Hyderabad: Hyderabad's notorious potholes and uneven road surfaces serve as powerful indicators of urban inequality and shape political consciousness among the city's residents, argued a study published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. The research, conducted by Sneha Annavarapu over six years of ethnographic fieldwork, demonstrates how everyday encounters with bumpy roads generate tangible experiences of state neglect and social stratification.

Sociologist Sneha Annavarapu, Assistant Professor from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. The study, titled "Surface Tensions: Roads, Potholes and the Embodied Politics of Driving in Urban India," which draws on extensive ride-along observations and interviews with motorists, particularly autorickshaw drivers and motorcycle riders who experience road conditions most acutely through their vehicles and bodies.

Embodied Inequality

Dr. Annavarapu's research captures how the physical experience of navigating Hyderabad's roads produces distinct sensory understandings of urban inequality. As one autorickshaw driver noted in the study, "Rich people fly, even on these roads. The cars that they drive in are so superior that you don't feel these potholes or bumps. Motorcyclists, cyclists, and autorickshaw drivers, we feel every bump on the road."

The research identifies three key ways potholes become political, generating narratives of state corruption, enabling experiences of inequality through pain and risk, and spawning citizen engagement and claims-making.

Areas housing political and economic elites receive regular maintenance: Study

The study documents significant disparities in road maintenance between different parts of the city. While arterial roads and areas housing political and economic elites receive regular maintenance, internal roads in older neighborhoods and economically marginalized areas, particularly in southern Hyderabad, remain chronically neglected.

“In Hyderabad, some roads are first-class roads and other roads are worse than village roads!” told the researcher. “The best roads are all these roads that important people use, roads where the important people live,” added an interviewee.

Monsoon Revelations

The research highlights how seasonal monsoon rains act as a ‘revelatory force,’ exposing poor construction quality and resurrecting public discourse about corruption. As roads deteriorate annually during the rains, residents see this as confirming their suspicions about kickback schemes between contractors and officials.

The study also examines how motorists develop ‘infrastructural aptitude’ by memorizing pothole locations and adjusting driving techniques as individual coping mechanisms for state infrastructural failures.

Dr. Annavarapu's approach treats driving as ‘a key mode of experiencing urban inequality’ and analyzes how road surfaces generate political subjectivities. By focusing on the embodied experience of jolts, jerks, and vibrations, the research offers a sensory methodology for understanding urban governance and citizenship.