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2012, Ethnography
Infrastructural practices, made by the manipulations of pumps, pipes and hydraulic expertise, play a critical role in managing urban populations. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Mumbai, in this article I show how Muslim settlers in a northern suburb are being rendered abject residents of the city. Abjection isn’t not a lack of social and political entitlements, but a denial of them. As Muslim settlers are being pushed down to claim less desirable water through the deliberate inaction of city engineers and technocrats, this article shows the iterative process through which abjection is made through tenuous and contentious infrastructural connections between the government and the governed.
Cultural Anthropology
Pressure: The PoliTechnics of Water Supply in Mumbai2011 •
In Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city’s upper-class residents, the city’s settlers have to consistently demand that their w ater come on “time” and with “pressure. ” T aking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of politics, pumps, and pipes to get water. I show how these practices not only allow settlers to live in the city, but also produce what I call hydraulic citizenship—a form of belonging to the city made by effective political and technical connections to the city’s infrastructure. Yet, not all settlers are able to get water from the city water department. The outcomes of settlers’ efforts to access water depend on a complex matrix of socionatural relations that settlers make with city engineers and their hydraulic infrastructure. I show how these arrangements describe and produce the cultural politics of water in Mumbai. By focusing on the ways in which residents in a predominantly Muslim settlement draw water despite the state’s neglect, I conclude by pointing to the indeterminacy of water, and the ways in which its seepage and leakage make different kinds of politics and publics possible in the city.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 26, Issue 4, pp. 542–564. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01111.x
PRESSURE: The Politechnics of water supply in Mumbai by Nikhil AnandIn Mumbai, most all residents are delivered their daily supply of water for a few hours every day, on a water supply schedule. Subject to a more precarious supply than the city’s upper-class residents, the city’s settlers have to consistently demand that their water come on “time” and with “pressure.” Taking pressure seriously as both a social and natural force, in this article I focus on the ways in which settlers mobilize the pressures of politics, pumps, and pipes to get water. I show how these practices not only allow settlers to live in the city, but also produce what I call hydraulic citizenship—a form of belonging to the city made by effective political and technical connections to the city’s infrastructure. Yet, not all settlers are able to get water from the city water department. The outcomes of settlers’ efforts to access water depend on a complex matrix of socionatural relations that settlers make with city engineers and their hydraulic infrastructure. I show how these arrangements describe and produce the cultural politics of water in Mumbai. By focusing on the ways in which residents in a predominantly Muslim settlement draw water despite the state’s neglect, I conclude by pointing to the indeterminacy of water, and the ways in which its seepage and leakage make different kinds of politics and publics possible in the city.
In Hydraulic City, Nikhil Anand explores the politics of Mumbai's water infrastructure to demonstrate how citizenship emerges through the continuous efforts to control, maintain, and manage the city's water. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai's settlements, Anand found that Mumbai's water flows, not through a static collection of pipes and valves, but through a dynamic infrastructure built on the relations between residents, plumbers, politicians, engineers, and the 3,000 miles of pipe that bind them. In addition to distributing water, the public water network often reinforces social identities and the exclusion of marginalized groups, as only those actively recognized by city agencies receive legitimate water services. This form of recognition—what Anand calls "hydraulic citizenship"—is incremental, intermittent, and reversible. It provides residents an important access point through which they can make demands on the state for other public services such as sanitation and education. Tying the ways Mumbai's poorer residents are seen by the state to their historic, political, and material relations with water pipes, the book highlights the critical role infrastructures play in consolidating civic and social belonging in the city.
2020 •
In November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai-a new program to upgrade the city's water infrastructure. Amongst several initiatives was a proposal to connect new settlements to water lines regulated by prepaid meters. In this paper I focus on the surprising and unexpected appearance of the prepaid water meter in Mumbai to make two arguments. First, I argue that based on the particular technopolitical history of Mumbai's water infrastructure, the neoliberal technology that was the prepaid meter represented not a withdrawal, but an extension of state services in the city. Second, I argue for an attention to the accreted and relational politics produced by infrastructural assemblages. The politics of technical devices or infrastructure are not discrete and singular, nor are these contained by the meter. Instead, the political effects of the meter are plural, and emerge from the relations between the meter and the accreted materials, histories, and rationali-ties already embedded and at work in infrastructural systems.
In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and social life that form hydraulic infrastructures in Mumbai trouble the audit cultures of neoliberal government. While scholars have recently drawn attention to the generativity of ignorance in the making of the state, in this article I argue that ignorance is not only a technology of politics, produced and managed by municipal water engineers and their subjects. Leakages, and the ignorances of leakages, are also enabled by the vital materiality of the city’s infrastructure. As engineers work hard to improvise resolutions to the leakages they can fix, and ignore the thousands of others they cannot, the processes of leakage always exceed the control of the city’s government. As such, the uncertain appearances of leakage in Mumbai not only provide the grounds for the work of the state. Leakages also constantly disrupt governmental projects in ways that make the water department vulnerable both to the claims of marginalized subjects and to new reform projects in the city.
Potential of the Private Sector in Providing Water to the Urban Poor: A Case Study of Mumbai Slums
Potential of the Private Sector in Providing Water to the Urban Poor: A Case Study of Mumbai Slums2016 •
While allowing great real estate profits, Mumbai’s market liberalization reforms failed to address the low- income housing shortage, causing the growth of slums which are now home to nearly half of Mumbai’s residents. The marketization of land rights led to the improvised construction of unplanned buildings, causing a mismatch between the over ground landscape and the deteriorating underground water infrastructure. In 1995, an electoral promise established a cutoff date which determines slums’ eligibility to rehabilitation schemes. Settlements built after this cutoff date are “unauthorized” and deprived of legal connections to the municipal water supply. While access to municipal water in most Mumbai slums is inadequate in terms of reliability, quality and quantity, the situation is worse for these unauthorized neighborhoods which represent nearly half of Mumbai’s slums. With little access to water through legal connections, slum dwellers turn to the informal sector for their daily supply, and have to pay up to 15% of their income on water which is often contaminated. According to a joint study by the World Health Organization and UNICEF published in 2009, « some 386,600 children die in India every year of diarrhea, with contaminated water being the main source of contamination ». Considering the public sector’s failure in providing sufficient access to clean water to millions of slum dwellers willing to pay for better service, this report argues that the private sector can contribute to providing sustainable solutions for decentralized distribution models and household level purification systems, while contributing to the adoption of hygiene practices through social marketing.
This review forum stems from an author-meets-critics session on Austin Zeiderman’s Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá and Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai. The session was organized by Asher Ghertner and held at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Boston, MA. The forum includes reviews by Malini Ranganathan, Diane Davis, and AbdouMaliq Simone, with an introduction by Asher Ghertner and responses from the authors. Read the entire collection of essays at: http://societyandspace.org/2017/11/28/endangered-city-by-austin-zeiderman-and-hydraulic-city-by-nikhil-anand-review-forum/
In scholarly and popular texts, Mumbai is invoked as an iconic example of the problem of urban informal settlements in the twenty-first century. While such representations oscillate between tropes of accommodation and marginalization, they often obfuscate the compromised and historical successes of settler politics in the city. In this paper, the authors use an international urbanization conference as a starting point for exploring Mumbai settlers’ housing practices. They examine the processes through which emergent forms of inclusion have been conceptually unhinged from longstanding struggles against inequality. By examining the complex interplay of housing politics, social mobilization, and municipal policy in Mumbai, the paper argues for more careful attention to new regimes of governing that accompany aspirations for “inclusion” in the cities of the urban age.
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