Published in Mumbai Mirror on Jan 13, 2009

One of the most insidious changes taking place in our world these days is to do with auditing. Everything and every body gets quantified, measured and valued in as numerically accurate terms as possible. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern elaborates this in her edited book ‘Audit Culture’, which should be read by every philanthropist, bureaucrat, and policy maker. She refers to social and cultural auditing as reductive and destructive. It forces educational institutions to devalue learning and to privilege acquisition of degrees and certificates. It makes donor agencies transform the idea of social change into a snake and ladder game. It makes governments and bureaucrats even more powerful than they are. They decide what is good for everyone – especially those who are deemed incapable of making decisions on their own.

Even activists and social leaders fall into the auditing trap all the time. Though they work through its reverse logic. They flatten every aspiration into the denominator that they think is appropriate for everyone. To them, the poor or the unprivileged must be treated as one – or they are being unjust to their comrades. They must calculate their strength in strict numerical terms and present themselves as a united front.

No wonder when the city authorities tried to deal with housing shortage for the poor they viewed the whole exercise as a massive auditing task. The need to do surveys was considered the most logical consequence of this process.

However, the surveys soon became tools of control – so that families could be relocated into a pre-fabricated notion of an ideal housing size. A size that was audited into existence in the meanest way possible. The basic idea being; how can you squeeze all the poor in the city in the smallest possible area so that the cost of building their homes gets subsidized by the rich who then choose their own homes as per their means.

The Kolis of Mumbai complained that the slum rehabilitation process would leave them high and dry – since they had inherited larger homes but lived in village like habitats that got labeled as slums by a myopic government And would now have to be re-located in the standard norm of a 300 whatever square feet flat. Their complaint was seen to be unfair by everyone – the state, as well as the housing activists..

This is blatantly unfair. The poor of the city seem to have lost their right to even assert their own needs as per their distinct histories.

Recently, members of several BMC chawls, among them the Omkar, Rang Tarang and Ram Gunta Co-operative Housing Societies have started an agitation requesting that they be exempt from the slum rehabilitation scheme since their housing histories could not be collapsed into the category ‘slums’. They feel they have the resources to develop their own tenements in a manner that fits into their middle-class aspirations and can be created through the existing land size that they have.

It is only in our beloved city that everyone, the state as well as housing activists would consider such a positive, straightforward request as being unfair. It is after all, a city where the rich are exclusively allowed the sinful luxury of inequality, while the poor have to celebrate their chaste egalitarian ideals through willful restraint. They must never challenge the precarious balance of equality among the united nation of the poor. Which of course, is the surest way of ensuring they always remain so.