When a participatory slum sanitation project encounters urban informality: The case of the Greater Mumbai Metropolitan Region

Abstract

This paper traces what happens to the official process and objectives of a participatory slum sanitation project, the Nirmal Mumbai Metropolitan Region Abhiyan, when non-governmental organizations (NGOs) encounter informalized municipal administration. We do this by describing the implementation phase from the points of view of the actors involved in two cities within the region, analysing them in terms of contraventions and non-enforcement of official objectives and regulations and then relating it back to discussions about both participatory slum sanitation and informality and municipal administration in India. In this case, elected councillors’ territoriality over slums, plus the coordinated actions among them, municipal officials and local contractors undermined the declared physical and social objectives of these programmes. In fact, NGOs quickly began following the rules and practices of informalized municipal administration. These findings are significant for those working on improving basic urban services because where incumbent actors in municipal governance can coordinate to undermine programmes, or alter them to their relative advantage, then participatory development programmes (as currently organized) lack fitness for purpose. This paper also contributes to debates on municipal governance in India by focusing on how political mediators, in this case ward councillors’ bending or breaking of formal regulations and protocols and the municipal officials’ non-enforcement together, informalized the municipal administration of this project.

Keywords

Urban informality municipal administration slum sanitation political mediation India

Introduction

Many localities in Indian cities lack access to adequate sanitation. The situation is particularly acute in poor informal settlements, often referred to as slums. Here the majority of inhabitants have little alternative to open defecation. In addition to issues of insufficient administrative capacity (regarding authority, revenue and technical know-how), the prevalence of urban informality contributes to seemingly intractable basic services problems (Roy, 2009; Sivaramakrishnan, 2011). In urban studies, informality can refer to unauthorized or informal development,¹ to illegal or unregulated economies and to a mode of spatial and political practice (McFarlane, 2012). It is often treated as a disparate or amorphous arena (cf. de Wit, 2010; McFarlane and Desai, 2015). This is partly due to the lack of conceptual clarity, which inhibits analytical research. To present a more finely-tuned analysis of informality in relation to the Nirmal Mumbai Metropolitan Region Abhiyan (NMA) participatory slum sanitation project, we use Kanbur’s (2009) two-part conceptualization of informality. The first aspect is the contravention of regulations or interventions, and the second is the uneven or non-enforcement of regulations and interventions. These two dimensions together are necessary for an intervention (plan, policy or project) or indeed an entire department or agency to become informalized. First, we will review the literature on participatory slum sanitation programmes in Mumbai and position our study in relation to these. We will also position this study in relation to debates on informality and municipal administration in India. Next, we describe our methodology and the study setting before covering the implementation of the NMA via the perceptions and actions of the main types of actors involved, project outcomes and the level of contravention and non-enforcement of objectives and procedures. We conclude with what this case adds to the literature on participatory projects targeting urban services improvements and its contribution to discussions about municipal administration in postcolonial contexts.

Slum sanitation in the Mumbai Metro Region

Before participatory sanitation approaches were introduced in 1997, public toilet blocks in slums were provided through local to national elected representatives’ Local Area Development Funds and Slum Improvement Programmes. Toilet blocks have always been popular expenditures for politicians because they are physical proof of patronage (YUVA, 2001). While the institutionalized system of kickbacks and ‘speed money’² often result in substandard work (de Wit and Berner, 2009; IRC, 1997), poor quality toilet blocks also work to a politician’s benefit because every few years a toilet block or two can be remodelled or replaced (van Dijk, 2006). While objectively this practice leads to inefficient use of funds (which contribute to unmet sanitation needs, because funds that could be used for expanding coverage are used to rebuild poor quality toilet blocks) toilet blocks continue to be used as evidence of a politician’s concern and assistance during election campaigns (de Wit, 2010). This iterative process reproduces both the politician–contractor–bureaucrat nexus via shared economic interests and clientelism between politicians and slum settlements.

The participatory approach of the NMA³ was a paradigm shift from the ad hoc discretionary process just discussed that predominates throughout the region. Municipalities and registered non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were to work together to build community toilet blocks. Community toilet blocks are different from public ones in two ways. First, they are not open to everyone – only the community they have been built for. Everyone in the community who uses the facility needs to pay a monthly fee, normally between 40 and 50 rupees per household. A community-based organization (CBO) is formed and officially recognized by the Municipality to operate and maintain the toilet block (i.e. fee collections, bill payment and upkeep). The point is for communities to feel ownership via the right to exclude and the duty to pay. Together, this was to result in more sustainable slum sanitation, which would be indicated by reduced open defecation (MMRDA, 2007). The cornerstone was the involvement of NGOs, who were to be responsible for publicity, hygiene awareness, design and construction of the toilet block, CBO formation and training and trust building between CBOs and municipal officials. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) completely funded this programme and designated a three-person cell for its execution. Municipalities were to hire registered NGOs and pay them in a timely manner as benchmarks were reached, provide land, water and electricity and submit required reports to the MMRDA. Upon completion, toilets were to be operated and maintained by the CBOs. Incidentally, while the community component of this programme was highlighted in publicity, only 10% of the budget was earmarked for social development activities in these communities, while 90% would go toward capital expenses (MMRDA, 2007).

Participatory slum sanitation was a departure for the MMRDA. It symbolizes the missionary zeal of its leader at the time – an eminent bureaucrat – who wanted to replicate the World Bank/Mumbai Slum Sanitation Programme, which built 520 community toilet blocks in Mumbai, to 13 cities in the greater metropolitan region. Unlike the Slum Sanitation Programme, where the World Bank was the executing institution along with the Mumbai Municipal Corporation (which appointed an ‘Officer on Special Duty’ to the Slum Sanitation Department to oversee administration), the MMRDA would be the executive, with many responsibilities, in practice, delegated to municipalities. Programme documents encouraged, but did not require, that municipalities appoint an ‘Officer on Special Duty’. While the Slum Sanitation Programme had one main NGO partner, the Society for the Promotion of Area Resources Centers (SPARC), NMA contracts were divided between SPARC and three other NGOs in these cases. Thus, the technology (community toilet block) and the implementation plan are the same as the Slum Sanitation Programme’s, but the institutional arrangements, number of actors and their level of experience changed.

Sharma and Bhide’s (2005) study of the Slum Sanitation Programme shows that interest in community participation gave way to the emergence of SPARC – an internationally linked NGO to emerge as a super-contractor who was able to change the discourse of participation from a beginning point to participation as a concomitant of infrastructure provision in slums. They also point out that the assumption that a NGO can be the sole representative of a community is flawed, and that such experiments in participation inevitably encounter established patterns of politics and organization. Desai et al. (2015) note how NGOs often become part of a dominant discourse generated around aesthetics of a clean city and extend middle class ideas of hygiene and dignity to slums without taking into consideration already existing sanitation politics and practices. SPARC argues that building toilets is the easy part; the hard part is dealing with the municipal officials and politicians, who are either indifferent or ignorant about slums, resent having to work with NGOs or have ulterior motives (Patel, 2015). Research on a similar programme, the Slum Adoption Programme in Mumbai (where the Solid Waste Department was to work with CBOs ready to manage fee-based day-to-day garbage collection) found that both the selection of CBOs and CBO–municipal relations were handled by ward councillors⁴ (Chattopadhyay, 2015). People linked to the councillor ran CBOs, who then kicked-back part of the funding received from the municipality to necessary bureaucrats (those whose discretion is required) and the councillor (de Wit and Berner, 2009). Similarly, Zérah’s (2009: 872) study of participatory projects found that participation perpetuated rather than replaced clientelism. The CBOs were either small private contractors or linked to already established private public-works companies connected to councillors and city officials. The research of MacFarlane et al. (2014) records the experiences, perceptions and coping strategies of the urban poor in Mumbai to show how these contribute to the uneven and unequal geography of informal sanitation. They argue for slum sanitation projects to pay much more attention to the poor’s practices, perceptions and experiences.

This largely urban poor (and to a lesser extent SPARC) centred research cannot account for political mediators (actors who negotiate with the municipality either to facilitate access to public services or to secure administrative discretion or non-enforcement) and the responses of municipal officials and staff. The practice of political mediation (whether patronage, clientelist or fee-based brokerage) presupposes access to vertically organized networks that include elected, appointed or hired state actors necessary for a claim or obligation to be met. However, the interaction between political mediators and the government functionaries, whose tacit or negotiated permission, blind-eye or coordinated actions are necessary for requests to be legible and for informality to be achieved, receives considerably less attention. Both those who contravene regulations and interventions and those who ignore, cover-up or in other ways secure the non-enforcement of regulations and interventions cannot be adequately covered by research focused on the perceptions and experiences of the urban poor. More qualitative inquiry into postcolonial state bureaucracies and the relations between politicians, civil servants and public employees is required (Gupta, 2013; Müller, 2013).

Informality and municipal administration

Informalized administration requires the collective intentionality of two or more people, and as such, can be theorized as a social process involving a configuration of actors engaged in social exchange over how and when regulations and interventions should be bent, broken or ignored. Collective intentionality refers to shared knowledge, beliefs, goals, fears and desires that link people in an action in situations where one can only do what he or she is doing because of others doing what they are doing, believing or desiring (Searle, 2005: 6). For example, patrons cannot do what patrons do if there are no people doing what clients do and who perceive each other accordingly. Informality comprises social practices of non-compliance, negotiation and non-enforcement related to some scale of government–territory or government–society relations. This implies contexts where person X takes on the status of a type of mediator with certain recognized or expected capacities and qualities. If this was not collectively accepted between the mediator, the person who approaches the mediator and the people the mediator then engages, mediating would not exist as such. Operative duties, claims and authorization relations (deontic relations) exist between actors engaged in informalizing municipal administration. If not, why would clients go to patrons and why would municipal officials oblige local politicians and vice versa?

Informality, as a social–political process shaping how regulations and interventions are implemented and enforced over time and space, has a long history in India. Historian Chandavarkar (2007) argues that from the colonial period onward salutary neglect – where laws, policies and, especially, conditions attached to grants to lower levels of government were often not enforced:

created social arenas that were removed, at least partially or intermittently, from the systematic rule of law and where the play of power and negotiation of dominance achieved a measure of impunity from its operation. The expansion of the state and the fuller integration of these domains into the political system in the late twentieth century did little to breach these immunities and may even have paradoxically increased the scope for the arbitrary exercise of power. (Chandavarkar, 2007: 453)

Research on patronage demonstrates how popular politics in India occurs at the level of implementation (Chandra, 2007; Kenny, 2015; Piliavsky, 2013). Partha Chatterjee (2004) theorizes that the contradictions between the society implied (and desired) in the constitution and formal policies and the everyday experiences of the majority are managed through ‘political society’. He describes a divided civic domain with two co-present meta-modalities. One domain is populated by ‘citizens’ who have the economic and cultural resources to adhere to norms of ‘bourgeois civil society’ and a modern bureaucratic state, and one domain contains the majority – ‘populations’ adhering to informal institutions and contingent arrangements between ‘political society’ and an informalized state where regulations and enforcement are negotiable. Political society, not civil society, is where non-elites must negotiate, often via political mediators, with local government for ad hoc and contingent basic services arrangements and occupancy in the city (Chatterjee, 2008).

Meso-level social order and material welfare organization are often, in practice, left to informal governance regimes, with the social institutions supporting them rarely targeted for reform. On this issue, the Government of India’s Second Reforms Commission Report found that:

Politicians at times tend to act as ‘executives,’ intervening in transfers, postings, sanctioning of local bodies’ contracts and tenders, crime investigation and prosecution — all of which are therefore often at the mercy of the local legislator. Given the compulsions of survival, the State Government, which depends on the goodwill and support of legislators, does not usually intervene except where the Constitution specifically and unambiguously directs it. (Government of India, 2007: 22)

While informalized administration could not function without the participation of state functionaries, the power-relations between them and political mediators, and the degree they are willing or compelled accomplices, cannot be presumed a priori. One strand of planning studies theory places the state at the centre of informality in India because law and civil codes construct what is illegal, and state actors’ calculations determine which informalities are tolerated in practice (Bhan, 2013; Roy, 2009, 2005). Rather than informality being an indicator of bureaucratic incapacity they see it as a governmental tactic for keeping certain spaces and practices ‘grey’ for a mix of political and economic reasons (Yiftachel, 2009). However, ethnographic studies show that patrons and other political mediators (i.e. brokers, middlemen, fixers, often, but not necessarily, linked to a political party or politician) are ubiquitous at government offices, courts, police stations and local political party offices.⁵ While local narratives of corruption usually have politicians blaming bureaucrats and bureaucrats blaming politicians, in practice, it is a form of collective action. The blame game, arguably, camouflages the level of coordination and shared interests between those publically cast as adversaries by themselves and others.

For historical, material and political reasons, the boundaries between social institutions and state institutions are ‘blurred’ (Das, 2001; Gupta, 2012; Parekh, 2009). Government bureaucracies, especially at the local and district level, are ‘porous’ (Benjamin, 2008) and easily ‘vernacularized’ by local politics (Kaviraj, 1990). The blurred boundaries of the porous and vernacularized local state suggest that impartial legal-rational municipal governance (administration, regulation and delegation) is likely an exception to the rule. This makes the rules and norms of state–society relations fairly inscrutable to outsiders. The opacity and uncertainty around politician–bureaucrat relations and state–society relations then compels people to utilize political mediators. The literature demonstrating how forms of political mediation of public administration are widespread supports this claim (see endnote 5). Political mediation is a source of economic, political and social capital and identity for political mediators and state functionaries (Khanna and Johnston, 2007). Thus, both sets of actors can be theorized to have vested interests in perpetuating informality.

Methodology

We chose two cities in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region where indications of urban informality were substantial and, where 350 NMA community toilet blocks were built between 2008 and 2011. The methodological rationale was that the NMA would be a stressor that would make the contours of informal municipal administration (its actors, institutions and practices) easier to chart. The paper draws upon 13 months of fieldwork (carried out between 2008 and 2011) that proceeded from 15 toilet block site visits guided by NGO officers, 50 informal discussions (with municipal officials, poverty-cell staff, councillors, political party workers and residents) and numerous observations of discussions between municipal officials, councillors, officials and NGO project officers (witnessed while waiting in offices for documents or appointments) and ended with 22 semi-structured interviews.⁶ This study is comparative in the sense of comparing the formal objectives, division of labour and protocols of the NMA with evidence of contravention and non-enforcement. Findings in one site were used to refine our focus in the following one and vice versa, making implicit iterative comparison a dominant analytical method. The condition of the toilet blocks in 2015 is based on local newspaper articles and email communications with municipal contacts. To protect the anonymity of the actors involved, the two cities will not be named.

Study context

Both cities reached populations over 500,000 before Municipal Corporations were formed (one corporation was formed in 2000 and one in 1982). Most settlements came under the formal jurisdiction of urban government structures quite some time after their initial development. In both cities many netas⁷ and landlords did not willingly abdicate their territoriality.⁸ They used the establishment of municipalities as opportunities to strengthen their position. Many actors adapted (e.g. changing from a smuggler to a ward councillor, or from a neta to a member of the State Legislative Assembly) and worked to shape the formation of the municipal corporation to reinforce their standing and interests. They positioned themselves as political mediators between Municipal Commissioners and other state appointed officials, municipal officials, residents and local elites, by running for councillor or fielding candidates loyal to them and by fixing municipal recruitment so that lower to mid-level staff positions were filled by people tied to them by choice or necessity.

Twice, the level of laissez-faire development has pushed the Government of Maharashtra to officially intervene in these cities. One Municipal Council was dissolved and officials from the District Collectorate of Thane took over temporarily in 1999. A study commissioned by the Government of Maharashtra detailed how ‘the entire municipal machinery worked in collusion with developers and builders to construct more than 2,500 illegal buildings’ (Varghese, 2006). These earlier efforts to discipline local state actors, builders and flat purchasers were in vain, and unauthorized development continues largely unabated (cf. Nair, 2011).

A Public Interest Litigation filed in 2007 (originally targeting unauthorized construction in the Vasai-Virar area of the Mumbai Metro Region) prompted the Bombay High Court to demand surveys of unauthorized construction and encroachments in all municipalities within the region. Unofficially, we were told that less than 30% of development is likely technically authorized. City Development Reports (produced by urban management consultants in 2008) stated that services and administration were not moving towards established benchmarks. One municipal corporation has yet to submit its by-laws to the state government for ratification. A 2011 Comptroller General of India audit noted an almost complete absence of internal checks and balances in the departments assessed. According to the 2011 National Census, slum⁹ households have increased by 159% over the last decade in one municipality and by 59% in the other.

Previous studies (van Dijk 2011a, 2011b) found that both municipalities show many signs of incomplete and uneven consolidation of legal and bureaucratic authority over their territory for three interrelated reasons. One being the share of ‘speed money’ and other rents, and the second being concerns over transfers and the ways ‘politics’ can cause ‘headaches’ for officials, by way of non-gazetted civil servants engaging in both obvious and stealth forms of rule bending and breaking to fit the goals of those to whom they owe their job. The second directly relates to the third reason, which is the widespread political mediation of public administration. Political mediaries mediate across structural and cultural gaps or incongruencies between those living in unauthorized or informal dwellings and government regulations and interventions. This allows them to shape information, activities and resources in both directions. Political mediaries are also involved in the day-to-day governance of informal housing, water, electricity, cable, and sewage disposal. In fact, everyone we spoke with about what accounts for the differences of services and occupancy security across different informal settlements (from political party workers to Government of India officials) said that the knowledge and connections (or ‘money and muscle power’) and intentions of ward councillors are the decisive factor.

Informality in municipal administration is prevalent in these two cities, with councillors figuring as the prominent political mediators. We hypothesized that for those who benefit, as well as those who do not see viable options to informality will continue to act in accordance with its rules and aims. The NMA gave us an opportunity to investigate this proposition in real time rather than after the fact.

NMA: implementation and outcomes

MMRDA

The responsibility for reviewing municipal reports and releasing funds was assigned to a cell (three junior staffers) within the Engineering Department with no experience in local politics. The cell quickly found itself being bogged down with trying to resolve conflicts between municipalities and NGOs, who were at loggerheads over site selection, choice of contractors and fund dispersal timelines. This quickly grew stressful for the cell, who had no experience of adjudicating these types of matters, and four months into the project, the MMRDA agreed with municipalities that their Public Works Departments knew more about local realities than the MMRDA, and they delegated complete supervisory power over NGOs to municipalities. The cell would no longer entertain NGO grievances.

The MMRDA views this project as a success because 1283 of the 1288 sanctioned toilet blocks were completed and the budget was fully utilized. However, they do not conduct site visits for monitoring or assessments. They rely solely on municipal reports. Third-party evaluations of toilet blocks were recommended, but not required, and no such evaluations took place. Lastly, the level of community participation, training and empowerment was not assessed beyond checking that a CBO was listed for each toilet block.

Municipal corporations

The Public Works Department carried out the municipal commitments to this project. The NMA was their first time working with NGOs. On the difference between dealing with private contractors and NGOs, one executive engineer said, ‘They both want to earn; but at least private sector companies know about construction and how to deal with contractors and labourers.’ Officials understood the value in using NGOs for hygiene awareness raising and for organizing CBOs, but for the rest, they resent the time it takes to deal with NGOs ‘who don’t know the system’. Another executive engineer explained that once word spread about the money to be made they were inundated by NGO tenders with either suspicious registration letters or with no experience in slum social work.

Regarding quality of work, their position was that NGOs actually reduced it because of their inexperience in dealing with contractors and ignorance regarding when and how corners should be cut. The Public Works Departments do not have time to monitor the construction of each (150 and 192) toilet block and stated, correctly, that third-party oversight was left to the discretion of the NGO. Additionally, after the MMRDA cell stopped mediating, this work transferred to Public Works officials, who spent most of their time allotted to this project mediating conflicts between ward councillors and NGOs. They encouraged NGOs to involve ward councillors at every level of this project for two reasons: (1) their local knowledge of slums in their wards and (2) because ward councillors could make it next to impossible for NGOs to meet their responsibilities and timelines. Public Works officials also lamented that even while these types of projects seem to inevitably end up being assigned to them, they are never asked to participate in decisions about programme design and implementation. Programmes that foreground participation are still quite top-down from the point of view of the municipality. Lastly, the CBO training and development objective was not assessed by municipalities, who, like the MMRDA, measured success only terms of completed toilet blocks.

NGOs

The NGOs were keen to participate in this programme because they thought it would function the same as the Slum Sanitation Programme. This enthusiasm dissipated when pitfalls and conflicts arose during implementation. NGOs thought they would get funds in two instalments – but when discretionary oversight was delegated to municipalities this shifted to four instalments. This change meant on-going interaction/conflict (thus increased transaction costs) and reoccurring kickback and speed money dramas. The kickback is a common informal institution where government contracts are involved. A percentage of the money paid to a tender gets ‘kicked-back’ (i.e. distributed between the municipal officials involved, the councillor of the ward the work is carried out in and other mediators involved). Thus, the more payment instalments, the more rounds of kickbacks and speed money or the interferences and obstacles that appear when kickbacks or speed money are not freely given.

One NGO director’s biggest disappointment was that the NGO’s site suggestions, based on slum sanitation surveys, were routinely overruled. Sites where older or derelict public toilet blocks already stood were where the Public Works Departments wanted to build new toilet blocks. They gave NGOs two reasons for this preference: 1) these areas already have some to most of the needed underground infrastructure (this reduces costs, which, presumably, would be used to finance kickbacks and speed money); 2) this avoids the hassle of acquiring land, which is to be avoided whenever possible as this multiplies the number of vested interests and thus obstacles to project completion. Relatedly, when this NGO tried to hirer its own ‘trusted’ contractors/labourers from outside the ward, it faced community backlash (which they attributed to ward councillors and local contractors) and it faced municipalities not releasing funds. Either no reason was given for the non-release of funds, or issues of work quality were raised – but never specified. NGO project managers – whose job it was to liaise between the Public Works Departments and NGO leadership – were eventually informed by political mediaries that if they wanted to get their work done, and funds released, they would need to work with the contractors the ward councillors and Public Works Departments wanted. They felt they were being pushed to use ‘known’ contractors, meaning those who understand and comply with the kickback institution. The two Programme Managers we spoke with realized that if they did not ‘go along to get along’ their projects would fail. They conceded to the status quo, rather than continue to endure being lectured to and scolded by the other stakeholders and their superiors. However, the Directors of these two NGOs proudly affirmed that they did not participate. To maintain plausible deniability, and to not be scolded by their superiors, project managers never specifically discussed their acquiescence to informality.

When it came to forming CBOs, councillors circumscribed the role of the NGO by insisting that they pick who joins. The NGOs saw this as the ward councillors’ way of co-opting the project to take credit during campaigns. When they tried to go around ward councillors, they quickly realized that local political party offices, and other political mediators, could easily sabotage their efforts. Basically, they felt that ward councillors needed to be given something to use for patronage if they were going to be brought on board and kept from undermining the NGOs. Not ‘going along to get along’ would have resulted in their failing and loosing face, so they acquiesced here as well.

Community awareness raising around hygiene issues also met obstacles. Many communities did not want to pay for what had been free, nor did they like how a government responsibility was being pushed onto their community. The 10% of the fund earmarked for CBO forming and training translated into one workshop on personal and public hygiene for the community, and one training on account management for the CBO. Once the municipality issued the completion certificate,¹⁰ the CBO was on its own – there was no follow-up support planned (or budgeted in) to improve chances of meaningful capacity building. Those hired for community development purposes by the NGOs (for this programme) ended up spending the majority of their time dealing with municipal staff, local political party offices and contractors. One NGO community organizer stated that:

Community development was at best a formality that came later at the end of the project. It [workshops] was window dressings. The local councillor appointed a CBO and we would have a half-day workshop with a short discussion on hygiene and then food and pictures of the CBO registration ceremony.

Training on how to manage and maintain toilet blocks in terms of dealing with free riders, administrative errors and water or sewerage problems did not occur.

Ward councillors

Ward councillors encouraged the Public Works Department to side with them on issues of CBO designation and subcontractors when their choices differed from the NGO (which initially, was almost always). Ward councillors found it rude and presumptuous of NGOs to just show up in their wards and begin actions without their blessing or guidance. Councillors were not interested in sharing their position as main mediator between their wards and the state and outside actors. They viewed both NGOs and CBOs that did not go through them with suspicion and as possible competitors. After a period of tug-of-war at the beginning of the programme, ward councillors retained the ‘last word’ on CBO members and contractors hired. Some councillors also demanded the top floors of toilet blocks for their office space. They easily managed to contravene NMA objectives and procedures. However, this can backfire, for example, when NGOs leave toilet blocks only partially built or when water, sewerage or electricity issues arise councillors may be blamed for these problems. When administrative mistakes or problems making utility payments resulted in water and/or electricity being shut off, some ward councillors organized informal, stopgap, connections. Councillors claim that they are better positioned to assist with slum sanitation programmes than are NGOs. Their advice is to formally charge them with this work and then add the necessary money to their yearly Councillor Development Fund.

CBOs

CBOs associated this project more with ward councillors than with the municipality or even with NGOs. In terms of participation, they were used instrumentally as patronage by councillors who appointed those affiliated with them to be CBO presidents and secretaries. The CBO presidents we interviewed demonstrated no knowledge about the community development objectives of the NMA. They mostly spoke of being grateful for the job the councillor gave them. Shortly after being delegated responsibility for the toilet blocks, many CBOs had problems both with getting community members to pay fees on time, and when dealing with unexpectedly high electricity and water bills or water shortages. They had no leverage on their own, and both the community and the Public Works Department placed the responsibility on them – which put them under much stress. The project does not include follow-up visits by NGOs to assess the functioning of toilet block nor CBOs. CBOs did not seem to know how to, or to be inclined to, deal effectively (strategically) with officials on their own. This disinclination became critical in communities where the toilet block was marked as ‘commercial’ in the payment system, which translates into significantly more expensive water and electricity bills (Allen, 2011). After several councillors complained, the Public Works Department was in the process of requesting that toilet block designation be switched to residential, but claims that this will take time to go through all the necessary channels. The CBOs are instructed to pay to avoid cut-offs while this issue works itself out. Councillors found it suspicious that changing the designation of toilet blocks in payment systems – which are now computerized – could take so much time and wondered out loud why this had to be done on a ‘case by case’ basis rather than all at once. Two councillors said that this was coded behaviour for ‘unless speed money is paid no one is in much of a rush.’ The 50 rupee per family fee was calculated based on residential designation, and CBOs were not able (or willing) to come up with the additional money given the time and stress this would entail to get households to pay more. This difficult situation was resolved in some sites by councillors, but the majority of CBOs disbanded over these seemingly intractable issues.

Outcomes

In 2011, communities with toilet blocks (where water service was secure and CBOs were charged residential rates) expressed that the facility made a notable difference in their daily schedule. However, substandard construction problems surfaced soon after completion certificates were issued. One death and several injuries due to stairway collapses have occurred. Also, almost no toilet blocks were hooked up to a networked sewerage system, and conservancy tanks regularly overflow.

Recent Mumbai Region newspaper articles (Golani, 2013, 2014, 2015; Shaikh, 2013) indicate that currently the majority of toilet blocks are not being used because of utility problems and/or they have fallen into disrepair. In one municipality, ward councillors and municipal officials are planning to adopt NMA toilet blocks. So far, this has taken the form of six private contractors being paid by the municipal corporation to maintain 162 toilet blocks at a fee of 20,000 rupees/month per toilet block. However, many toilet blocks remain unmaintained and people are still being charged to use them. This begs the question if the municipality is already paying contractors to maintain these toilet blocks, then who is charging users? Two local contacts (email correspondence, July 2015) speculated that someone affiliated to the local councillor acts as doorman and splits his or her earnings with the councillor. If this is the case, then both councillors and municipal officials and staff involved, receive kickbacks from the private contractors and from the attendants. Further, councillors can then tout their adopting of NMA toilet blocks during elections.

Informalization of the NMA

Both councillors’ territoriality over slums and the collective actions among them, municipal officials and engineers and local contractors informalized the administration of the NMA. Once the MMRDA removed itself from the hassle of local politics, NGOs quickly ceased disputing the contravention or non-enforcement of the NMA’s objectives and division of responsibilities related to site selection, CBO designation, and choice of sub-contractors. They also complied with kickback and speed money institutions in order to meet their contractual obligations. This resulted in community empowerment becoming a non-priority. Participation became a formality, a box to tick and a photo opportunity at registration ceremonies. Thus, community contracting and capacity building had no chance of creating diversified routes to improved sanitation in this context. Informalization also resulted in substandard construction and sites of derelict toilet blocks being chosen for the NMA, rather than site selection being based on need. This intervention was reduced to building toilet blocks as inexpensively as possible, in ways that did not alter the balance of power or practices of informality. Since the MMRDA delegated the supervision of NGOs to the municipalities, the blame game camouflage works here too, with Public Works Departments and councillors being able to blame NGOs and NGOs blaming them for the poor state of many NMA toilet blocks. NGOs wanted future government contracts and the MMRDA wanted to avoid bad press and drawn out proceedings, so neither pushed for a formal third party assessment or commission.

Conclusions

The World Bank’s advocating of participatory development projects and SPARC’s international reputation, combined with the ostensible success of the Slum Sanitation Programme, contributed to the MMRDA undertaking the NMA. However, once problems arose between municipalities and NGOs, the cell responsible for overseeing the project opted not to mediate between the two, which left NGOs on their own. The NGOs went for the path of least resistance. CBOs also remained within the ambit of councillors’ territoriality. In practice, no appreciable incentives for municipal officials or councillors to alter rules, relationships or aims of informalized municipal administration manifested from the NMA. Considering the current condition of the toilet blocks, the situation seems to have ended up back where it was prior to this programme, with NGOs and CBOs being a glitch in the system of supply-side and informalized slum sanitation.¹¹ The contractual inclusion of NGOs and the nomination of CBOs had no substantive effect on informality.

This study corroborates literature discussed above in Slum sanitation in the Mumbai Metro Region by highlighting the weaknesses and blind spots of participatory development ideology and projects that miss or dismiss informality when designing, implementing or championing interventions. Policy-makers or project designers who only know areas on paper, if at all, have little idea, and thus little control, over what processes and which actors interventions will strengthen in practice. Exogenous interventions that disavow, or are ignorant of, informality are quite handicapped from the beginning, and thus quite vulnerable to obstruction, appropriation or futility. In other words, the actually existing materiality and informality shaping slum–municipal relations may be incongruous with liberal notions of civil society, Weberian bureaucracies and the type of social capital required for new practices and relations to be taken up and become durable (cf. Mosse, 2004). Too often, it is taken for granted the extent to which an organized and powerful enough social base in support of proposed changes is needed to mobilize the opportunities for change that interventions can open up (cf. Zérah, 2009).

New forms of urban governance and nascent spaces of formalized citizen participation draw much scholarly attention, while how pre-existing forms of rule, such as: vote-bank politics, patronage, clientelism, bossism in the arena of informalized municipal administration adapt or develop are too often ignored, that is, regarded as anachronistic or aberrant forms that are dying out (cf. Naseemullah and Staniland, 2014). This study contributes to the growing evidence in South Asia that these forms of rule can both successfully adapt to contextual shifts and prove resilient to external interventions.¹²

Lastly, by leveraging Kunbar’s definition of informality and treating it as a social–political process, we learned more about the rules and relationships between politicians and bureaucrats. For instance, these councillors and officials were not competitors or adversaries. Municipal officials never saw the NMA as an opportunity to reduce the de facto powers of councillors in municipal administration, in fact they encouraged NGO staff to work with councillors and to use contractors aligned with them. Further, no one at the MMRDA used the NMA to push for changes in councillor–bureaucrat relations either. However, the cell’s reasons were much more practical – they quickly grew tired of hearing municipal officials and NGOs complain and point fingers and decided to go down the path of least resistance. Given that formalized relations of accountability between levels of government and between politicians and civil servants are weak in practice, it is not surprising that communities and CBOs did not use this project to alter their relations with councillors or with the municipality. The NMA has no effect on tenure security, and NGOs are only temporarily involved in these communities, which makes them unsuitable candidates to either replace councillors or effectively encourage CBOs to change their expectations and undertake sustained actions to shift the status quo (cf. Bhide, 2009). Formal NGO and CBO participation will likely remain blunt instruments in contexts dominated by informalized public administration.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank research assistant Nutan Shivtare. We also appreciate the comments Joop de Wit, Shazade Jameson and three anonymous reviewers offered on an earlier drafts.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding

This research was in part funded by a Dutch NWO-Wotro Grant.

Notes

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