaluating them with the tools of critical cart... more Looking at maps as instruments of sovereignty and evaluating them with the tools of critical cartography, this commentary analyses the unbalanced implementation of India’s National Map Policy. The policy ostensibly directs its energy towards regulating and safe-keeping of internal sovereignty.

In this paper Needs theory is being redefined as the foundation block of the Quality of life (Qol... more In this paper Needs theory is being redefined as the foundation block of the Quality of life (Qol) structure and as a starting point in the lexicon of Qol philosophies. It is argued that the elementary and the most important characteristic to define Qol is always the needs-based approach – through its merging with the means-end dialectic. Keeping this epistemology intact, Ascribed Qol (aQol) is defined as that Qol which transfuses from mother to her child by meeting the needs of a mother and through that meeting the needs of her child. Also, the disjuncture between global and local estimations is highlighted, reflecting on its implications for policy prescriptions. Referring to Mosley–Chen’s framework for child survival, empirical study has been made for eight socially and demographically backward states (EAG (Empowered Action Group) states) of India to justify the idea of aQol. The OLS technique and geographically weighted regression, using the data from the Annual Health Survey, 2010–2011, were used for conforming to the tenets of the framework. It is empirically argued that within the aQol frame mother’s education has the most influencing role in securing survival of her infant vis-a-vis institutional delivery and full antenatal checkup.

Book Review on Indian Cities by Annapurna Shaw, Apr 2014

Challenges of Urbanization in the 21st Century- Vol. 1, 2013

Gender roles and Caste effects in Indian Social Setup

INTEGRAL REVIEW, Feb 5, 2013

Though much criticized, the Indian blackout in July 2012 also possesses another side of a coin:... more Though much criticized, the Indian blackout in July 2012 also possesses
another side of a coin: the extent to which the blackout has served on the fronts of unity,
cohesiveness, and equality is highly explicit. The currently ill-functioning Indian
administration is identified as being at an intersection of a transition, a transition to more
administrative efficiency. The ideas proposed in the essay are intended to perpetuate
thoughts of optimism and faith through a constructively-framed perspective.

Journal of new frontiers in spatial concepts

The paper aims at achieving two objectives, firstly, to acquaint the researchers in the field of ... more The paper aims at achieving two objectives, firstly, to acquaint the researchers in the field of spatial demography with the techniques of residential segregation; pattern of population distribution based on the concept of spatial statistics and secondly, the practical evaluation of the techniques through real life data. The study queries about any residential segregation and pattern of location of the scheduled caste (SC) and the scheduled tribe (ST) population in Kolkata city by concentrating on the measures of Entropy Index (EI), Atkinson’s Index, Absolute Centralization Index (ACE) and the Global and Local Spatial Autocorrelation (SA) measures of Moran’s I and LISA. The outcome of the study clarifies the fact that caste and race based segregation is being diluted in the wake of Indian urbanization and the spatial clustering tendency of the Concerned Social Group (CSG) is as mild.

This paper aims at evaluating the situation of the elderly dependency in different states of Indi... more This paper aims at evaluating the situation of the elderly dependency in different states of India from the perspectives of demography, economy and the changes in the life expectancy. The situation is evaluated through a conventional measure of old age dependency ratio (OADR) and an economic measure of old age economic dependency rate (OAEDR) and a latest measure of prospective old age dependency ratio (POADR).The use of census data, 2001 and state wise life tables (2004-2008) are made to arrive at conclusions. The focus of the paper is on emphasising the point that elders are not burdens, in spite of the fact that they contribute at very low mark to the economy, they are socially an asset. Few suggestions are provided by which dependency could be disburdened and old age security can be strengthened. At the end, few of the government policies to counter the old age insecurity are provided to look at the presently functioning administrative machinery.

Book Reviews by Swasti Vardhan Mishra

Contemporary South Asia, 2019