‘Without water,there is no life’: Negotiating everyday risks and gendered insecurities in Karachi’s informal settlements

Securitising ‘illegal’ water and gendered lives

Our interviews and observations led us to consider how water was being securitised, the shifting logics of that security, and what theoretical work might inform our analysis of these processes. Whether designated legal or illegal, water is brokered by the state. Karachi’s so-called ‘tanker-hydrant mafia’ or ‘water mafia’ comprises a constellation of actors that straddle the state/non-state divide. Evidently, tanker operators (Figure 2) create artificial crises in alliance with KWSB officials, to expand their business potential. A male respondent from Orangi took the photograph (Figure 2) of an ‘illegal pump’ station and noted: ‘This is an artificially created water shortage; there is no real shortage of water, just an active mafia.’

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Photograph of an ‘illegal’ water pump station in Karachi’s periphery. Printed with respondent’s permission.

It would be straightforward to comprehend this dynamic in terms of an absent state and an extant ‘water mafia’; an explanation that easily slides into the common trope of ‘state failure’. Such a reading elides the securitisation logics that condition access to water in Karachi. Informed by Foucault’s ([1979] 1990) use of the term, we take ‘logics’ of security as a notion of discursive power that circulates and reconfigures state governance, with risk as a political rationality that governs according to predictive calculations of future harm.

This discursive power can be understood through KWSB-sanctioned water brokers as a dominant provisioning pathway, which signals the messy entanglements of water-brokers and state officials; drawing both into subversive forms of political agency and contingencies based on quiet negotiations (Anwar, 2014b; Fuller and Benei, 2012). With the ‘water-tanker-hydrant mafia’s’ reach expanding, the KWSB is now primarily a bulk supplier, which has led to the increased presence of local strongmen or water-brokers in informal settlements, backed by regionally powerful – and often violent – political parties such as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). In the form of union councillors and valve men, local leaders, middlemen or strongmen (note the gender dynamic), these figures play an important role in the financing of new water supply schemes and timing water deliveries through private tankers. The valve men are perceived as manipulative, predatory, opportunistic figures who take advantage of the community’s goodwill; as gaming the system and acting deviously and illegally, while the vulnerable, especially women, children and those with disabilities, are considered passive victims of this corrupt masculine force. These actors constitute an essential albeit fraught conduit for the flow and control of water in Karachi.

A feminist informed interrogation of the security state locates these actors within gendered and militarised practices that shape water provisioning in Karachi’s informal settlements. Such settlements are often seen as threats to political stability; as risks to the city but, as we show, contain large concentrations of men and women living at risk. This feminist lens allows us to remain mindful of the gendered politics of security; the realities of which support a statist brand of patriarchal security. In Karachi, a patriarchal stereotype of the militant- or terrorist-controlled water supply is wielded with the aim of upholding statist national security concerns that undermine women’s and men’s daily security in water provisioning, whereby everyday issues of risk and violence appear politically inconsequential.

Water, terrorism and security in Karachi

Certain scholars (Goldstein, 2010; Lutz, 2014; Masco, 2010; Pain, 2014) describe the 21st century as an age of multiple, overlapping crises involving conflict, human insecurity, climate change, capital, law and institutions; an age in which everyday violence has been normalised in relation to the ‘war on terror’. Masco pinpoints the Cold War era as shaping a specific security concept: nuclear fear elevated to be the core instrument of state power. This vision of national security – which Enloe astutely calls masculinised and statist – rivals the human security notion of danger associated with environmental risk, scarcity, even disaster. Ultimately, the image of the armed ‘terrorist’ trumps global warming as a threat to human existence. The concept ‘human security’ is also historically contingent: starting with the Cold War end, it emerged from the human development paradigm by bringing the human rights agenda into development discourse (Gupta, 2015).

Pakistan’s security discourse since Independence in 1947, has been defined largely in terms of a sovereignty-obsessed state with the power to shape citizens’ fates, and a security agenda that goes back to the inscription of war between India and Pakistan (Jalal, 1990). Prominent are the actions and agendas of military generals and an administrative machinery during Marshal Ayub Khan’s military rule (1958–1969) when Karachi’s slums were cleared to resettle the urban poor (Daechsel, 2011). Sovereignty, territorial integrity and ‘national security’ shaped Pakistan’s nuclearisation. Since 9/11, national security concerns have dovetailed with the complex dynamics of the ‘war on terror’, complicating urban governance, especially as related to Karachi’s water provisioning. As the conceptual power of ‘war’ overrides all concerns, nuclear threat organises politics and experience with powerful effects on security culture. Hence, we live in an age where the cultural landscape of security is dominated by risk and premediation, a process in which the future has already been mediated by every possible aspect of war. Security premediation denotes ‘the discursive economies through which terrorist futures are imagined’ (De Goede, 2008: 158).

The state’s response for managing Karachi’s water crisis has unfolded via three interlocking logics: first, the Supreme Court’s discourse of water as a basic citizenship ‘right’ (Dawn, 2018), where failure of provision creates human security risks to the health and prosperity of Karachi’s residents; second – and much more powerful – a ‘securitised water’ logic to contain terrorists/mafias who allegedly control valves, hydrants and tankers. A third logic perpetuated through NGO projects is the ‘human right’ to water – a concept that has been collapsed into state-led or sanctioned projects that avoid dealing with the systemic causes of water scarcity. Despite commitment from environmental NGOs, journalists and donors, the state’s response to systemic issues, such as failing to adapt to climate change, has been piecemeal at best (Herald, 2015; Lead Pakistan, 2016). Climate change has become a convenient narrative for urban water scarcity – especially in working-class and informal settlements – as it masks endemic problems of weak municipal water governance and accountability, and significant impacts of corporate activities on Karachi’s groundwater resources, especially sand mining and extraction by mineral water companies.

The presence of informal water brokers in Karachi has activated state anxieties about security as they are seen to operate ‘outside’ of the state apparatus and collude with terrorists. This is framed by the state – sometimes – as a ‘human security’ issue: risking individual citizens’ abilities to access their basic needs. Literature in political ecology and critical security studies finds that when governments pursue human security through natural resource-related infrastructures, their underlying aims are ‘imbued with statist logics’ (Fagan, 2017). In Pakistan, government narratives on water supply for human security arise in dialogues with multilateral donors and civil society, but practically the logic underpinning the state’s response appears much more grounded in national security concerns. Noteworthy are media and ‘security’ experts who envision possible terrorist futures. In Karachi, security premediation fosters a landscape of securitised water as the state endeavours to eradicate water mafias, criminals and terrorists who allegedly control the water supply.

De Goede emphasises that, unlike risk, premediation is about enabling action now by drawing on an imaginable future. This is precisely how judicial action concerning the eradication of ‘water mafias’ works in Karachi to enable the ‘right to water’, by emphasising a call to action in the present. Besides, judicial action intersects with and amplifies the national security logic of securitised water as it provides succour to the masculinised, elite Ranger’s efforts to eradicate mafias and terrorists. Since 2015, Supreme Court-backed paramilitary operations have shut down alleged ‘illegal’ hydrants in peripheral settlements such as Orangi Town and attempted to ‘break’ the ‘water mafia’ (Dawn, 2017). Regarding the city’s periphery, the media reports the water mafia are ‘militants’, a greater threat because billions of rupees earned from illegal water are being channelled into terrorist activities in Karachi (Tribune, 2015a). While the city-wide paramilitary operation was initiated in 2013 to bring down violence, particularly in connection with terrorism and criminal activities that also involve the MQM, by extending the operation’s remit to water, the state’s discourse has blurred the boundary between ‘water mafia’ and ‘militant’.

As we deliberate the relationship between security, risk, gender and water provisioning, we take a cue from Amar’s (2013) and Enloe’s (2013) gendered conception of state governance that critiques the state’s power to rescue and police; notably of patriarchal security states such as Pakistan, which not only sit on an authoritarian–democratic spectrum but have been at the frontline of the ‘war on terror’. Pakistan has been the USA’s main ally since the war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits in 2001. With time, Pakistan’s role has become more important because of threats in Afghanistan that have expanded into Pakistan (Siddiqa, 2011). As militancy threats peaked in the later 2000s, even under the civilian dispensation, the military assumed control of the national plan to address terrorism, largely without civilian oversight (Rumi, 2015). Military operations were launched in Pakistan’s northern regions, bordering Afghanistan, and in Karachi where informal settlements have been a source of constant media speculation. The anxieties about an exodus of terrorists and/or Taliban invading the peripheral belts has kept alive a sensation of fear (Anwar, 2014b).

While the paramilitary operation brought down levels of non-state violence and crime in Karachi (Ur-Rehman, 2015), the remit of state violence has expanded. As the discourse of terrorist-militant dovetails with water mafia, the spectre of threat is amplified. A senior KWSB official notes that the paramilitary Rangers are the only force that can ‘abolish these water hydrants and underground network of water pipelines for the city’s peace’ (Tribune, 2015b). Ironically, more people in Karachi have died of water contamination and scarcity (human security issues) than terrorism. The Supreme Court’s own militant rhetoric of shutting down illegal hydrants ‘at any cost’ (Tribune, 2018) to ensure the ‘right to water’ for citizens, because the ‘water crisis issue in Pakistan is turning into a bomb’ (Samaa, 2017) and the ‘court will solve the problem’ (Tribune, 2018), has boosted the Rangers efforts to unilaterally eliminate water supply threats.

This shifting security logic has had distressing effects on socio-economically and environmentally vulnerable populations in geographies where KWSB supply is absent. In the periphery, the legally authorised closure of illegal hydrants has exacerbated uncertainty and constraints on household water rationing and increased the price of private tankers. Federal and provincial authorities, even the media, see this as beneficial to rooting out corruption and improving security but, within targeted informal settlements, there has been intensified exclusion and embodied hardships despite the curtailment of crime and violence. We elaborate later, illustrating through our findings how in their search for water, ordinary men’s and women’s lives are put at risk, even as provisioning is securitised to mitigate risk associated with ‘illegal’ or terrorist-controlled water. The experiential dimensions of risk manifest in the frustrations, grievances and anxieties over the search, distribution and use of potable water, as these involve residents’ gender expectations related to local cultures and livelihood strategies.

The third security logic – the ‘human right’ to water – although affirmed by Pakistan with the United Nations, has been applied predominantly by civil society through small-scale water projects and advocacy. For example, WaterAid Pakistan held a ‘Dialogue on Prioritising WASH in Political Parties Manifestos 2018’. Perhaps as a result, the Pakistan’s People’s Party (PPP) did include water as a human right in its manifesto. Nonetheless, their practical politics demonstrate a securitised water logic. During the opening winter session of the National Assembly in 2018, a debate on water shortages between PPP and other parties circled around the water tanker ‘mafia’ and the ‘civil war’ over water in Karachi (Wasim, 2018). Further, NGO projects cannot operate in isolation from political actors and the ‘water mafia’. Permissions and patronage are necessary to be able to operate. This was tragically demonstrated by the 2013 assassination of Orangi Pilot Project Director, Perveen Rahman. It has been alleged through investigations and media reports that her killing was to shut down her mapping of water and land grabs in Orangi Town (Syed Ali, 2017).

Water, security and urban risk

Scholars (Anand, 2017; Björkman, 2014; Graham et al., 2013) writing on water infrastructures in South Asia, note the everyday disruptions involved in negotiating water shortages underpinned by the increasing volatility and unpredictability of pipes in cities such as Mumbai. Akin to those of Mumbai and New Delhi, Karachi’s residents obtain water either by claiming rights through procedural channels, or through informal and illegal processes – theft, corruption or political negotiation. Bjorkman underlines that an unhelpful fantasy is that someone is in control of water access – whether an organisation such as the KWSB, the Rangers, terrorists or the water mafia. The realities of water infrastructures in South Asian megacities, she emphasises, are more complex, multifaceted and increasingly opaque.

A feminist analytical lens is critical to understanding the complexities of urban lives and governance (Butcher and Maclean, 2018). For our analysis, it elucidates how water infrastructures are deployed and securitised by the state, and how women and men experience and negotiate water (in)security in Karachi. FPE emphasises the relationships men and women have with water in a specific political economic context, which leads to different material outcomes (Cleaver, 1998; Davidson and Stratford, 2007). As we show, at the household, community and state levels, decisions around how to deal with water supply are made by men and informed by patriarchal visions of managing risk. As emphasised by Enloe (2013), using the example of policing: different forms of masculinities can be inculcated within a specific context – which may compete for resources and power but simultaneously reinforce masculinity as a governing principle. This ‘game of masculinities’ places women at the bottom of the hierarchy, thus most exposed to risk.

Certain scholars highlight the gendered embodiment of water scarcities and contaminations, leading to psychological and physical suffering for working-class women (Sultana, 2009). Others call for an intersectional FPE, demonstrating how gender overlaps with other social identity markers to impact relative positions of power for different women and men vis-à-vis water (Mollet and Faria, 2013). We bring an intersectional lens to our analysis, considering the overlaps of gender, ethnicity and age; illustrating that overlapping systems of discrimination are critical constructors of everyday experiences of risk and (in)security.

Bringing paramilitary Rangers into the broader schema of managing water supply in Karachi exemplifies an instance of security premeditation in a 9/11 context, where the control of an uncertain water future is sought by the judiciary, the media and the security state. Poignantly, premediation has become a human security disaster, disrupting ordinary citizens’ daily lives and feeding feelings of insecurity in a landscape where histories of violence persist, and where informal water provisioning systems – now destroyed – have long been relied upon. Despite the state’s efforts to designate terrorism as the ultimate existential threat, there has been increasing scientific evidence of the effects of climate change on water shortages. Pakistan is predicted to become a water-scarce country, with declining per capita water availability and overall environmental insecurity (Mustafa et al., 2013).

Hidden within these numbers are acute security issues that the Pakistani state has faced – from debilitating floods, heat waves, storms, to sectarian violence and the killing fields of post-9/11 suicide bombers. In Karachi, these security issues have coalesced with other concerns, from extrajudicial killings to criminal violence and extortion whereby the ‘writ of the state’ is routinely undermined. Hence, in Karachi, histories of violence and military interventions have produced an enduring fear culture. In Karachi’s informal settlements, risk management is part of a broader shift in how futures are imagined, especially in relation to water as it intersects with the imperatives of state security (Amar, 2013; Enloe, 2013; Masco, 2010).

As the logics of securitised water, the judicial right to water and human rights intersect, effects on the ground are devastating. In June 2015, just after the five-day heat wave, Nusrat, a 25-year-old housewife from Ghaziabad, angrily described how her household’s dependence on private water tankers had been disrupted because of the Rangers’ operations:

My children can’t bathe, I can’t cook or clean, can’t wash clothes; our lives have come to a standstill! You can’t imagine our anger. The line has no water and we can’t find a tanker. We have depended on water tankers supplied by the water mafia. But now there are hardly any tankers. Ever since the Rangers operations started, the water supply has worsened.

A heatwave returned in 2018, but with a lesser death toll of 65. Since 2015, NGOs and federal agencies have been assisting local governments in heatwave management plans, to mitigate risk. Implementation so far appears to have focused on citizen capacity building to navigate heatstroke risk – rather than ensuring more equitable delivery of water and electricity.

Gendered insecurities, everyday risks

According to Siraj Bhai, who runs an NGO – Technical Training Resource Center (TTRC) – in Ghaziabad, Orangi, the Rangers ‘cracked down against illegal hydrants to demolish the “water mafia”. But this strategy has created a new set of problems. Public water supply doesn’t work. How can ordinary people get water now?’ In endeavouring to securitise Karachi’s water from ‘terrorists’ and ‘mafias’, the paramilitary operation disrupted longstanding neighbourhood water practices. The stories of our female respondents exemplify the increasing anxieties, struggles and risks involved in managing everyday life around securitised water. Nusrat elaborated:

Nowadays if tankers deliver water, we ask, where is the water coming from? We know the hydrants are shut. A woman who lives a few lanes away from my house, her youngest child got sick; severe gastrointestinal sickness after a water tanker delivery. Later she learnt it was waste-water from an ice factory. She had to pay expensive medical bills and seek help from neighbours, borrow money.

The loss of her normal routine forced Nusrat to mitigate risk as she struggled to locate water. With TTRC’s help, she formed a savings group to construct a borehole in the neighbourhood lane. The group now has 33 women who took an interest-free loan from TTRC to build it. But this risk management strategy was hardly a boon. When the first borehole was constructed at 125 feet, the water came up bitter. The next at 82 feet brought water fit only for washing clothes and mopping. Through conversations with respondents, we learned that women have mobilised to contest local officials about water services through protests at local government offices. When we asked Shaista if she or female family members had participated, she hesitated. Her gestures emphasised that she considered protests a risk to women’s safety. Her explanation resembled similar elucidations from mothers, fathers and brothers in all neighbourhoods:

Everyone is not the same; all households bear sons and daughters. Where will the daughters go? I have a daughter and a daughter-in-law; if I participate in a public water protest, I can’t leave them alone in the house because it is not safe. In any case, my husband and sons won’t allow us to go outside for such reasons. Such actions would undermine our daughters’ reputations. What would our neighbours say? Young women can’t be seen outside wandering alone.

Shaista’s response demonstrates the enduring process of risk calculation over women’s security inside and outside the home, where inscriptions of patriarchy permeate the moral and sexual regulation of women (Shaheed, 2010; Toor, 2014). Interestingly, such a calculation did not pertain to her daughters’‘human security’: when we probed the cause for concern, Shaista explained that given the unregulated nature of public space, the major cause of anxiety was the threat against maintaining proper sexual conduct; young women’s presence in public might lead to transgressive social behaviour, such as pre-marital relations. The risk is around violating social norms of appropriate inter-gender relations in the public space – especially women’s ‘purity’. But anxieties around risk and danger concerning water also involve men. Risk conditions the relations between residents and designated water-brokers or ‘valve men’, especially male residents, who compete for resources in a ‘game of masculinities’ (Enloe, 2013). Salma, 20, explained how frustrated men thrashed the municipal ‘valve man’ in Ghaziabad:

These valve men are mostly political party workers. A few days back the valve man was beaten by men from our community. They beat him because water supply had completely stopped. The valve man ran off. The political party workers claim there is no water in the pump, but we know they are selling water through private tankers.

This account demonstrates how men use force to defend their communities and households against the danger caused by a – presumed to be artificial – water shortage. This security logic, at the neighbourhood level, is informed by a patriarchal notion of masculinity (as protectors of the family/community) and is calculated as a lower risk option than allowing their community or households to continue struggling without water. But in the hierarchy of males who police/protect (Amar, 2013; Enloe, 2013), it is the Rangers who, because of their authoritarian, elite, professionalised security, trigger the greatest anxiety. When he took the photograph in Figure 3 of a ‘legal’ water hydrant controlled by the Rangers, Umar noted: ‘This is a legal hydrant, so you cannot go close or the Rangers take the camera.’

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Photograph of a ‘legal’ water pump station controlled by the Rangers in Karachi’s periphery. Printed with respondent’s permission.

Our female respondents’ accounts illustrated how such gendered frustrations bleed into the home. Women have little control over water procurement but are expected to manage the household water economy. Daily anxieties around insufficient household water become a source of domestic conflict and problematise the gendered division of labour. Women recount, with great frustration, concerns over accessing enough water to fulfil what is expected of them. In a focus group in the informal settlement of Raees Amrohi, Orangi, Ishrat, 20, recounted: ‘My husband left the house in the morning when there were four full cans of water. When he returned the water was finished. He asked what happened? Where did the water go?’ At this point in the focus group conversation, another woman, Parveen, 25, responded: ‘You should say: I drank all the water!’

The undercurrent of being unfairly held responsible for household water scarcity highlights how men’s inability to ensure stable access to water from the public sphere spills over into the private by displacing responsibility onto women. It is precisely in the issue of deviation from socially prescribed norms around ‘female’ and ‘male’ roles and mobilities that the nexus between water provisioning and everyday risk emerges. When women deviate from the private sphere, in taking on water procurement, the interplay with patriarchal cultural norms around female mobility and ‘purity’ can put them at risk. Hareem, 18, from a neighbourhood in District Malir, narrates:

We don’t have water and need money for this. My husband gave me my mobile phone and asked me to give it to my friend Gul Bahar [so she can sell it for water]. I gave the phone to Gul Bahar, but she kept it with her for four hours. My husband got angry why it was taking her so long (he slapped me twice). Gul Bahar returned the phone without selling it. My husband is jobless. We don’t have a single drop of water in the tank. I can only borrow a tiny quantity of water from my parents’ household. If I take extra, my Father will break my leg.

Constant fear and risk calculation in accessing water also exemplifies how gender expectations blur the assumed boundaries between the public sphere and the home. Many women and men described the impacts of water scarcity as zehni tashhadud (psychological burden), not only because of the lack of support in a crisis, but how it challenges gendered roles and expectations. Our respondents told us that domestic violence between men and women increased during water scarce times, and they often articulated it as an outcome of zehni tashhadud.

Risking loyalties

Analogous to cities such as Mumbai and Delhi, the involvement of political parties in Karachi’s water supply constantly embroils residents in power struggles to control the streets and neighbourhoods to ensure vote banks (Anand, 2017; Björkman, 2014; Graham et al., 2013). Social and political power structures are fundamentally reproduced and used through water, thus enmeshing men and women in multiple forms of risk. There is clear awareness that water is a political issue. Jamshed, 32, from Raees Amrohi, Orangi, recounted: ‘There is no water issue. It is all artificial; just created for money-making … Whenever Pakistan People’s Party is in power, ghunda gardi (criminal activity) is at its peak.’ However, it is generally known that Orangi is under the overall patronage of the MQM. The expression of support or opposition for local political actors should be understood as a discourse more than anything else. Discourses of blame, corruption, responsibility, are deployed strategically to ensure residents’ survival in a climate fraught with risk and shifting security logics, where compromised loyalties can have fatal consequences. Expressing loyalties also provides opportunities to negotiate water access.

As demonstrated in the valve man case, the forceful interplay between groups is enforced and played out through masculinised notions of policing public spaces (Enloe, 2013). This creates further opportunity to police women’s mobilities, as men see it as within their remit to ensure women behave properly and are ‘secure’ in public. This becomes the most hindering experience in women’s lives, preventing them from accessing education, social life, even clean water without facing physical and verbal threats. While FPE work recognises that water supply schemes often misunderstand restricted female mobilities (Sultana, 2009), there is a gap in investigating how changing urban female mobilities for water supply are shaped by perceptions of risk, and importantly ‘intersectionality’. In these working-class neighbourhoods, only women of a certain age (deemed too old for sexual relations) can navigate the streets for water; most other women are left at home to deal with the ‘undrinkable’, ‘smelly’, ‘dirty’, water that comes sporadically through the pipes or tankers. This is distinct from middle-class or elite women who can take a car or send drivers. Gender discrimination, intersecting with class discrimination, leads to a compounded form of risk and (in)security; it is not the working-class men that must drink, cook and bathe in this water throughout the day, as they are free to roam outside.

Mitigating risks, gambling futures

Respondents repeatedly described living in ‘unsanitary’ or ‘filthy’ conditions at home as zehni tashhadud. Following certain FPE authors’ (Sultana, 2009; Truelove, 2011) findings, women literally embody the disadvantages and inequalities of water scarcity. This was demonstrated across neighbourhoods, but in Mansoor Nagar, on the outer boundary of Orangi Town, there is a more intensified landscape of insecurity. The hills flanking the settlement provide cover for illicit activities and opportunities for surveillance, whether by the (male dominated) Rangers, police, criminals or political groups. Consequently, people living in this locality, especially women, express a greater sense of danger. The location ensures that basic services such as water and sewerage find their way there last, or never. This is convenient for the state narrative that expanding informal settlements and illegal groundwater tapping are the problem behind inadequate supply to certain localities, rather than the actual ‘cherry-picking’ of wealthier neighbourhoods for supply.

Cherry-picking materialises through the exclusion of minority community neighbourhoods who are not deemed citizens by the state, and hence unworthy of services. For example, Hassan, his wife Nadra and his mother live in a house located at the end of a steep road that goes up one of Mansoor Nagar’s hills. Despite living in Karachi since 1974, and residing in a well-furnished, newly constructed two-room house, they remain at risk by their exclusion. A state of contingency has permeated all their attempts to gain access to citizenship rights and mitigate risks – the two most important are access to identity cards and infrastructure, both of which are denied by the state. Owing to their economic and citizenship status, they are also subject to extortion attempts by police and local criminals.

But most of all, it is water scarcity that comes up again and again. Efforts to locate water embroil the family in constant battles with councillors, politicians, valve men and private tanker operators. These interactions result in hope and disillusionment. After many promises from politicians, Hasan and Nadra subsequently started investing their capital and taking out loans on other things, such as house improvements and making payments on their land. But they found themselves in trouble when none of the promises came through and, instead, they were left with a huge debt. Efforts to access water become part of the overall calculation of risk and what essentially becomes a process of gambling with their future.