3: Street Regulation and Bureaucracy: Encounters, Time and Identities

The street in South Asia is the site of intense regulation and resistance. Based on ongoing fieldwork with small-scale transport operators, bureaucrats, and lawyers in diverse sites across Delhi, in my project I examine how regulation is framed, implemented and contested through various ways, political, legal and bureaucratic.

While the post-colonial bureaucracy has many continuities with the colonial bureaucracy, in recent times there have been some fundamental changes in how bureaucratic activity is carried out. With the liberalization of the Indian economy, the pressures of ‘leanness’, intense media reporting, public private partnerships and court interventions have dominated policy-making. In this panel, I discuss the everyday activities of transport bureaucrats: framing street regulations, citizen encounters, and the pressures brought by diverse groups of operators and politicians.

In this context, focusing on the work, careers and milieu of lower level bureaucrats, I explore how their everyday activities interact with their professional identities and social relationships, through the rubrics of ‘bureaucratic encounters’ and ‘bureaucratic time’. I also explore how these categories--identities, relationships and everyday activities--are characterized by diverse and often discordant pulls: relationships between different cadres, external public persona, professional competencies, court hearings, vigilance investigations and respect commanded from clerks.