Taxi Drivers, Infrastructures, and Urban Change in Globalizing Mumbai

Abstract

This paper focusses on taxis and the taxi industry in relationship to crisis and change in contemporary Mumbai. Through an ethnographic exploration of Mumbai's taxi modernization project, changes in the material aspects of the taxi and taxi system, and a community of hereditary taxi drivers known as chillia, I examine ways that infrastructure is understood, practiced, and contested. Focusing on how chillia drivers negotiate livelihoods in the context of contemporary moves to modernize, deregulate, and privatize the taxi trade, I argue that while rationalizing imperatives of infrastructural modernization are vital to jumpstarting urban change, they contend with multiple and shifting meanings that infrastructure building takes on among various actors in the city. Mumbai's taxi modernization project illuminates how negotiations around these meanings have the capacity to shape and redirect urban change both from “above” and “below.” [Urban Infrastructure; Globalization; Labor; Transportation; South Asia; Taxis; India]

Transportation and Change through an Anthropological Lens

“…In Lima, informal minibuses serving 85 percent of the commuters were finally legalized by the government due to failure of public buses (Uzzell 1987). A clash of views about modernity and regulation between public administrators and transport providers threatened the livelihoods of hereditary taxi drivers in Mumbai (Bedi 2016) and three-wheel taxi drivers in Ethiopia (Mains and Kinfu 2017). Contestations between officials and transport service drivers escalated to protests on the part of motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok (Sopranzetti 2014) and the three-wheel taxi drivers in Ethiopia confronting fuel shortage and fare reductions (Mains and Kinfu 2017).…”

From the taxi drivers’ rear-view mirror: masculinity, marginality and sexual violence in India’s capital city, Delhi

“…Given that the working-class migrant men I focus on are taxi drivers, I engage with some scholarship on automobility (Bedi 2016a and2016b;Choi 2018;Jain 2005;Urry 2007) to make sense of the connections between working-class masculinity, public transport, ruralto-urban male migration, spatiality and neoliberal urban transformation. On the links between automobility and masculinity, scholars like Jain (2005) and Urry (2007) argue that the driver's seat is seen as (re)asserting the male as the family head in control of its destiny.…”

Joyriding: Making Place in Nairobi’s Matatu Sector

“…This social element of the matatu aesthetic forms a social web of infrastructure where the networks of matatu workers form a type of reputation for the community—some positive, some negative. This large workforce shapes the mobility of Nairobi; they often come from the communities they serve, and as Tarini Bedi argues, taxi drivers not only are intimately related to the material infrastructure of the city but also the social infrastructure of “sociality, labor, migration and politics” (, 392).…”