A Range of Informality Across Cities and Slums: Understanding Precarity in Patna’s Slums Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article proposes a framework for understanding why slum residents are particularly vulnerable to economic downturns. We centre evidence from Bihar’s capital city, Patna, to examine how downturns are experienced more severely in some cities and slums than others. We argue slums are zones of pervasive informality, remaining largely disconnected from formal institutions and dependent on discretionary supports. But the extent of informality, and vulnerability, varies within and across cities. Relative to those in the cities we compare to, Patna’s slum residents are poorer, less upwardly mobile and have weaker property rights and shallower institutional connections. We argue this makes them particularly vulnerable to downward shocks and we present evidence from the case of the coronavirus pandemic to show that they experienced this disaster particularly severely. Our results have important policy implications: in general, slum residents require greater policy and institutional support, but there is important variation in their vulnerability and needs within and across cities. Moreover, while most research on slums focuses on mega- and first-tier cities, we emphasize the urgent need for more attention to second- and third-tier cities—where the degree of informality, and consequently, the vulnerability to downward spirals, can be greater.