EXPERT FIXERS: Bureaucratic Informality, Brokerage and the Politics of Land in Mumbai

Sangeeta Banerji

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2025, vol. 49, issue 3, 609-631

Abstract: Based on ethnographic fieldwork within the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), this article illustrates the ‘field of fixing’, a brokerage structure that operates alongside Mumbai's urban bureaucracy. Scholars of Southern urbanism have extensively written about the role of informalized state action in producing an unequal cityscape. Exploring a disaggregated view of this state space in the megacity of Mumbai, this article turns attention instead to the ‘paralegal’ or the ‘field of fixing’, a liminal space between the state, market and society dictating access to the city in postcolonial India. The expert fixers in this space manipulate and maintain the real estate industry's relationship with Mumbai's urban bureaucracy. This article highlights the practices of six such fixers—the follow‐up boy, the watcher, the paper expert, the regulation expert, the regulation strategy expert and the liaisoning architect by following the movement of files seeking bureaucratic approvals for land development in Mumbai, elucidating a predatory politics that ensures the success of real‐estate developers in the megacity.

Date: 2025
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