“Northing Must be Fastened to the Ground”: Mobile Informal Work in Indian Cities

Abstract

This thesis investigates how the architecture of regulation addressing street vendors’ livelihood protection in India relies on either enforcing mobility or suspending it. It proposes that narratives of spatiality must accompany the contestations around the regularization of informal work. Using the city of Chandigarh as an empirical case, the thesis poses a set of policy considerations that link workers’ conditions of spatial, social, and economic informality, through a framework of ‘dignified work’. In doing so, it addresses the limited scholarly accounts on the dimensions of informal street work in India and aims to move the discussion around formalization beyond the economic rhetoric of public policy.