Who is the state? Infrastructural power and everyday water governance in Delhi

Abstract

In Indian cities, a variety of state and non-state political actors and institutions play a role in regulating infrastructures in the everyday. Anthropological approaches to the everyday state have demonstrated how residents experience and discursively construct the state in relation to key services and amenities. However, less is known and theorized regarding how city-dwellers and public authorities understand and experience political space and power related to urban infrastructure that includes a variety of actors operating in tandem with, or even outside the bureaucracies and purview of, the state. This article partially addresses this lacuna through ethnographic research on (1) residents’ experiences and narrations of the everyday infrastructural governance of water and (2) the practices of key political actors who engage in regulating urban water infrastructures in Delhi’s neighborhoods. This research demonstrates that political actors’ and residents’ narratives and practices related to the infrastructural governance of water sharply contest both singular and dichotomous (state/non-state) readings of state power, instead revealing nuanced and situated understandings of hybrid and negotiated forms of “infrastructural power.” In particular, the practices and narratives of both residents and political authorities bring attention to the ways social and political power is decentered in the everyday and the porosity of the institutions of everyday infrastructural governance. My findings show the complex ways that infrastructures are tied to differing experiences, understandings, and articulations of power in relation to urban environments.

Keywords

Infrastructure water governance everyday state urban governance southern urbanism

Introduction

In Delhi, India, the infrastructures that sustain everyday life are often characterized less by urban plans, and more by the material interventions, appropriations and deviations of residents, and political actors who work to co-produce and co-opt vital urban resources. Similar to many other cities of the global South, some estimates suggest that as little as 4% of built structures in Indian cities are designed as part of official plans. With regard to infrastructures such as piped water and sewerage in Delhi, the limited willingness of both the colonial and postcolonial state to ensure either adequate or universal services has generated a political field in which access and control over these critical infrastructures involves a wide range of actors, materials, and practices. Within this political field, infrastructure becomes an organizing force by which both city-dwellers and key political actors come to understand and exert forms of everyday governing power in the city: from engaging in micro-networks that facilitate local forms of water access outside the grid, to ad-hoc methods of waste disposal and collective practices to secure provisional spaces for sanitation. Yet, the co-production and everyday governance of these diverse urban infrastructures, which often go “beyond the network” (Coutard and Rutherford, 2015), remains a relatively nascent area of study (Lawhon et al., 2018).

While anthropological research on the everyday state has usefully focused on the everyday ways citizens experience and discursively construct the state in relation to such key services and amenities, less has been directly theorized regarding how city-dwellers specifically understand and experience political space and power related to urban infrastructure that includes a variety of political actors operating in tandem with, or even outside the bureaucracies and purview of, the state. Similarly, scholarship on critical infrastructure studies tends to focus more overtly on large-scale networks and their embeddedness in the production of state power. Aside from an important body of emerging work (see, e.g. Björkman, 2018; McFarlane, 2008; Silver, 2015; Simone, 2010), there has been relatively less attention to heterogeneous infrastructural configurations beyond the network that challenge the boundaries of state space (Lawhon et al., 2018). This article builds on this area of scholarship through ethnographic research in Delhi within two differing types of informal settlements, examining: (1) residents’ experiences and perceptions of the everyday infrastructural governance of water and (2) the practices of key political actors who engage in regulating urban water infrastructures in Delhi’s neighborhoods. My analysis demonstrates that political actors’ and residents’ narratives and practices related to Delhi’s infrastructural governance sharply contest both singular and dichotomous (state/non-state) readings of state power, instead revealing nuanced and situated understandings of hybrid and negotiated forms of “infrastructural power” (Mann, 1984). In particular, the practices and narratives of both residents and political authorities bring attention to the ways social and political power is decentered in the everyday and the porosity of the institutions of everyday infrastructural governance. My findings show the complex ways that infrastructures are tied to differing experiences, understandings, and articulations of power in relation to urban environments.

Data for this analysis come from ethnographic research in Delhi during 2011–2012, as well as follow-up visits in 2016 and 2017. This includes in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and/or group discussions with 50 residents across two informal settlements, as well as with key political agents including NGO workers, water tanker drivers, Delhi Jal Board officials, and a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA). The paper proceeds by first detailing the development of Delhi’s colonial and postcolonial fragmented infrastructural configurations, illustrating the prominent role of both state and non-state actors in regulating water infrastructures in the everyday. I then nest understandings of these everyday forms of infrastructural governance within two key literatures: the first, a growing body of work on (urban) infrastructure that attends to its socio-material dimensions, and the second, anthropological approaches to the everyday state. Lastly, I turn to an analysis of residents’ perceptions, and key political actors’ practices, of infrastructural power in two informal settlements.

Delhi’s fragmented and unequal infrastructural configurations

Delhi’s fractured infrastructural configurations stem from (and at times pre-date) the colonial period, as well as subsequent master planning put in place upon India’s independence, when urban infrastructures were deliberately designed to be segmented rather than universal. This is particularly true of water, sanitation, and housing, which intersect with each other and have been historically experienced as fragmented and unequal for the urban population. As colonists never intended to fund or extend universal access, the installation of Delhi’s first piped network for water imbibed social difference and hierarchy into the fabric of the city’s fractured network. Pipes followed the borders of the old and new city, segregating water sources and infrastructures between the homes and spaces of colonists and significant portions of the Indian population. As Prashad (2001) notes, modernity became a project that furthered the privileged access to piped water of the ruling classes, and a marker of status, purity, and cleanliness. Moreover, what Bakker (2003) terms “archipelago” infrastructures developed in piecemeal fashion across the cityscape, imbibing informal water solutions and infrastructures as central to shaping the flow of the resource and the means by which it became locally accessed. Wells, handpumps, illegal tapping, and local micro-economies of water exchange outside the network became more norm than exception for Indians living in the old city (Mann, 2007; Sharan, 2006), imbibing informality as a central feature of water’s circulation to the urban majority.

Postcolonial and contemporary fragmented infrastructures

After independence, infrastructural fragmentation became embedded in the new institution of scientific planning in the postcolonial city, as officials formed a consensus that rather than Delhi’s Master Plan promoting universal amenities, infrastructural standards for resources such as housing, water, and sewerage in Delhi’s substantial poorer neighborhoods would remain curtailed. One of the lead foreign consultants for planning postcolonial Delhi, Albert Mayer, concluded that Delhi did not have the massive resources of more developed countries that were necessary to address the “moral and social pressures” purportedly caused by poor residents and slum settlements (Sharan, 2006). As Sharan (2006) elucidates, Mayer’s team argued that provisional and partial services should be arranged in informal settlements, rather than universal and high quality infrastructures. It was argued that a different standard of amenities within settlements would ensure that all residents had a place to stay, which could later be improved upon when residents established the socio-economic mobility to move neighborhoods. This incremental approach further entrenched a wide variety of infrastructural differences and inequities across urban space, with poor and informal neighborhoods chronically contending with piecemeal and provisional water access, sewerage, sanitation, and housing (Sharan, 2006: 4908).

In contemporary Delhi, the centralized water supply does not reach the majority of city-dwellers (Sheikh et al., 2015). Unplanned neighborhoods, which houses more than half of the population, have remained excluded from centralized water connections through both master planning and the DJB 1998 Act, put in place by the state’s water agency (called the Delhi Jal Board (DJB)). This 1998 Act formally relinquishes the state from a legal obligation to extend centralized household connections to informal settlements, precisely due to their “illegality” (DJB, 1998). Residents in these urban spaces rely upon uncertain and changing infrastructures of water access, from sporadic state water tanker deliveries to handpumps, tubewells, and private water purchases. For the urban majority, water governance in the everyday involves diverse state and non-state actors and institutions, including local politicians, police, NGOs, private water networks, community leaders, and strongmen (Truelove 2019). Such heterogeneity and ever-changing configurations of access demonstrate the criticality of parsing through the multiple forms of power and authority that emerge in the ordinary practices of regulating the city’s vital infrastructures.

The ‘infrastructural turn’ and everyday urban governance

In order to analyze Delhi’s heterogeneous infrastructural configurations and their everyday governance, I first draw from a burgeoning interdisciplinary literature that chronicles the social, political, and cultural life of cities through their material infrastructures. Attention to the simultaneous material and socio-political dimensions of urban infrastructure has been effective in broadening conceptualizations of governance to include an assemblage of both the human (institutions, politics, social relations) and the non-human (biophysical processes, environmental conditions, and unruly pipes and pumps) (McFarlane, 2008: 348). Research within this “infrastructural turn” shows how the materiality of infrastructure itself becomes an organizing force of governance, as infrastructural breakdown, disruptions, fractures, and fragments emerge from and shape social power relations, state power, and the regulation of key resources and services in the city (Amin and Cirolia, 2018; Anand, 2015; Pilo’, 2021; Silver, 2015).

While state power has been central to understanding the politics of infrastructure, conceptualizing configurations of non-state actors and networks, and the concurrent political and infrastructural space produced, remains a challenge that is only beginning to be taken up (for examples, see Björkman, 2018; Coutard and Rutherford, 2015; Schwartz et al., 2015). For example, scholarship has focused more concertedly on how infrastructure is embedded within, and productive of, processes of state formation, power, and nation-building. Non-state actors within this literature are often conceptualized as either an extension of the state, one part of a broader assemblage co-producing everyday infrastructures, or as the private sector. Overall, less has been specifically theorized regarding non-state actors’ complex positionalities and complicated relations with both urban residents and the state in shaping everyday infrastructural governance.

These trends coincide with a scholarly tendency to privilege the analysis of large-scale technological networks, such as centralized water supplies and electrical grids, over and above the diverse everyday infrastructures beyond the network that tend to constitute the infrastructural experiences of the urban majority in the global South (Author, 2019; Coutard and Rutherford, 2015; Furlong and Kooy, 2017). The proliferation of water and sanitation networks that remain partial and incomplete, electricity enabled through extra-legal practices, and ad-hoc “do-it-yourself” infrastructures of informal housing require attention to high degrees of heterogeneity with regard to the materials and actors involved in everyday infrastructural configurations. Thus, McFarlane (2008: 354) points to “ruptures” between the claims about urban infrastructure that tend to center on more singular narratives regarding large-scale networks and their governance, and the actually existing empirical diversity of infrastructures on the ground that are produced, governed, and experienced in highly uneven ways. He thus calls for infrastructures to be “provincialized” (ala Chakrabarty) to account for situated understandings and experiences of urban heterogeneity that reveal a greater diversity of urbanisms in the everyday city. Such scholarship points to the analytic imperative to develop new understandings of how city-dwellers perceive and experience diverse constellations of infrastructural and political power.

In an effort to analyze diverse infrastructural configurations and their everyday governance in Delhi, my analysis draws from anthropologies of the everyday state as instructive for advancing theorizations of differing state and non-state political actors and provincializing forms of infrastructural and political power. This literature, which is neither specific to urban settings or infrastructure itself, has been effective in broadening examinations of everyday governance to include a wide range of state and non-state actors including politicians, bureaucrats, local chieftans, strongmen, and NGO workers (to name a few). In the work of Le Meur and Lund (2001: 2, see also Cornea et al., 2017), for example, everyday governance includes “the actual practices of how interests are pursued and countered, authority exercised and challenged, and power institutionalized and undermined.” A number of scholars show how everyday interactions and institutions of governance cannot be easily captured by demarcations such as “state,” “private,” or “civil society” (Berenschot, 2010; Cornea et al., 2017), requiring more nuanced and situated understandings of the fragmented state, informal forms of sovereignty (Hansen and Stepputat, 2006), and multiplicities of power centers in the everyday city (Author, 2019; Cornea, forthcoming; Lindell, 2008; Schindler, 2014).

More specifically, Lund’s work on twilight institutions and forms of public authority in differing African contexts is of particular utility for conceptualizing the complex roles of state and non-state political actors, and can be applied to help further provincialize forms of everyday political power in the city. Lund’s (2006) research brings attention to the parallel structures and multiple alternative modes of authority (such as chiefs, vigilantes, political factions, and neighborhood groups) that persist alongside, or in complex relations with, the state in governing resources. By showing that “strategic groups defending shared interests may form or disintegrate in the course of struggle,” Lund (2006: 686) reveals their twilight character, which erodes a clear distinction between either the state or civil society. Lund (2006: 688) finds that, on the one hand, public authorities have no qualms in operating in their own spheres, and on the other, are often also connected to the state and local politicians. Thus, he reveals the contradictory positionality of such figures, stating: “In a variety of ways, public authority seems to manifest itself in an ambiguous process of being and opposing the state” (my italics, Lund, 2006: 689), pointing to their useful ability to move in-between differing subject positions.

In examining residents’ perceptions and experiences of diverse forms of political power in Delhi, my research suggests that this “twilight” character of everyday infrastructural governance works to constantly blur, rather than clearly differentiate, the boundary between state and society. My findings show that city-dwellers perceive diverse political actors as part of the apparatus of disciplinary power, but also as what Anjaria (2011: 58) calls “a locus of negotiation and legitimation” regarding infrastructural claims that, “ironically, are often ignored in formal institutional contexts in the city.” Due to a historic absence of adequate state provisioning, NGO actors, tanker drivers, and local leaders are perceived by residents not simply as intermediaries of the state (see also Cornea, 2019), but rather as political figures in their own right who accrue power through their ability to control and mediate vital infrastructures in the city. Residents thus calculate that an engagement with politics, outside the channels of state space and political society, is sometimes more effective, and necessary, for negotiating infrastructure access and building footholds in the city.

Thus, rather than viewing political actors uniformly as the state, or dichotomously as either state/non-state, my findings demonstrate that city-dwellers instead assess and navigate these actors’ influence and control over infrastructures, giving “infrastructural power” primacy over more uniform or singular conceptualizations of “state power.” Here, I borrow the term “infrastructural power” from Michael Mann (1984), who uses it to refer to the ways infrastructure constitutes an institutional channel for social regulation and territorialization, primarily by the state. I adopt and extend the concept to include configurations of socio-material power exercised by a broad range of political actors (and networks) over vital urban infrastructures.¹ I show that residents’ perceptions of infrastructural power constitute a “politics of anticipation” (Simone, 2010), in which city-dwellers calculate how particular fields of political authority will shape their abilities, practices, and politics to secure vital urban resources such as water.

Finally, in examining the everyday practices of key political actors of infrastructural governance, I show how such actors utilize their twilight positionality (between the state and its outside) to increase their power and authority over key urban infrastructures. This includes these political actors’ strategic oscillation between state and non-state identities, and ability to use multiple subject positions to improvise new governance practices. In particular, I demonstrate how state actors and private water vendors leverage their non-state identities as a political tactic to increase power and control over local infrastructures, reshaping urban space and resource distribution in Delhi’s neighborhoods.

Who is the state? Negotiating “infrastructural power” in a South Delhi Basti

In 2011, I returned to a small informal settlement (basti) in South Delhi called Rampur Camp, which I had been visiting for research since 2008. It was home to more than 5000 residents and many families whom I had come to know well. Something new was brewing with regard to the neighborhood’s infrastructure. A defunct tubewell had been restarted inside the settlement, offering a water alternative to the centralized supply, which had never been extended to the site due to the settlement’s “illegality.” The tubewell was intended to replace erratic and insufficient state tanker deliveries. These tankers arrived once per day or less, servicing the predominately Hindu and Muslim areas of the settlement separately (and unequally), and had been a source of regular hardship for residents since I began researching the area in 2008 (see Truelove, 2016, 2019). Alongside the new materials of the tubewell infrastructure, which included a set of spaghetti pipes from the well to lanes and outdoor spigot points, a number of public authorities suddenly became active and visible in the neighborhood. I wanted to understand how residents not only experienced the new water modality, but also perceived its complex governance that involved the sudden appearance and visibility of particular political actors and institutions.

In those first days back in the neighborhood, I asked around a dozen residents in casual conversations (mostly in the neighborhood’s lanes) to recount how the defunct tubewell suddenly became repaired and subsequently promoted as a new water source for the community. Each resident (or group of residents) I approached initially gave a similar answer: “Diya Madam.” Diya Madam’s name was invoked consistently as a political actor who wielded significant power over the tubewell’s motor, pipes, and billing. I was keen to quickly determine who Diya Madam was, as I had not met her, nor heard her mentioned, during past visits. However, in these initial conversations, rather than detailing Diya Madam’s position and official role in the settlement, residents were more eager to discuss and describe her infrastructural power over the tubewell. While I became aware in subsequent visits that Diya Madam was a worker from a local NGO that focused on water-related issues in the city, residents had another way of describing her.

For example, a woman from the neighborhood named Malu, whom I had known for over three years, repeated a statement I frequently heard from others. She pointed out that Diya Madam was simply a “lady from the government” who not only played a pivotal role in restarting the tubewell and its motor, but also acted like a government official by handing out “biscuits and pens,” a practice residents associated in general with state officials entering the basti (particularly during election times) bearing gifts and money in order to gain votes (Interview of Resident, 2011). Because Diya Madam was indeed an NGO worker, rather than a government worker, I initially assumed that there was confusion among residents concerning who was an official of the state, and who was from a non-state organization (and perhaps this confusion might even work to Diya Madam’s benefit). Such confusion seemed intuitive because, according to residents, the practices of both (actors from the state and the NGO) seemed to be similar: providing gifts and hand-outs and promising future infrastructural work that would be done. What I came to realize in the months that followed was that, rather than a confusion, there seemed to be a rather ubiquitous conflation of the qualities of the state with public and informal authorities that were technically known by many in the basti to be non-state actors. This was clearly not a matter of simply “getting the facts wrong,” but of revealing a window into how emerging public authorities become perceived by residents as endowed with a “twilight” (Lund, 2006) nature and authority: both mimicking qualities of the state (with regard to the neighborhood’s infrastructures), yet also persisting parallel to, and in complex relations to, state space.

In everyday conversations residents conveyed that more important than locating the state/non-state positionality of such actors, was their infrastructural power—or what residents describe as these actors’ web of authority and control regarding key infrastructures in the settlement—which needed to be carefully negotiated in order to achieve access to vital resources. In other words, demarcating Diya Madam as a member of the state or an NGO was less important to residents compared to the imperative to determine and trace Diya Madam’s role in controlling and managing local infrastructures in the camp, including the tubewell, its associated spigots and water storage tank, and even the frequency of state tanker deliveries (which became curbed after the tubewell restarted). Thus, in the months that followed, I came to recognize that residents’ frequent use of the word “government” to characterize active public authorities in the neighborhood referred not simply to the state, but rather to a type of governing power that was infrastructural in nature: a particular politics situated around the control and regulation of the neighborhood’s tubewell, pipes, and tankers. As such, residents of the neighborhood were aware of the infrastructural and political roles of a number of additional formal and informal agents and actors in the settlement, including the director of the NGO, the local Chieftan (Pradhan) of the settlement, and key politicians such as the local Municipal Councilor and MLA. Residents frequently described such public authorities in short definitive statements (e.g. “he is like this,” “she won’t do that,” “he is connected to that person,” “she gets votes from the settlement with this informal leader’s help,” etc.) to show the political strength, malleability, and hybrid (overlapping state and non-state) networks of these actors, rather than speaking more uniformly about state agencies, bureaucracies, or even non-state organizations such as the local NGO.

For residents in late 2011 and early 2012, Diya Madam’s power over water infrastructures superseded that of local politicians, such as the MLA, who was rarely seen in the neighborhood and perceived by residents to have other priorities in settlements with larger vote banks. Broadening conceptions of Diya Madam’s political power beyond the state/non-state binary, one resident summarized her (and other key actor’s) political power as both decentered and diffuse:

You also know what is politics. They [public authorities like Diya Madam] will say something else in front of you and different things to me … Politics is about how you come into my clutch, either by power or by money or by … anything (Interview of Resident, 2011).

Diya Madam was thus perceived as a public authority, among others within the constituency, that had to be carefully reckoned with in relation to securing everyday water access. She had to be approached, negotiated with, and managed in a calculative “politics of anticipation” (Simone, 2010) for accessing critical infrastructures in the camp.

Furthermore, residents narrated the governing power of both state and non-state public authorities as sharing a specific set of common characteristics. These included the (often unfulfilled) promise of infrastructure provisions, occasional threats of violence (regarding cutting off existing water supplies or demolishing the slum altogether), and attempts to manipulate/coerce residents through controlling infrastructures. For example, in a conversation with one woman leader from the settlement, she describes NGO actors as mirroring both the same qualities and failings of members of the state, particularly through taking payments in exchange for the promise of water access that was slow to arrive:

Woman: “Why should the NGO workers care for you … We have collected 150 rupees [per month] from each house and given the money to them thinking that the [tubewell] work would be done. But nothing has happened yet. Some people gave the money, some did not. I paid extra from my pocket thinking that the work would be done soon … ”

Author: “Do you have any hope that the work will ultimately be done?”

Woman: “I do not have any hope. The work will not be done.”

Author: “Do you think the NGO is as bad as the politicians” [whom residents regularly characterized as not doing work]?

Woman: “They are all the same. They will get all of our votes and [nonetheless] one day, they will get the basti demolished! There is no work being done. No initiative is being taken regarding the water and the toilets”. (Interview with Neighborhood Female Leader, 2011)

Here, efforts to secure “votes” are used to describe the work of both the NGO and politicians, despite this local woman’s clear awareness that the NGO is not officially elected, and thus does not need votes. However, using the language of “votes” helps this resident articulate her perception of both politicians and the NGO to be trying to extract a “buy-in” from residents that is both duplicitous (taking money without delivering water) and potentially violent (with regard to these actors’ ability to support the demolition of the camp itself).

Similarly, a long-term resident of the settlement, named Salu, described the specific practices and politics of key public authorities in the settlement as embodying qualities similar to the state, regardless of the organizational body from which they came. During an open-ended interview many months into my research, I mentioned to Salu that a group of women from the basti had gone with members of the local NGO to bring a petition regarding the poor water quality in the neighborhood to the Chief Minister of Delhi. In his response, Salu likened actors of the NGO to a political party, stating:

People from the NGOs and various other parties take these ladies along and represent them as their vote bank … They get signatures [from people in the basti] for whatever their vested interests are. People [from the basti] are basically taken for a ride (Interview with Resident, 2011).

Here, Salu conceptualized the NGO as the same as “various other [political] parties,” referencing their common practices that include collecting signatures across the basti as part of securing something akin to a “vote bank” that would further the NGO’s vested interests. In response to Salu’s statement, another man chimed into the conversation, stating:

I sometimes refuse to sign the papers [referring to the blank pages the NGO asked residents to sign, which were brought to the Chief Minister Sheila Dixit]. What if [the NGO leader] loses support someday and our signature papers are misused? (Personal communication, 2011)

This man’s statements again invoked the language of the state to describe an authority outside the state that nonetheless mirrors qualities of the state, implying that “losing support” was akin to being out of office, and that signatures posed a risk of being politically mishandled in the future.

It is precisely through demonstrating how NGO actors become “state-like” that residents such as Salu are able to map particular actors’ webs of power over the vital infrastructures of the settlement, and hence anticipate how to negotiate such power and control. Later in our conversation, Salu returned to the topic of the NGO, this time accurately identifying its workers as from the non-government sector rather than the state, yet articulating the practices of NGO actors as being similar in kind to the state. He commented:

The NGO comes here regularly and gets signatures from bastiwallas [residents of the basti]. From what I come to understand is that NGOs get money from outside [e.g., the state or donors] by showing these signatures … The NGOs make money but we do not know where it goes … They rent an office place in a plush building … One thing is for sure, an NGO that works for the poor must be getting huge amounts of donations. They get all our signatures, distribute school bags, biscuits, stationary, etc. and show that they are doing great work. That is how they get the funds. (Interview with Resident, 2011)

While recognizing the technical distinction between the NGO and members of the state, descriptions of the acts of displaying “good work,” distributing “gifts” in exchange for signatures (rather than votes), and representing “success stories” on the ground (that, according to residents’ perceptions, worked in effect to provide money and resources that benefit the NGO) demonstrate how residents narrate everyday governance as emerging through powerful actors and their associated networks becoming endowed with state-like qualities and state-like capacities, particularly with regard to shaping the infrastructures of life in the settlement. Resisting such actors, through practices such as refusing to sign petitions, required careful calculation in a manner similar to resisting actors of the state: balancing such resistance in tandem with its infrastructural consequences. In Salu’s case, his socio-economic position enabled him to pay high prices for private water deliveries, avoiding reliance on the tubewell water under Diya Madam’s purview. This widened Salu’s political position should he face diminished water access as a punitive consequence for refusing to sign NGO paperwork, a consequence he anticipated as a possibility (Interview with Resident, 2011).

Returning to Diya Madam, who was initially perceived as a key public authority who “distributes gifts” (albeit, the inappropriate gifts of “biscuits and pens” that were often a joking point for residents) and, more importantly, organizes the everyday regulation of the tubewell, this perception shifted several months after I arrived. Within a few months of the tubewell becoming restarted, residents began to describe Diya as a more threatening public authority “who speaks very badly” and acts as a “bully” (Interview with Residents, 2012). For example, a group of six residents described how they were threatened by Diya Madam for not filling out and signing an NGO survey. Many of the residents who were asked to complete the survey were not fully literate, and thus had a heightened fear that their signature on an unknown document could be used against them. One resident described this fear and uncertainty during a group discussion in the lane, stating: “What if tomorrow they [the NGO] get our signatures to demolish this settlement [as we don’t know what we are signing for]? They will drive us out someday” (Interview with resident, 2012).

During this group discussion, the residents asked me to read the NGO survey to them, so they could better understand what Diya Madam was asking them to sign. After looking over the written Hindi content, I stated: “It’s a survey. What they have done is asked questions about the water quality.” One resident responded: “Yes, but what she [Diya Madam] said is, ‘if you don’t fill out this thing, you will not be provided with … water’” (personal communication, 2012).

The perceived threat of infrastructural violence in the form of water being cut off for residents who did not participate in the survey further solidified residents’ perceptions of Diya Madam’s infrastructural power in controlling life-giving infrastructures in the settlement. Her punitive capacities appeared to be confirmed when state tanker deliveries in 2012 were eventually (and temporarily) stopped and residents were told by the local DJB office that “Diya Madam” had directed the office to reduce water tanker deliveries for the area since the tubewell was in operation (Interview with Residents, 2012).²

Pivoting between the state and its outside: The infrastructural power of key public authorities

In this section, I turn to an examination of the everyday practices of key political actors regulating the city’s infrastructures, demonstrating their “twilight” character (Lund, 2006) in the unauthorized colony called Saroj Bagh.³ By examining both the practices of the so-called water mafia and the MLA within Saroj Bagh, I show how such figures’ calculated oscillation between both state and non-state subject positions helps to endow these actors with “infrastructural power” over the materiality and governance of the city’s water infrastructure. The practices of these public authorities reveal not only how non-state identities are put to work to heighten power and control over water infrastructure, but also how diffuse forms of political power and infrastructural governance become orchestrated through a variety of creative techniques and tactics that have unequal and often uncertain outcomes for residents.

Water tanker trucks and drivers

Saroj Bagh is a large agglomerated unauthorized colony (UC) in Delhi housing an estimated 300,000 residents that span the urban poor and middle classes. One of the most common forms of water delivery across the locality is that of tanker trucks. As the state is not legally obligated to service the unplanned neighborhoods of UCs with centralized water connections, residents of these localities rely on a set of alternatives to the centralized grid, which include both tanker and tubewell water. Tanker trucks enter particular lanes (depending on size and fit of the truck and lane) and service residents with both potable and non-potable water.

Water tanker deliveries are normatively divided between two categories: as either state provisioned, through the DJB fleet that delivers ad-hoc potable water once per week free of cost, or private, through small vendors colloquially termed the “water mafia” (who charge for such deliveries). However, my findings show that a tanker driver can simultaneously embody the subject position of both the state and the so-called water mafia on any given day (or hour!), strategically pivoting between subject positions in overlapping governance regimes. It is this “pivot” that endows these actors with distinct forms of infrastructural power over the governance and distribution of ad-hoc state water.

Tanker drivers’ oscillation between state and non-state roles, and resulting twilight positionality, has particularly manifested in Delhi due to a DJB program to add contracted tankers to its fleet, ensuring the circulation of at least 800 state tanker trucks across the city every day. The hiring of private contractors enables the city to supplement its fleet without purchasing new trucks or hiring new permanent state employees. Notably, these supplemental trucks and their drivers are in ready supply precisely because they are already in private circulation as part of the so-called tanker water mafia. Rather than constituting an integrated network of informal water vendors, the tanker water mafia in reality consists of set of dispersed and often individually owned water tankers that service informal settlements, as well as high-end buildings such as malls and hotels, providing a critical water source to those who can afford to pay. Private tankers are common in Saroj Bagh as they provide a critical water source for households that lack central connections to the state water supply, but whose (lower) middle class socio-economic positions enable them to pay substantially more for water than more disadvantaged urbanites of other poorer informal settlements. However, the high costs of water mean that some renters in the neighborhood were paying more for water than rent.

On any given day in Saroj Bagh, tanker drivers occupy dual roles as both DJB workers and private water vendors. Here, the same tanker truck that delivers “free” potable water from a DJB filling station at any given point in time is also used to deliver private water at alternate points in time and space. Technically, such contracted tanker drivers are perceived to work for the state on specific days of the week and conduct their private water sales on alternate days. However, the materiality of the tanker truck itself—which is painted with a contractor’s name (or company) rather than having the state’s DJB label on it—enables private tanker trucks to move fluidly and imperceptibly between their roles in state delivery and private delivery. For example, private vendors, as contractors of the state, have open access to state water-filling stations. Officials at filling stations keep track of contracted vehicles, and they are a visible and regular presence along with other state trucks that wait in line to fill water. However, after exiting a state filling station, state tanker water may not necessarily reach the designated lane drop-off points in Saroj Bagh, but rather be sold to local residents willing to pay the vendor’s price, or alternately taken outside the settlement altogether to other buyers, including to elite neighborhoods, malls, and hotels (Interview with DJB Official, 2012). According to the DJB CEO in 2012, the official salaries of DJB tanker contractors remain low. It is much more profitable for contractors to sell a tank of water to one household, instead of giving it for free (as stipulated) to multiple households (Interview with DJB Official, 2012).

As such, water technically deemed as “free” potable water from the state (retrieved from DJB filling stations) to be delivered to Saroj Bagh’s residents can instead be informally and privately sold and delivered to alternate designations, as it becomes difficult to trace or read precisely what type of water (groundwater or potable treated water, state or private water) is in a tanker at any given time, and whether the contracted tanker is working for the state or privately vending at any given moment. Thus, there is nothing unusual in seeing a private tanker selling water to a hotel, even if this is in fact an illegal sale of potable state water, since the material origins of the water cannot be traced and whereas this type of transaction might be more anomalous if it were a DJB (state) labeled truck. The overlapping materiality of state and non-state water sources and tanker trucks, as well as the hybrid status of informal vendors who work as part-time state contractors, enables a particularly flexible and “gray zone” (Truelove, 2019) of governance that transforms formal state water into lucrative private water. Furthermore, the materiality of water infrastructure—in this case, the contracted tanker truck—becomes an organizing force of everyday governance. It is utilized to enable a water theft by the driver that effectively “transforms” free and potable state water to lucrative and privately sold water. The contracted tankers provide a tool (Meehan, 2014) by which tanker drivers can fluidly move between subject positions as either an actor of the state or private vendor at any given moment.

The infrastructural power of contracted water tankers and their drivers profoundly shapes how water is governed and unequally distributed in the everyday within settlements like Saroj Bagh. First, contracted tankers commonly fail to arrive and service community members at the designated times and lanes stipulated by the DJB, regularly leaving residents waterless as drivers instead sell the water for a higher price elsewhere (Interview with DJB Official, 2012). During my research, I observed tankers failing to show up on stipulated days as a regular practice, and one that residents were normalized to problem-solving. One woman expressed her frustration regularly waiting for tankers that never arrived: “[The tanker drivers] lie to you all the time. They say they bring water but they do not bring water here” (street gathering, 2012).

Additionally, residents reported frequently calling the contracted tanker owner (in charge of a fleet of contracted tanker trucks) in order to press for water deliveries when tankers sometimes failed to arrive for weeks at a time. One resident recounted how tanker owners deflected complaints about their absence:

Some people in the local lane have the DJB tanker owner’s number, and when he is called, he sometimes says, ‘the driver is not here, so we cannot send water,’ and water never comes. And sometimes the calls are not even picked up. (Interview with Resident, 2012)

These discretionary tactics, enabled by tanker drivers’ ability to pivot between state and non-state subject positions, enables tanker drivers to co-opt scheduled state deliveries and instead re-map to whom, and where, tanker water will flow.

Even when tankers arrive in designated neighborhoods, they may only service a select few residents, rather than the entirety of the lane, furthering distributional inequity. For example, some residents reported that neighbors were able to buy off shares of state water, with water being delivered to the highest bidder rather than being offered as a free (ad-hoc) service. In addition, when tanker drivers arrived within designated areas and did not charge extra for water, residents reported that the neighbors who were the most active in calling and persuading drivers to show up often demanded a larger share of water as compensation for the extra effort to bring the tanker in. Such arrangements further the unequal allocation of water in the interstices of the community. As such, some residents reported that a few privileged households fill more than 150 liters of water during a tanker delivery through such strategies, while others can only manage 30–40 liters, or none at all (Interviews with Residents, 2012). Here, we see how the twilight nature, and infrastructural power, of tanker drivers perpetuates a diffuse everyday water politics. These hybrid infrastructural and political arrangements profoundly shape everyday urban governance and water inequality in the city.

Improv governance: From state agent to public citizen

One of the most visible public authorities in Saroj Bagh during my research in 2011–2012 was the MLA, a powerful political actor at the state-level endowed with a discretionary budget to fund infrastructural fixes within the constituency. The MLA of Saroj Bagh was a regular fixture in the colony, with an established office on site due to the neighborhood’s significant vote bank (such offices were notably absent in other smaller settlements of his jurisdiction). On any given day, he could be seen officiating residents’ complaints in his office or informally in the lanes of the neighborhood that he frequently walked. Water was typically at the top of the list of residents’ grievances. Every resident I interviewed placed water as the primary concern of their day-to-day lives, and the sentiment was no different when residents encountered the MLA. Tanker deliveries of potable water from the state only arrived once per week, if that. When tankers did arrive, they would not provision equal water for each person, or water would be sold-off to particular households instead of freely provisioned. In-between tanker deliveries, the state’s internally piped system of tubewell water—also partially funded through the MLA’s infrastructural budget—often failed to flow through taps despite regular billing.

Due to residents’ ongoing water complaints, and an inability of the MLA’s infrastructural budget to offer much more than temporary piecemeal fixes, in 2011 the MLA approached a number of state agencies (including the DJB, Ministry of Urban Development, and Chief Minister of Delhi’s office) with requests to provision more tankers and tubewells for Saroj Bagh. When progress remained stalled within each office, without any new commitments to augment the water supply in the neighborhood, the MLA opted for a new improvisational governance strategy by which he could attempt to hold state agencies more accountable and ultimately increase water provisions in the area.

To do so, the MLA “pivoted” his subject position as an elected politician to the role of “citizen” with a complaint against the state, specifically launching a citizen Public Grievance (PG) against the DJB itself. Here, the MLA attempted to bypass obstacles presented by state agencies not through attempting a state exception, or the breaking or bending of laws per se, but rather through reaching into an alternate channel of legal–juridical action normatively reserved for citizens. By successfully re-positioning himself as a citizen with a grievance (rather than as a member of the state who commits grievances), the MLA sought to augment his infrastructural power within the neighborhood through an experimental, improvisational tactic with the potential to transform water governance on the ground. As we shall see, utilizing his non-state identity was a critical tool for the MLA to gain leverage in the city’s infrastructural politics and demonstrate water improvements to his constituency.

Approaching the Public Grievance Commission (PGC), an institutional body of the Government of the National Capital Territory responsible for arbitrating citizens’ complaints regarding the state’s delinquency, the MLA formally filed his grievance. The PGC is designed to redress complaints of the public and “take action against acts of omission or commission on the part of public officials,” such as those similar to the MLA himself (PGC, 2015, my italics). The MLA’s petition, submitted as a citizen, stated:

The water supply [in the UCs] is being made through tubewells and tankers, but the water supply from tubewells is not fit for drinking and even this water … is available only to 40% of the residents. The water supply from tankers is available to 10% of the residents. As such, the residents are forced to purchase water from private water suppliers and the situation is acute in the area. (PGC, 2011)

After two hearings in 2011, and a series of follow-up directives, the PGC ruled in favor of the MLA as citizen, stating that the state, in this case the DJB specifically, should provide five additional water tankers to Saroj Bagh as well as three new tubewells. Beyond these provisions, the PGC unexpectedly went a step further, indicating that the settlement would need additional water in the longer term. Specifically, in light of groundwater depletion in the area, the PGC declared that additional water would need to come from the centralized water supply, precisely the type of legal piped water source that has been historically denied to unplanned neighborhoods like Saroj Bagh. The PGC ruling thus unexpectedly and surprising provided the first (known) official document granting the informal settlement a stated right and mandate to connect to the city’s centralized piped system (a promise that had, as of 2017, yet to come to fruition).

The MLA’s work as a citizen, rather than state agent, provides a window into the ways state actors creatively negotiate hybrid subject positions in hopes of exerting greater degrees of power and control over urban infrastructures in their constituencies. Here, such improvisational governance practices illuminate diffuse and decentered forms of political power over vital urban infrastructures, where pivoting one’s subject position away from “state actor” can help to negotiate and leverage the porosity of the institutions of infrastructural governance. In the case of Saroj Bagh, a number of contingent, uncertain, and ambiguous outcomes resulted. First, infrastructural transformations that had been bureaucratically stymied for years were effectively negotiated, a success the MLA could use in relation to shoring up his vote bank. Acting as a citizen, the MLA’s petition worked to discipline the state—in this case, the DJB—as it was ordered to provision additional tubewell and tanker water deliveries. In reality, such piecemeal provisions were likely to augment water levels for only a limited number of households, with little overall improvement for the vast majority of residents who were not geographically located near enough to these additional infrastructures to benefit. However, more unexpectedly, the PGC provided a governance pathway by which the rights of residents within UCs to the central water supply were ratified in a legal document for the first (known) time. This dramatic turn of events, which ironically had never been a stated goal of the grievance, reveals how improvisational and hybrid pathways of infrastructural power can work to (somewhat unpredictably and incrementally) build new forms of access and legal frameworks of rights to vital resources.

Conclusion

In cities of the global South such as Delhi, the historic unwillingness of both the colonial and postcolonial state to provision adequate and/or equitable services to the urban population has generated a political field in which power and control over vital infrastructures involves a wide range of actors and practices. By drawing from anthropologies of the everyday state, and a growing body of work on the socio-material dimensions of urban infrastructure, this article seeks to contribute to both literatures by examining how city-dwellers and public authorities understand and experience political space and power related to urban infrastructures beyond the network that include a variety of actors operating in tandem with, or even outside the bureaucracies and purview of, the state. In particular, this paper employs the concept “infrastructural power” to both analyze and characterize the ways residents and public authorities perceive and negotiate the everyday politics of vital infrastructures in the city.

First, as a concept-analytic, a focus on infrastructural power brings attention to the everyday negotiations, calculations, and narratives that residents employ with regard to access and control of vital urban infrastructures such as tubewells and water tankers, revealing diffuse and decentered forms of political power in the city that blur state/society distinctions. Although residents in Rampur Camp ultimately (and accurately) identified “who is the state,” they also articulated hybrid and situated understandings of infrastructural power, narrating the diffuse governing power of both state and non-state public authorities as sharing a specific set of common characteristics that included both the promise of infrastructure and threats of infrastructural violence. Thus, characterizing non-state actors as mimicking the state helped residents to acknowledge, perceive, and map these political actors’ webs of control and influence over critical water infrastructures. As such, city-dwellers’ perceptions and understandings of infrastructural power constituted an everyday politics of anticipation. Anticipating, and engaging with, the practices of non-state actors helped residents to open up critical pathways for achieving infrastructural access in the wake of being bypassed by state agencies and institutions.

My findings thus reveal that making claims to the city and its resources by engaging the state through the collective petitioning of “political society” (Chatterjee, 2004) is not always useful or necessary for residents of informal settlements (see also Graham and McFarlane, 2015: 10). Instead, claims to vital infrastructures and resources come through navigating, negotiating, and even thwarting key political authorities including NGO workers and private tanker drivers, with residents’ full awareness that such actors may be equally or more crucial than state agencies and government officials for achieving forms of everyday access and control of resources like water. As such, city-dwellers perceive non-state political actors not simply as intermediaries of the state, but as political figures in their own right who exert power through their ability to control and govern resources in the city. Thus, the “politics of governed” (Chatterjee, 2004) is one not simply of the urban poor operating through the petitioning of government officials through moral appeals, political mobilization, and vote bank politics (in the wake of being denied the full rights of citizenship), but rather encompasses a much broader range of everyday negotiation and anticipation regarding a diverse milieu of political actors (that themselves shift subject locations between the state and citizen). Without more deeply probing this wider range of everyday infrastructural politics and practices, we risk missing important dimensions of “actually existing” governance and the highly diverse ways social and political power are experienced and structured in the city. Beyond the vote bank politics that certainly constitute an important element of everyday infrastructural governance, is a complex array of experimental tactics and socio-political negotiations that, for some residents, occupy a significant portion of their everyday experience of governance and their abilities to make footholds in the city. These modalities of ordinary claims-making, anticipation, and resistance require complicating theorizations of urban politics, citizenship, and rights to the city beyond a fixed state/non-state divide.

Finally, this research demonstrates the ways that infrastructural power blurs and operates outside of state space through the practices of key public authorities themselves. In Saroj Bagh, public authorities are able to mobilize power over urban infrastructures precisely through subverting their stateness. The politics of water tanker distribution and tubewell allotment are powerfully re-shaped through key public authorities shifting their subject positions from state to citizen, and back again. Not only do such oscillations between state and non-state subject positions enable gains in infrastructural power over flows of water in the city, such practices produce unequal outcomes for residents that profoundly shape how the city is unevenly experienced. For example, tanker drivers who strategically pivot from the roles of state contractor to private water vendor propel water inequality and uneven patterns of potable water’s distribution. By delivering treated (and purportedly free) state tanker water illegally to households who are willing to pay, or even selling this water outside the neighborhood altogether, these actors’ ability to straddle state space propels new patterns of water scarcity and in/security in particular pockets of the city, providing water for a few at the expense of many. On the other hand, when the MLA of Saroj Bagh shifted his subject position from state to citizen, filing a PG to augment local water infrastructure, this creative governance tactic resulted in more tubewells and tankers coming into the neighborhood’s lanes, potentially providing incremental gains in water access to nearby households. However, more unexpectedly and unpredictably, this governance tactic produced the first known mandate (by the PGC) to grant the unplanned neighborhood official water rights and end its historic exclusion from the state’s centralized water supply altogether.

As diffuse forms of political power come into being through the city’s everyday infrastructural governance, much more research is needed on the complex ways infrastructural power unequally shapes urban lives, space, and development. Creative pathways and variations of infrastructural governance are not simply devices that serve to uniformly include/exclude specific populations, but have complex and uncertain outcomes, sometimes increasing and at other times diminishing access to resources, urban inclusion, and in-roads to the city. Thus, these everyday governance modalities produce what Ong (2007: 4) calls “mutating configurations of possibility” that need to be examined on a case-by-case basis. My findings ultimately suggest a need to expand analyses of everyday urban governance to more concretely engage with the hybrid political space produced through the city’s infrastructural politics, and its effects on urban-dwellers’ bodies, lives, and claims to the city.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Natasha Cornea, Mike Dwyer, and Anu Sabhlok for their helpful feedback and discussions on the ideas for this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Yaffa Truelove is an assistant professor of Geography and International Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research examines urban and feminist political ecologies of water, southern and comparative urbanism, and the everyday governance of Indian cities.

ORCID iD

Yaffa Truelove

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