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The present paper explores the pathways of citizenship for migrants in the context of the metropolitan cities of India. With the onset of neoliberalisation, urban migration has increased manifold in India and it is very recently that their ‘existence’ has actually came to light owing to the enormity of the pandemic covid-19. The article focuses on the political and social strategies employed by migrants to attain and extend their rights of citizenship and the way they navigate through the complex system of citizenship in the country which is predominately class dependent. It aims to investigate how migrants use networking as a strategy to extend their citizenship rights highlighting that citizenship is not just a legal status, but also a social and political concept that is continuously negotiated and contested in an urban setting. Although recent research has emphasised the importance of networks in shaping and sustaining migration, there are very few that explain how these networks work within the institutional system and how they vary across various levels of migration flows and across policy contexts.

Methodologically, both qualitative and quantitative survey methods have been employed to study the lived experience of the migrant workers in the peri-urban areas where specific emphasis on the photographic images of the city offered additional meanings to the textual understanding of the relationship between the migrants and the urban. The combination of participatory visual methods with a traditional ethnographic approach made it possible to understand ‘urban’ from a different perspective while the juxtaposition of photographs with text is expected to open-up new arenas to the epistemological foundation of migration studies.