Water insecurity and patchwork adaptability in Bangalore’s low-income neighbourhoods

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ‘patchwork adaptability’ of low-income residents living in south-eastern Bangalore in India to demonstrate the socially embedded ways that city dwellers patch their water supply gaps. Drawing upon site visits and semi-structured interviews in three neighbourhood enclaves, the discussion highlights how residents cope with difficult and water-insecure contexts despite the municipality’s resource governance failures. While we encourage appreciation of the remarkable resilience that low-income populations in Bangalore exhibit, the evidence lays bare the need for more government support to help low-income residents navigate water insecurity in ways that require less time-intensive labour and social networking.

KEYWORDS:

• Water insecurity
• patchwork adaptability
• low-income residents
• informal economy
• Bangalore/Bengaluru
• India

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to those who participated in this research, without whom it would not have been possible. We also acknowledge Maneesha Sudheer, Professor Sunanda Muralidharan and Jay Mishra for supporting the research, and for helping to arrange Georgina Drew’s Research Visa through the School of Business at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University, Kochi. The authors are also thankful to the anonymous referees for their comments, which strengthened the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approval

H-2016-013 (Provided by the Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Adelaide).

Notes

1. Bengaluru is the proper name for the city, but this article uses ‘Bangalore’ in keeping with the terminology most often used among English speakers.

2. Bögenhold (2013) criticizes ideological approaches that overlook social embeddedness in economic transactions and pushes against the notion that markets are populated by rational ‘homo oeconomicus’ actors (p. 296).

3. In contrast to an informal supply, a formal water supply ‘usually means piped delivery’ that is ‘at least partly treated’ and is regulated by a utility (Burt & Ray, 2014, p. 106).

4. To access Cauvery water, owners had to pay per m² of each property in addition to the water connection, ranging from US$1340 to US$2680 (Mehrotra, 2019). Even then, they were not guaranteed a regular supply.

Additional information

Funding

Georgina Drew acknowledges the generous funding of the Australian Research Council [grant number DE160101178], which made this research possible.