http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7141-6626
Nikhil Anand. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. xiv and 296 pp.; acknowledgments, notes, references, index. $26.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-8223-6269-2); $99.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8223-6254-8).
This is the latest in a long and increasing number of studies of urban political ecology in general and the Mumbai water system in particular. Analyzing a city's water system reveals not only the technical issue of water supply but also how it reflects and embodies wider social issues and deeper economic concerns. In this book Nikhil Anand advances the theme of hydraulic citizenship, the idea that citizenship is in large part a function of access to water rights.
Mumbai's water system is large. More than 3,000 miles of pipe distribute billions of gallons of water. The Hydraulic Engineering Department employs 500 water engineers and 7,000 laborers. Water is pumped from outlying districts to feed the seemingly insatiable demand of a growing urban population. Ensuring the water supply involves the constant manufacturing of the narrative of a water supply crisis.
The hydraulic system was chronically underfunded from the city's beginning. The British colonial authorities limited expenditures and through rationing piped water to the elite areas. Water distribution has widened but is still strictly rationed. The private lives of the city move in accord with the chronology of rationed water. Different districts have access to water only at limited and fixed times. Something we take for granted in the urban North—continuous 24/7 supply—is more episodic than intermittent in Mumbai. The turning off and on of water to the neighborhoods provides an important temporal peg to everyday lives and a key structuring of social relations, reinforcing traditional gender roles, for example.
Populations are imagined and governed though water management practices. Access to water is not a right of citizenship. Rather, citizenship is won, negotiated, and signaled by access to water. The heart of the book reveals how people in the self-built communities of the city negotiate with city employees and political representatives to get connected to the city's water system. Hydration is not given but won by those on the margins of the economy and the state. The main point of the book is to show how hydraulic citizenship is neither a given nor fixed, but a constantly evolving relational process for those on the margins.
The book at its best has sharp insights and is wonderfully evocative of the hard work needed to get and keep water supply from a complex socio-political-technical assemblage. Much of the text loses its narrative coherence to continual reference citations, however. It as if the city is drawn in the half-shadow of large amounts of text reiterating other people's works. The net effect is a curiously hazy sense of the city and its citizens. There is little real discussion of methodology. There is a lot of “I spoke with … .” We catch glimpses of the action but then the darkness of the citations descends and the looseness of the methods disorients us. Like the city and its water supply, the end result is fascinating, slightly chaotic, and something still somewhat mysterious to the reader.
ORCiD
John Rennie Short 
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7141-6626