Living on the Edge: Mapping Homeless Women’s Mobilization in Kolkata, India

Paromita Chakravarti

Chapter 8 in Women, Political Struggles and Gender Equality in South Asia, 2014, pp 117-137 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract New social movements, led by civil society groups, such as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab spring or the youth unrest in Bangladesh, have been gaining ground in different parts of the world. Meanwhile successful anti-corruption and anti-rape agitations and environmental movements led by local people have been emerging in India. While the mass support for these protests seems unprecedented, Nivedita Menon has traced them to ‘a longer history of non-party activism’ that she locates in the citizen’s initiatives of the 1980s.1 At this time, disappointed with partisan politics, and governmental apathy and corruption, small groups or broad alliances of organizations took up issues of civic rights, freedom and democracy. Urbanism constituted one of these early social movements in which problems of livelihood, shelter, exploitation and police brutality affecting the urban poor — slum dwellers, homeless people, street vendors and hawkers — were highlighted. However, these issues — and particularly urban homelessness — have gathered a new momentum in the past decade.

Keywords: Gender Equality; Homeless People; Homeless Woman; Indian City; Political Society (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:gdechp:978-1-137-39057-8_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137390578

DOI: 10.1057/9781137390578_8

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Gender, Development and Social Change from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().