What Do We Owe Each Other? Operationalizing Social Protections with Gautam Bhan

"A global pandemic has brought renewed attention to an old question: what do we owe each other? " The crisis of the COVID-19 brought this question to a head, and with it, calls for rethinking a “new social contract” that would outlast the emergency measures, a social contract rooted in mutual aid, yes, but also a stronger, more active, welfare state. It also made painfully urgent to consider the process by which these measures were operationalized; that is, by which the intentions of the state to reach the most marginalized groups of urban residents were put into practice, given that these resdents and workers were also the least visible, often informal, and therefore illegible to the state. Gautam Bhan's article "Operationalising Social Protection: Reflections from Urban India" addresses this very question. Drawing from empirical cases at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bhan explores how the social contract plays out through social protection systems, arguing that how we deliver both existing and new entitlements is as important as deciding what entitlements urban residents should be entitled to. We discuss four challenges: (a) residence as an operational barrier; (b) workplaces (thru informal worker orgs) as sites of delivery; (c) working w worker orgs as delivery infrastructures; and (d) building systems of recognition and registration of informal workers. Bhan also points out how the different trajectories of Brazil and India changed inequality, finding that the ecosystem of social protections (in education, housing, cash transfers and the right to the city) backed by social movements rose the conditions for the bottom 30% of Brazilians. For Bhan, “operational knowledge is essential to imagine what Simone and Pieterse (2017) describe as ‘grounded and speculative alternatives’” - and in this text, he reveals operationalization to be a profound reflection on putting solidarity in action. Gautam Bhan is an urbanist whose work focuses on urban poverty, inequality, social protection and housing. He is currently Associate Dean of the School of Human Development, at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements School, and the Senior Lead in Academics and Researhc at this same institution. He holds a PhD in urban studies and planning from the University of California, Berkeley. Pranav Kuttaiah is a researcher and writer from Bengaluru, India currently pursuing a PhD in City and Regional Planning (with designated emphases in Political Economy and Science and Technology Studies) at UC Berkeley.