Pipe dreams? Practices of everyday governance of heterogeneous configurations of water supply in Baruipur,a small town in India

Introduction

Nazrul Sarani is a predominantly low income, Muslim-dominated ‘para’ within Baruipur Municipality, a small town located in the southern fringes of the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA). ¹ Here, Gulnaz, an elderly widow, spends a large part of the day collecting and storing water in an assortment of plastic bottles, pots, pans and a bucket that occupy her small one-room dwelling. ² In a town where water access is inequitable, deeply contested and a daily struggle; Gulnaz’s options are severely limited. She has to make multiple trips to fetch water from her neighbour’s household tap when they allow it. She cannot afford the packaged drinking water sold by informal vendors that her better-off neighbours use. Frailty prevents Gulnaz from fetching water in heavy buckets from the deep tube well, which is a ten-minute walk from her place. The lived experience of Gulnaz’s physical labour and daily negotiations with her neighbour draws our attention to the diverse ways in which bodies, infrastructure, and the city are related (Sultana, 2009). It highlights the diversity of socio-technical infrastructure, uses and users and how social relations continually reconfigure these complex arrangements of artefacts, practices and uses.

Heterogeneous infrastructure configurations are embedded deeply in socio-spatial relations and are in turn, shaped and governed by complex imbrications of power involving ‘different kinds of technologies, relations, capacities and operations, entailing different risks and power relationships’ (Lawhon et al., 2018: 720). This paper contributes to existing scholarship that challenges the singular “networked city” ideal through an in-depth examination of the lived experiences of diverse forms of water supply in Baruipur Municipality (Coutard and Rutherford, 2016; Jaglin, 2014). We seek to understand the politics and practices adopted by shifting configurations of actors and institutions, both formal and informal, within the household, ‘para’ and town levels as they influence, mediate, negotiate and localise access to and flows of water on an everyday basis (Cornea et al., 2016). We demonstrate how the material realities of two distinct and publicly accessible water infrastructure - the non-networked 1000-foot tube well and the networked public stand posts, are in turn reconfiguring power relations between individuals and collectives in distinctly uneven ways, sometimes disrupting while at other times reinforcing socio-spatial inequalities at the household and neighbourhood level (Truelove, 2019).

Baruipur relies on groundwater resources that coexist with a centrally planned, networked source of treated surface water supply. Locals also depend upon informal private water vendors selling packaged drinking water. The state government has been pushing its ideal of a networked and treated surface water supply. ³ However, the reach, efficiency, adequacy and quality of water delivered through this piped network has been uneven due to several existing socio-spatial inequalities in the town as well as larger systemic challenges. ⁴ This inequality has produced a varying range of lived experiences of accessing water supply on the ground, increasing hardships and vulnerability of poorer families, especially the women. Therefore, locally devised formal and informal socio-technical arrangements have been strengthened to address the gaps and supplement the networked services fostering new configurations of power networks and social relations (Truelove, 2016).

Our paper draws on an in-depth qualitative examination and comparison of the everyday governance practices and politics around the formal 1000-foot deep tube wells and the public stand posts. These are used as ‘methodological device’ (Batubara et al., 2018: 1189) to reveal intangible socio-political practices that relate people to highly uneven water flows within and across neighbourhoods and enmesh them within locally contingent governance regimes. We collected field data from December 2016 to August 2018 from three wards (nos. 4, 7 and 12). Wards were chosen based on the varying strength of ward-level political leadership, a culture of active ‘para’ politics, and their geographical location. Observations carried out at the public stand posts, and deep tube well locations, the Municipal water department, Councillors’ residences, neighbourhood clubs helped to understand the workings of formal and informal networks of social and political power. We interviewed thirty-eight household respondents and eight local Councillors. These interactions allowed us to understand and situate everyday practices that govern water usage, the social embeddedness of these material artefacts, and the nature of socially produced regulations and norms controlling the actual access and uses of water infrastructure.

The paper has five sections. In the following section, we examine the contours of the scholarship on the situated and embodied forms of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) to understand how everyday social relations and plural practices govern heterogeneous urban water configurations and in turn how socio-material artefacts shape lived experiences and local networks of power. We then move on to introduce Baruipur town and the diversity of water infrastructure that has evolved incrementally. The fourth section is a qualitative examination of the diverse lived experiences at the neighbourhood level and the everyday urban practices and micro-politics that govern infrastructure and mediate between the networked and non-networked socio-material water infrastructure configurations. This analysis leads to the concluding section, wherein we discuss the theoretical and empirical insights highlighting the diverse ways in which social relations and socio-material infrastructure are co-constituted, significantly reconfigured and produced through plural practices of everyday governance.

Theoretical framework

This article attempts to integrate the broader socio-technical approaches to urban water (Coutard and Rutherford, 2016; Jaglin, 2014), with discussions on situated and embodied urban political ecology. We try to deepen this study using Lawhon et al.’s (2018) concept of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations (HICs). The concept of HICs presents a comprehensive approach to the materiality and wide-ranging geographies of different infrastructure, the dynamics of their everyday use; the nature of decision-making they accommodate, the agency of individuals and how they navigate the socio-material differences of specific artefacts. HICs, enable a clearer analysis of infrastructural artefacts not as individual objects but as a subset of geographically spread socio-technological configurations. A ‘configuration’ which includes diverse technologies, relations, their capacities and operations, with varying risks and power relationships. Such an analysis moves past debates of the state, community or private nature of ownerships, as well as formal or informal bounds of infrastructure. It also encourages comparative thinking about the possibility of incremental change (Lawhon et al., 2018).

The modern infrastructural ideal backed by the states is that of a uniform and a universal formal system of water provision that is centrally planned and networked. However, on the ground, how is infrastructure experienced? Infrastructure is geographically and materially fragmented, disjointed, uneven in reach, displaying archipelagos of access (Bakker, 2003), and are splintered (Graham and Marvin, 2001); particularly between formal and informal settlements (marked by issues of legality, property ownership, status, wealth and poverty) (Anand, 2011; Ranganathan, 2014; Truelove, 2016, 2019). Southern cities display an emergence of parallel systems and informal infrastructure (Björkman, 2015; Monstadt and Schramm, 2017; Schindler et al., 2019), particularly in informal settlements to make up for gaps. Scholars who problematise this dualism between formal and informal point out that even those with Municipal connections extend/expand/augment their water supply using informal practices (Truelove, 2019); resorting to the use of formal channels within informal settlements to gain infrastructure access. In reality, residents’ practices involve a phenomenon of switching to avert risk, as they make use of the redundancies and overlaps of multiple discontinuous systems (Lawhon et al., 2018).

We use the situated and embodied UPE framework with urban drinking water infrastructure to analyse the differential regulation and practice (Cornea et al., 2016) to uncover the uneven impacts and lived experiences of the city for residents (Truelove, 2016; 2019). How do residents experience infrastructure transformations? How is their access to water affected, in terms of quality, quantity, ease of access; inclusion and exclusion from certain modes? We highlight how these transformations and access to water varies across different groups of residents within a ‘para,’ applying feminist and intersectional approaches that bring to focus embodied and gendered forms of class (e.g., Sultana, 2009) that mediate and shape differential forms of access. Shifts in power networks and alliances, nodes of authority, embodied practices occur with transformations in infrastructural configurations. For example, Truelove’s (2016) study of an informal settlement in Delhi traces how a change from tanker deliveries to a motorised tube well for piped groundwater supply shifted power in favour of the informal pradhan, sidelining the community women who were earlier informally in charge of regulating access to the water supply.

These reconfigurations in the governance of water supply bring out how people respond to cities/infrastructure in motion, by working out new alliances, power shifts, use of formal and informal mechanisms to retain or augment access, exclude access for others and consolidate one’s own. A situated approach to UPE can be useful to demonstrate the shifting state and non-state political assemblages as playing key roles in the everyday regulation of water, as Truelove (2016) illustrates through the negotiations between informal leaders (Pradhan), other strongmen, influential NGOs and elected representatives to broker deals (votes in exchange for waterworks). It also shows how different political agencies and assemblages empower or disempower different actors involved in the governance of water (ibid). Similarly, Cornea et al.’s (2016) research on the everyday governance of urban pondscape in West Bengal shows how state and non-state actors such as ‘para’ club members form ‘webs of power,’ to exercise authority over and through ponds to govern access and command authority within the community. Within the everyday context, this not only re-constructs social relations of power but shapes the pondscape as well.

We attempt to highlight the different state and non-state actors and the kind of powers they have to govern, regulate and shape infrastructure. We ask, how do transformations in infrastructural configurations empower or disempower various power networks? Do technology changes in infrastructure offer sites of de-politicisation or re-politicisation over everyday water provisioning and access? Does it lead to status quo or possibilities of incremental social change by redistributing power and access to resources? Can this understanding reveal the workings of power relations in order to move to more just, accessible and inclusive infrastructure configurations?

According to Sulley (2018: 8), “Through multi-scalar investigation of access to and use of water, uneven participation in water governance, and multiple lived experiences of water, gendered inequalities across the city, community, and household levels are brought to the fore”. We analyse the intersection of gender and class through actors situated at the neighbourhood and the household levels to talk about how infrastructure affects gendered relationships in the town. In turn, how do gendered relations govern the use and access as well as material configurations of infrastructure? To bring out a gendered understanding of differential access to water, we followed studies on gender and class (Crow and Sultana, 2002; Sultana, 2009), intersections of gender, caste and class (Birkenholtz, 2013).

Sultana’s (2009) study in the arsenic affected waterscape of rural Bangladesh shows how gender becomes significant through everyday practices and performances. These comprise bodies, places and spaces (e.g. inside/outside the homestead); intersectional social axes (class); geological factors that configure notions of contamination around tube well infrastructure. Furthermore, hierarchical household structures show that women have less decision-making powers. However, women’s class positions vis-a-vis their family’s social standing and ownership of infrastructure (e.g. tube well) determine access to water and power outside their homes (Sultana, 2009). The spatiality of arsenic-affected and safe tube wells also shows how binary gendered constructions of the ‘public – masculine’ and ‘private – feminine’ conflict when women have to fetch water from public sources. Such practices demand ‘crossing the boundaries from the private into the public in order to fulfil the private/domestic duties’ (Sultana, 2009: 432). These struggles highlight gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions in everyday living (Sultana, 2011).

Birkenholtz’s (2013) work on rural water supply (Rajasthan) shows how social differentiation of caste, class, age further exacerbate water access within gender roles. Historically dominant castes enjoy illegal in-house connections and do not spend time collecting water. Contrarily, women from marginal castes spend significant trip hours for water collection, even though their villages have working public connections; hence the phrase “on the network, but off the map” (ibid: 362). Further, intragender scarcity between differently situated women (both across and within villages) deepens existing social prospects (education) and has negative physiological effects for lower castes.

The case study of Baruipur is significant for critical urban studies and policy planning. Baruipur represents small towns in the shadows of large metropolitan regions that suffer due to weak capacities, lack of finances and piecemeal infrastructure development. It contributes to a small but significant, growing body of literature on the challenges and multiple trajectories of urbanisation of small and medium towns in India (de Bercegol, 2017; Samanta, 2017). Secondly, this study builds on and contributes to the scholarship on looking ‘beyond the network’ (Coutard and Rutherford, 2016; Jaglin, 2014; Schindler et al., 2021), which argues that the norm in South Asian cities is that the vast majority of citizens are dependent on multiple and overlapping water supply systems in the locality - that is non-networked, regulated through social relations, and highly localised.

Research on everyday governance practices using urban water as an object of study has mainly focussed on specific material infrastructure in large cities, e.g. pipes in informal settlements (Anand, 2011; Björkman, 2015). Our specific contributions through the article compare a networked and a non-networked artefact and the diverse practices of everyday governance around these configurations. In doing so, we probe the multiple ways in which the heterogeneous configurations of water infrastructure are interrelated, how power flows through them and how the configurations respond to the dynamic shifts in the political-economic context of the small town. Additionally, the study tries to point out how social preferences, established habits and the importance of local culture shapes access and usage of non-networked versus networked water.

Discussions on infrastructure assemblages that lie beyond the network are located mostly in informal settlements (Kooy, 2014; Truelove, 2016). We look at the intra-settlement differences in lived experiences to emphasize the neighbourhood scale.

The study also seeks to expand the knowledge of the role of women of different classes at household, neighbourhood and city level concerning water governance and access in the urban areas. Specifically, we look at the intersection of class and gender vis-à-vis the para-level institutions that informally govern water access and the everyday experience of supply and usage. In turn, the study shows how the materiality of infrastructure affect social relations at the household, ‘para,’ and city levels. Though the role of ‘para’ club members as intermediaries shapes everyday life in West Bengal, their practices of exerting local influence have got little empirical attention in the urban governance context (except for Cornea, 2019; Cornea et al., 2016). We intend to contribute to this growing body of work. This theme is particularly critical to urban West Bengal where much of the argument contends that local social clubs/para-level institutions merely serve as go-betweens of the people and the state; but largely function to sustain and consolidate the hegemony of the party in power at the state level (Roy, 2002).

In the next section, we turn to the historical factors, political-economic reasons and local socio-cultural practices that have shaped the heterogeneous infrastructure configurations of water in Baruipur.

Small town, big plans and the making of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations

Baruipur Municipality is a small town about 30 km from Kolkata on the southernmost fringes of the KMA. ⁵ Located in South 24 Parganas, one of the most socio-economically backward districts in West Bengal, Baruipur is predominantly residential with a commercial core and administrative district-level offices along the arterial road. Surrounded by agricultural lands, there are 17 wards, 64 slum pockets (Baruipur Municipality, 2014: 11), with the northern part of the town more developed and densely populated than the south.

Residents used to depend on rudimentary non-networked water sources – individual shallow and some deep tube wells and community-regulated ponds. Municipal services increased when the town was included in the KMA for all developmental work in the 1970s. The KMDA helped Municipal engineers lay a localised piped network to draw out groundwater through mechanised submersible pumps for ease of public consumption. ⁶ Residents queued at stand posts located in accessible street corners to collect water at fixed times. The then Municipal Chairman, who had strong political ties to the party ruling the state (Roychowdhury and Purkait, 2014), was instrumental in getting this project sanctioned. This network was limited to the densely populated areas, inhabited by influential landed elites and the commercial class. Successive local governments who came to power expanded this piped network but in a piecemeal fashion depending upon the release of finances from the state to the local government. Pipeline expansion was also subject to the (almost non-existent) alignment of sub-arterial roads (Interviews with ex-Councillor, 06.09.2017).

In the ’80s and ’90s, with technological improvement and growing aspirations, this partial network was modified to provide individual house connections (Roychowdhury and Purkait, 2014). Those with formal land titles and the ability to pay a one-time connection fee connected their house plots to the piped distribution network. Municipal engineers contended that some households made an additional provision of an underground or overhead tank and a booster pump to access stored water outside of scheduled supply timings. Many houses also had shallow tube wells within their compounds as a backup option as the Municipal piped water flow was erratic. Excluded from individual house connections were poorer households or the informal, temporary hutments without legal land titles. Formal houses on the town’s periphery were also excluded as extending the main network to these sparsely populated areas was expensive. Poorer families were thus dependent on public stand posts, deep tube wells and the highly polluted ponds for daily use, often having to walk long distances or wait in queues to access water.

When groundwater arsenic problem started gaining attention in the 1990s, the Municipal water department had to think of a safe drinking water alternative. ⁷ The contamination risk from shallow hand-pumped tube wells was high, and piped water coverage was insufficient. As a temporary mitigation measure, the Municipality introduced the hand-pumped ‘1000-foot kol.’ Unlike the stand posts which are a node connected to the underground piped network, the 1000-foot deep tube well is a point source, a discrete arrangement. The 1000-foot is a Municipality-managed public drinking water source, installed in municipally-owned land.

According to the Master Plan (2001-2025) for water supply (Kolkata Metropolitan Planning Committee, 2001), in early 2000, the public outcry against widespread arsenic contamination in South 24 Parganas led the state to direct the release of treated surface water to Baruipur ⁸ . This water would be available three times a day (for 4.5 hours) through the existing piped network. However, since Baruipur lacked the bulk infrastructure to receive, store and transport treated surface water, the supply was inadequate and inconsistent. Residents we interviewed recalled frequent fights at local public stand posts. Households with Municipal water connections also complained about the quantity. This prompted Municipal engineers to respond creatively by pumping up groundwater (from the existing system) and mixing this with the treated surface water. The flow became less erratic and gave engineers partial control over the system. However, residents complained that water was yellow, muddy and smelled different, refusing to drink it; forcing the Municipal water department to dig more deep tube wells, especially in peripheral wards where network coverage was poor or absent. Some of the more affluent middle-class households who had settled in the periphery relied upon individual shallow tube wells and an emerging market of vendors delivering packaged drinking water at a steep price.

In 2013, Baruipur Municipality inaugurated a large-scale state-driven project to provide piped treated surface water to all 17 wards and all ‘eligible’ households through individual connections under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. The project executed by the state government attempted to introduce metering and a standard water tariff, a move which has been staunchly rejected by the ruling party regime - the Trinamul Congress (TMC) which believes water is a public good (The Telegraph, 2011). In what ways will these top-down, state-driven, modernisation projects affect how Baruipur’s inhabitants’ experience and negotiate their everyday access to water? What does this state-controlled process of creating “citywide networks” and “universal access” (Schindler et al., 2021: 4) mean for the actually existing, fragmented, discontinuous and heterogeneous configurations of urban water? How will the town’s existing constellations of formal and informal actors and institutions that regulate the existing infrastructures, respond to the various socio-technical transformations? What kinds of plural practices do people engage in to deal with a “city in motion” (Schindler et al., 2021: 4)? These are pertinent questions given that scholars studying cities in the global South seem to agree that “universal access will never be achieved through the construction of seamless citywide infrastructure networks and service delivery systems” (ibid:4).

The patchy, incremental and fragmented nature of water supply mechanisms is partly due to the fraught politics between the local and state governments between the ‘80s and ‘90s. The populist Left Front Government headed the state from 1977 to 2011 (Banerjee, 2011), but Baruipur was a traditional Congress stronghold because a powerful elite Bengali landed gentry resided in the town. Local governments in India are dependent on the state for financing capital intensive infrastructure projects (de Bercegol, 2017), and this political dissonance led to Baruipur’s neglect. Now, however, the political and economic fortunes of Baruipur has changed with the current Chairman of the local body supporting TMC. The slew of infrastructure modernisation projects is related to the enhanced connectivity with metropolitan Kolkata, which has accelerated urban growth in and around Baruipur. Official plans such as the Draft Development Plan (2007-2012) has indicated Baruipur as a ‘promising growth centre’ (Baruipur Municipality, 2007: 3), reinforcing its growing significance in the wider metropolitan region.

This section thus highlights the broader political-economic context which shapes the material configuration of large scale networked infrastructure. It brings out the diversity of non-networked socio-technological artefacts, uses and users that coexist to provide water in the absence of a uniform and universal system. This case strengthens the view that discontinuous and overlapping socio-technical systems create considerable redundancy but reduce risks faced by residents in one socio-technical system (Lawhon et al., 2018; Schindler et al., 2021). Scholars suggest technological modernisation, as it proceeds, can and often does obliterate existing water supply modes impairing access for social groups reliant on them (Anand, 2011). Alternatively, it introduces unevenness through incremental network addition, disturbing supplies and access to localities previously well-served (Björkman, 2015). In Baruipur’s case, the networked system marginalises the urban poor by pricing them out of the system of household connections and by reducing the number of public stand posts. However, extension and layout of new trunk mains and reservoirs are expensive and time-consuming to develop (Bakker, 2003) leading to a piecemeal expansion of Baruipur’s piped network. This section illustrates the inherent problems of the ‘networked ideal’ (Coutard and Rutherford, 2016; Jaglin, 2014), especially in resource-strapped towns in the global South. However, it is also clear that local actors, institutions and their practices reconfigure, modify and adapt these socio-technical systems - extending and adapting weak, fragmented public water delivery systems. It is to these everyday practices of accessing and governing the diverse water supply systems that we turn to in the following section.

Plural everyday practices, social power relations and the (re)production of differentiated water access at multiple scales

A situated, nuanced and an embodied understanding of actually existing, socio-technical configurations of water infrastructure requires paying particular attention to the heterogeneity of urban actors, institutions and their many practices. While scholars (Anand, 2011; Björkman, 2015; Graham and McFarlane, 2015) have studied how the materiality of contingent infrastructural configurations shapes our everyday social lives, others (Ahlers et al., 2014; Cornea et al., 2016) have shown that existing asymmetrical social and power relations govern and decide the terms of inclusion and exclusion from access to or control over resources. Moreover, shifts in socio-technical configurations due to external pressures may be challenged, resisted, modified and adapted in various ways on the ground leading to new territorial power struggles, coalitions, networks, spatial practices and power hierarchies (Truelove, 2019).

Pipe dreams?

Overall, this article demonstrates the complexity of everyday governance practices and politics around publicly accessible drinking water infrastructure in a small Municipal town. The town displays a heterogeneous, incrementally developed and fragmented water supply mechanism, partly due to the fraught politics between the local and state governments, and the potential of urban growth. This broader political-economic context shapes the material configuration of large-scale piped water infrastructure. Besides, it also points to the diversity of non-networked socio-technological artefacts, uses and users that coexist to provide water given the absence of a uniform and universal system. Geographic factors and socio-economic status have intertwined at the local level to produce uneven access in addition to shaping how people regulate their water-use and use different water sources for different purposes.

The study highlights some findings on the contingent nature of heterogeneous infrastructure configurations and their governance. Contrary to widely-held opinions, middle-class households with formal land titles often struggle to access water from networked and non-networked sources. In contrast, poorer groups living in informally constructed houses may have better water access enabled by local-level politics, social networks, proximity to party ‘dada’/Councillor, and ability to negotiate or leverage social status within the local political networks.

Our paper highlights how small-town infrastructural transformations can impact local power hierarchies and social relations. Changes in material infrastructure (stand post removals or defunct tube wells) can disrupt existing constellations of actors, institutions, and practices which has grave implications for social relations, exclusion and inclusion, and household water access. Locally-situated actor configurations, therefore, can resist, modify and manoeuvre top-down decision-making. This contests not only the networked infrastructure ideal that modern cities are prescribed but also theories of linear neoliberal urban transformations that suggests that the local is a mere static receptacle for the impositions of globalisation.

Local actors, institutions and their practices reconfigure, modify and adapt these socio-technical systems through socially-produced regulations and norms to control the actual access and uses of water infrastructure. This process involves a continual (re)negotiation of relationships among different state and non-state actors - elected leaders and the Municipality; liaison between Councillors and residents; local intermediaries negotiating the impervious network of the local civic body to enable a household’s access to new connections. These actors with varied subjectivities act at different sites and scales employing differential regulation and practices leading to uneven impacts and lived experiences for the townspeople.

Transformations in infrastructure on the ground bring about shifts in power, authority, and embodied practices. Different actors respond to these changes by working out new alliances, using both formal and informal mechanisms to retain or increase access; exclude others and consolidate one’s own. For instance, households, both middle-income and poorer families, manage their water needs by switching or supplementing their water access from more than one source, thereby off-setting the possibility of a shortage. The top-down development of piped infrastructure and household connections has reinforced and deepened inequitable water distribution – producing more everyday struggles, mainly for women from lower-income groups. Women’s work of collecting, storing water has been invisibilised for many middle-class women, who need to now struggle against the social stigma attached to water collection from public stand posts.

Local intermediaries (party workers and members of ‘para’ clubs), often young men from the locality, continually look at opportunities to embed and empower themselves firmly in the newer, as well as the older water supply systems through their everyday practices of co-management and co-governance. They mostly operate through informal control mechanisms, and sometimes take over formal tasks that the Municipality would have done (e.g., minor tube well repairs and maintenance); even acting as an extension of the Councillor. These actors ensure regulation of stand posts by keeping an eye out for fights erupting between users and act as mediators for resolution of disputes and grievances relating to the collection of more than the allotted share of water or wastage, especially in the slum settlements. Through these practices, they make themselves visible and indispensable to the fabric of the ‘para.’ In the course of this social work, and through their involvement in extending/expanding/controlling water access, they actively carve out territorial configurations, which then provide a fillip to their political ambitions and become their ‘home-grounds’ for gaining entry into the local political race.

Furthermore, we highlight the role of Councillors, who, as the local elected representatives, have formal authority as decision-makers. At the same time, how they also act through informal channels or use them to re-politicise infrastructure and consolidate their power position. Contrary to the assumptions of centralised piped networks and promises of de-politicised water provisioning, making it a uniformly accessible resource, the on-ground reality appears to indicate that not only has the inequality of access (and spatial distribution of infrastructure) continued, rather, micro-politics is deepening it. The first thing that we notice is how Councillors, in effect, ‘localise’ what is, in theory, implementation of a centrally-planned infrastructure. To bridge the systemic gaps, they resist stand post removals or encourage the continued use of groundwater; all ostensibly intended to serve their respective constituents favourably in terms of access; behind the scenes, it works to consolidate their political clout. At the same time, intermediaries from social and locally-embedded institutions who may have been useful to counter the political weight of the elected leaders and ensure equitable distribution through their vocal demands and participation, in reality, are mostly an extension of the influence and power the Councillors wield over the local areas. This points to the re-distribution of power in the locality through daily engagement with water infrastructure.

The heterogeneity of Baruipur’s water arrangements shows situated, decentralised power nodes and networks regulate infrastructure instead of a single, uniform centralised authority. Councillors and ‘para’ clubs, as well as the informal ‘dadas,’ can become powerful agents, reconfiguring and assembling local infrastructure. The above instances illustrate how technology is contributing to the re-politicisation of the process of everyday water supply and access. However, these multiple webs of partnership and authority at work, reflect fragility and volatility necessitating a constant effort to build reputation and reliability of connections both social and political. Governance practices are based on tacit knowledge of subterranean pipes, risks and water flow as well as of social dynamics, customs, and power hierarchies. It is at the ‘para’ scale that the everyday state is experienced, challenged and reaffirmed through the practices of disparate actors and institutions across the formal and informal spectrum.

To conclude, the paper argues that distinctive place-based patterns emerge from the creativity, the conflicts and contestations that characterise everyday urban governance instead of a uniform, unidirectional and uncontested field. Analysis of everyday household practices and coping mechanisms creatively deployed to secure water highlights the ways power, social relations and customary rules about gender and class tend to operate. While communities of place can exclude some households from using ‘public’ water resources, they can simultaneously develop collective action measures to extend access for households without tap connections. New projects thus exacerbate social conflicts and spatial inequalities on an everyday basis while opening up opportunities to overcome marginalisation concerning access. Thus, while piped water is a dream for many, a vision developed by state power, in reality, a variety of sources are brought together creatively and imaginatively at the local level to access water.