Abstract

The city’s relationship with its margins in the context of how state affects the lives of the people has increasingly become an important site of research—especially how pressures of governance split the nature of power and violence of the state at the margins vis-à-vis the city—where the experience of the state and how it operates is starkly different from how it unfolds for the middle-classes of the city. Education in this context has been an under researched area. This research aims to examine how education unfolds in the informal settlement (basti) of South Delhi. Literature on education has established how it plays a hegemonic role in maintaining the existing status quo. The project explores the role that the educational processes at the margins of the city play in maintaining the subservient status of margins vis-à-vis city. It aims to understand the lived experiences of children and examines the wider public meanings of education in its relationship with the state apparatus.