Political Ecologies of Water Capture in an Indian ‘Smart City’

ABSTRACT

The historical water catchments of India’s capital city were foundational to the flourishing of settlements that spanned centuries. Today, those water features are held up as ‘wise’ models of water stewardship for the people who criticise the Indian government’s water management shortcomings. This article investigates historical imaginations of infrastructures past with attention to how their example leads to demands for ‘smart(er)’ water management regimes. It also shows how efforts to revive past water catchments can make meaningful contributions to water stewardship, but that they still risk perpetuating the water access inequalities and middle-class priorities that are identified in a growing body of scholarship on India’s water politics. Since the existing scholarship predominantly focuses on exploitative rural-to-urban and inter-urban water flows, this text argues that water politics – including political ecologies of water – are also poignantly revealed in the study of seemingly proactive solutions such as the expansion of urban water catchments.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart cities
• urban political ecology
• water capture
• New Delhi
• India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Georgina Drew http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5087-7551

Notes

1 Although the map was a sketch from 1807, it included hydrological features built up to five centuries earlier.

2 I henceforth call the city ‘Delhi’ in keeping with common parlance.

3 Delhi’s water supply gap exceeds 200 million gallons per day (Prashar and Shaw 2012: 10).

4 See: ‘New Delhi is Running Out of Water’ (11 July 2017) by Asit K. Biswas, Cecilia Tortajada, and Udisha Saklani. See: https://theconversation.com/new-delhi-is-running-out-of-water-80402 (accessed 15 April 2018).

5 One of India’s most renowned environmental organisations, the Centre for Science and Environment actively promotes urban catchments with publications such as Dying Wisdom (1997) and A Water Harvesting Manual (2003).

6 Amanbhai. 2016. Sohail Hashmi: Oral History on Delhi’s Water Supply. Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/amanbhai-301153112/sohail-hashmi-oral-history-on-delhis-water-supply (Accessed 25 September 2017).

7 Ibid.

8 Many of these pipe-laying efforts were done under the umbrella of the ‘Anti-malaria Works’ programme (Legg 2007: 170).

9 As Larkin (2013) has also explained, many of today’s infrastructure projects are ‘copies’ that are ‘funded and constructed so that cities or nations can take part in a contemporaneous modernity by repeating infrastructural projects from elsewhere to participate in a common visual and conceptual paradigm of what it means to be modern’ (333).

10 The United Nations Economic and Social Council (2016) contends that a smart city is an 'innovative city' that provides adequate urban infrastructure that meets the increasing pace of urbanisation while responding to the ‘sustainable development needs of society’ (3–4).

11 Commenting on the transformation, an interlocutor described the revitalised Haus Khas lake as an ‘oasis in the middle of Delhi’ and an ‘eye opener’ for the beauty that can be found within one of the world’s largest (and most polluted) cities.

12 As Sohail Hashmi commented, many of the water bodies located in lower-income areas have ‘been quietly erased from existence and from memory, filled up and built over, without leaving a single trace that might betray the fact that they ever existed’ (Hashmi 2013: 1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DE160101178].