The year 2026 appears so much like 2016, when we were made to stand in lines with the promise that once the new notes were in circulation, things would change for the better, and in case they did not, the Prime Minister said he was ready to face any punishment. Now, Indians are standing in line for LPG cylinders.

But then again, you will find many who will say that the claims are exaggerated since they did not have to wait in line, which might be true. Not all of us must wait in line to have our dying relatives admitted to hospital or wait indefinitely to get a government-issued card that gives access to subsidised grains necessary for basic living.

But some of us do. And that difference, between those who wait and those who do not, is not merely a difference of luck or of temperament or even of effort. It is a difference written into the architecture of Indian cities. It is, if we are prepared to call it what it is, a form of structural violence. Not the violence of the baton or the bulldozer, though that, too, exists and has been extensively documented.

This is the quieter violence of the clock. It is the violence of the hour stolen in a queue, the afternoon lost in a government corridor, the morning surrendered to a water tanker that may or may not arrive. It accumulates invisibly, this violence, and it leaves no bruise that the courts can take note of as evidence.

Walk into a government hospital in any of our major cities on any ordinary morning and you will immediately understand something that no economic report will tell you plainly. The people sitting on the benches, on the floor, where there are no benches, have, in many cases, already been there for hours before the doctor arrives. They have come from distant localities, often by multiple modes of transport, having woken before sunrise. They will leave, in the best case, by afternoon. In the worst, they will return the next day. And the day after.

A 2022 study in Indian Journal of Community and Family Medicine found that longer waiting hours often discourage older people from attending healthcare facilities. The same study noted that in some healthcare centres, where the staff numbered fewer than 4, the wait time was upwards of 25 minutes, which added to the commuting time can easily add up to an hour or more. This is simply the time spent waiting to be seen.

For a daily wage labourer who earns only when he works, a few hours are not an inconvenience but rather the difference between eating and not eating that evening. The economics of the waiting room are never discussed in health policy because health policy tends to measure outcomes, mortality rates, vaccination coverage, beds per thousand, and not the invisible tax that the system levies on the bodies of those who use it.

It is the same at the ration shop. It is the same at the Regional Transport Office. It is the same at the tehsildar’s office where land records are corrected, at the Labour Commissioner’s office where wage disputes are registered, in court where a property case has been pending since the applicant’s father’s time. The Indian state, at its most quotidian, is experienced as a long corridor at the end of which sits a man who may or may not help you and who will certainly make you wait.

This is not bureaucratic inefficiency in the ordinary sense. Inefficiency suggests the system is trying and failing. What we have, in many of these institutions, is a system that is working exactly as it was designed to, which is to say, slowly, for some, and not at all for others.

Whose time has digitisation saved?

A 2019 report by Oxfam India found that women in the bottom income quintile spent, on an average, six hours a day on unpaid care and domestic work against less than one hour for women in the top quintile, and these figures do not even account for time spent in queues, in transit, in the various anterooms of bureaucracy. When you add it all up, the urban poor are, in a very literal sense, running out of time in a way that the urban wealthy simply are not.

We were told, and we told ourselves, that digitisation would fix this. JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile) was the trinity that would usher in an era of frictionless governance, where the poor would no longer have to stand before petty officials with folded hands. The app would replace the queue. The portal would dissolve the corridor. And to be fair, in some narrow registers, this has happened.

Booking an LPG cylinder, once requiring a trip to the dealership, is now achievable on a phone. Checking the status of a passport application no longer requires a physical visit to the Passport Seva Kendra. In these respects, yes, something has changed.

But the question that the cheerleaders of digital governance rarely ask is: changed for whom? The people who have been saved time by the UPI revolution, by the e-governance portals, by the app-based services—who are they?

They are, overwhelmingly, people who already possessed smartphones, stable internet connections, functional email addresses, and sufficient literacy in the language that the portal happens to operate in. In a country where smartphone ownership in the bottom two income quintiles remains significantly below 50 per cent, and where digital literacy among the rural-to-urban migrant population is, to put it generously, emergent, the digital queue is not a replacement of the physical queue. It is a parallel system, one that the already advantaged have migrated to, leaving the physical system more degraded, less funded, and more congested for those who have no alternative.

Phenomenon of the digital intermediary

There is also the phenomenon of the digital intermediary, which is perhaps the most cynical development in this story. Where the e-governance portal exists but is sufficiently complicated, or where the internet connection is insufficient, or where the language is wrong, a new industry has emerged: the Common Service Centre operator, the Aadhaar enrolment agent, the cybercafe owner who will fill your form for you, for a fee.

The fee is small by the standards of the middle class. By the standards of a daily wage worker, it is another tax on poverty. The state has outsourced the inconvenience, and the poor are paying, in money now as well as in time, for a service that was promised to them for free. Digital governance, in other words, has not reduced waiting. It has privatised it, routed it through new bottlenecks, and added a financial cost on top of the temporal one. The queue has not disappeared. It has merely been made less visible to those with the political and cultural influence to demand its elimination.

Temporal citizenship, and how it works

This brings us to what might be called temporal citizenship, the idea that full participation in the life of a city requires not just physical presence or legal status, but time. Sufficient, flexible, discretionary time. And that time, like income and space, is distributed in our cities in profoundly unequal ways. Consider the commute. In Delhi, the average commute time for workers in the informal sector, construction workers, domestic workers, street vendors, auto-rickshaw drivers, is between two and three hours each way because they live on the periphery, in the resettlement colonies and jhuggi clusters and unauthorised settlements that have been pushed further out with each successive wave of urban development.

The average commute for a professional in the same city, living in a gated community in Gurugram or Noida, might be 45 minutes, often in an air-conditioned car. Both begin their day at the same hour. But one of them arrives at work having spent significantly more time and energy simply getting there.

Over a working lifetime, this difference in commute time, 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, amounts to tens of thousands of hours. Hours that cannot be spent sleeping, or with one’s children, or reading, or doing anything other than being transported across a city that was not designed with this person in mind.

Then there is the question of working hours. The formal sector, for all its problems, offers what the informal sector generally does not: a defined end to the working day. A call-centre employee works her shift and then, in principle, she is free. For the domestic worker, the construction labourer, the street vendor, the working day is more elastic, more amenable to the demands of the employer, or the logic of piecework, or the vagaries of the weather.

And then, and we must say this clearly because it is always the first thing to be omitted, there is the time of women. The woman who wakes at 4 in the morning to light the stove, who walks to the borewell and back, who cooks and cleans and looks after children and elderly parents, and then goes out to work as a domestic worker in someone else’s house—this woman is effectively never off duty. Her time is the subsidy on which the entire household, and by extension the city’s economy, runs. And it is counted as nothing.

Temporal citizenship, then, is the possession of time that is genuinely yours, time you can use to rest, to participate in public life, to pursue any ambition beyond mere survival. By this measure, large portions of the urban poor are not full citizens of the cities they inhabit and build and clean and feed. They are present in the city, they are essential to it, but they do not have access to it in any meaningful sense beyond the instrumental. The city uses their time and does not return it.

Our standard metrics of urban inequality are spatial and economic. We count income. We count housing. We count access to sanitation and electricity and schools. These are important measures, and the data is damning enough. But income and space do not capture the whole of what is being lost, because time is different from money in one important respect: it cannot be saved for the future.

The hour spent in the ration queue is gone; it cannot be retrieved by any future windfall. This means that temporal inequality is, in a philosophical sense, more irrevocable than income inequality. The poor man who later becomes prosperous still cannot recover the years of his life spent waiting in government queues. Those years are structurally extracted. They are a form of primitive accumulation, not of capital, but of life.

If we were to develop a Temporal Inequality Index for Indian cities, measuring the time burdens carried by different income quintiles in accessing basic services, moving through the city, and fulfilling domestic obligations, I suspect we would find that the gap is not merely large but is, in many cities, widening. Every new private hospital that opens in Gurugram, every new express metro line that serves the business districts rather than the peripheral settlements, every online portal that assumes a smartphone and a stable connection—each of these developments quietly redistributes time from the poor to the comfortable.

This is not a conspiracy. No one sat in a room and decided that the working poor should lose years of their lives in queues. But the effect is the same as if they had. And the solution, therefore, cannot simply be one of intent or attitude, of asking the bureaucrat to be more efficient or the politician to be more sympathetic. It requires that time be treated as a resource that urban planning and governance have a responsibility to distribute justly. It requires that we ask, of every policy, project, and digital initiative not just how much it costs in money but how much it costs in time, and whose time it costs.

A city that takes years from the poor and hours from the rich is not a neutral city. It is not a city that has merely failed to serve everyone equally. It is a city that has made a choice, quietly, repeatedly, systemically, and that choice has a name. We have simply not been willing, yet, to say it aloud.

Ankush Pal is a sociologist trained at the London School of Economics, researching urban spatiality, caste epistemology, and social movements.

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