Licenses for Sale: on brokerage, bureaucracy, and driving in India
November 13th, 2025 | 12 PM CST
Presentation Description
In this talk, I explore the meaning and function of a driver’s license – and how it mediates motorists’ relationships to the state. Marking an inaugural moment in the relationship between a motorist and the regulatory power of the state, driving licensing process is a rite of passage that, scholars have argued, turns drivers into driver-citizens. Becoming a licensed driver is contingent upon an evaluation and examination by the state that one is not just fit to drive but can enact an embodied obedience to traffic rules and laws. At the same time, it is an open secret in India that the state agency in charge of issuing driver’s licenses – the Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) – are hotbeds of corruption and that “anybody” can get a driver’s license for the right price. What happens, this chapter asks, when the permission to drive is on sale? How does bribery structure attitudes towards driving and state authority? Leveraging ethnographic field notes from my own experience of obtaining a drivers’ license in Hyderabad, complemented by several interviews with motorists of different social classes, I show how bribery and brokerage at the licensing office produces and reproduces long-held expectations and ideas about bureaucratic corruption in India which shapes motoring bodies’ dispositions towards the road, the state, and official rhetoric around road safety.
About the Speaker
Sneha Annavarapu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, with a joint appointment in the South Asian Studies Programme. Her research interests centre around the politics of transportation, infrastructure, class relations, and gender in contemporary Indian cities and, more recently, Singapore. She is currently working on a book project titled On The Move: the politics of driving in urban India.
For more information, please visit www.snehanna.com