Between Stagnancy and Affluence: Reinterpreting Water Poverty and Domestic Flows in Delhi, India

ABSTRACT

Hydrological systems are reflective of the social systems from which they spring. A close examination of the water narratives in a Central Delhi slum reveals that these are imbued with language of developmental struggle and social injustice. This brings clear voice to otherwise tacit, abstract flows ranging from the movement of women, to the circulation of money, and distribution of water, illustrating the delineation and control of the borders and categories over which things flow. In the slum, residents mark the success of their lives, and their measure of the future, by the passing of time in waiting for water. Some residents are believed to live in a state of financial, temporal, and hydrological affluence, while others identify the flows in their lives as stagnant. These abstractions are manifested in stories of daily water struggles, reflecting identities and worldviews that shed light on perceptions of development that are otherwise difficult to express.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology
• India
• poverty
• sustainable development
• urban planning
• water

Introduction and Research Design

Every day 1,000 people move to Delhi hoping to become a part of the new India, some propelled by the promise of economic opportunities of a world-class city, and others pushed by the idling growth of their villages or the fragmentation and desiccation of their farms. Exponential population growth puts strain on water resources and strains contemporary development rationales (Maria 2006). Though many hope that simply moving to the city will incorporate them into flows of progress, their immigration is often fraught. Much of their struggle is expressed in metaphors of time and timings that mitigate their inclusion in contemporary India and its modern, developed Delhi. While metaphors range from unidirectional ideas about progress and modernization, more cogently, the relevance of time is grounded in everyday difficulties managing the transition from village to urban life. The discrepancies of rural and urban time are experienced through changing material and social relationships that critically affect the everyday ability to collect water. Like many immigrants to global cities worldwide, the majority who arrive in Delhi live in tenements or in illegal “slums” with limited access to water infrastructure (Zerah 2000). The broader developmental difficulties immigrants experience surrounding abstractions of time are difficult to articulate, yet become evident in parallel language about the overwhelming consequences of temporal limitations on their water infrastructure.

The link between poverty, urban immigration, and entry to the informal economy is well documented. Ghertner discusses the structural and infrastructural transformation of cities like Delhi into “world-class” ones through processes that simultaneously disenfranchise the urban poor by criminalizing informal lifestyles (2011b) while also sanctioning unauthorized, informal development at the state level (2008). In this duality, informal structures and infrastructures operate as the primary functioning system to meet the immediate needs of the new immigrants whom the state externalizes in services, though ultimately relies upon for labor (Mitra 2003; Banerji 2005). Despite their illegality, informal housing and employment are often the first lifeline to immigrants. Many immigrants attempt to mitigate their tenuous economic situations by finding an initial foothold in India’s informal urban economy—women, in particular, often find employment as domestic workers (Sassen 2002; Ray and Qayum 2009; O’Leary 2015).

Broader flows of resources in the changing urban domestic context—the movement of women and their labor within and outside of communities, the circulation of money in formal and informal employment, and the allocation patterns of water—interrelate to form subcultures of speed that immigrants contrast at its two extremes: affluence or stagnancy. Affluence, a rapid flow or circulation, can be understood in the self-descriptions of working women and those applied to them by their nonworking neighbors. These residents consistently defined the life of a working woman by the breadth of spatial movements of physical bodies into communities and the broader city (women “always going,” “quick like their water”), by increased economic capacity (flows of money), and by increased allocation of water (fluency in access). In contrast to the comparative rapidity of these flows, nonworking women were defined by physically limited geographies, by exclusion from economic exchange circuits, and by “always waiting” for flows of water. The frequent refrains of immigrants’ descriptions of “going” versus “waiting” seamlessly linked these separate categories through the interconnectivity of these flows and identities of “go-ers” and “waiters.” The overarching heuristic of “affluence” and “stagnancy,” contrasting the freely flowing opportunities of some women with the lack of resources of others, is a way to reconcile what residents described as overlapping flows with dramatic impacts on development and urban inclusion. These terms are used to move beyond an understanding of inequality or poverty alone as the main causation for disparate development, into one that, from residents’ own descriptions, shows the importance of understanding development through fluidity.

During 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork (2011–2012), I explored the cultural dimensions of water allocation through engaged ethnography—by waiting with working and nonworking women from the basti on the road-corner drop-off points for water deliveries, fostering discussion in women’s groups, and participating in the everyday family lives of the urban water poor. This ethnographic data collection complemented quantitative tracking of water tanker delivery quantities and timings and parallel quantitative research on other community water sources. The ethnographic research was multiphased and recruited openly in the community, as well as drawing from community organizations to ensure representation in geographic and cultural distribution. The narratives presented here were collected through questionnaires and open-ended interviews at water sources and residence-cluster focus groups, as well as in-depth family tracking and participant-observation—all of which encouraged freely speaking about water. In conjunction with ethnographic research, participatory quantitative surveys were completed by community members in a water allocation diary project, which included individual and group discussions on the resultant narratives. Community members were involved in the design of the survey, the analysis of data, and the interpretation of conclusions. The data presented in this article are part of a larger project that draws on interviews with community experts (Resident Welfare Association leaders, nongovernmental organization [NGO] workers) and public water governance authorities (tanker drivers, the Delhi Jal Board, Ministry of Water Resources), among others. This multiyear discussion of overlapping flows from multiple scales (from daily domestic life to urban politics to the transnational global economy) resulted in a collection of narratives that reflect the recurrent theme of “waiting” versus movement, largely illustrated through water metaphors of subjectivity and material flows. The metaphors of stagnancy and affluence are a “co-construction” between the community members and researcher (Hellberg 2014); the final English words were selected by the researcher with community input. The centrality of stagnancy and affluence was used with particular poignancy in internal community hierarchies to define the social waterscapes of lower-class, informal Delhi.

In Panchtare Basti, two physical “sides” of the community were demarcated by informants. These sides were defined geographically and culturally, because of two waves of development. These waves delineated differing paces of social relations, flows of water, and the circulation of women, ultimately impacting externally derived measures of development. Within the community, this distinction was exacerbated by separate water deliveries supplied by the Delhi Jal Board. The tankers stopped on each side in the morning and evening, returning to the filling station before each delivery. Despite this parity, Road-side residents suspected Embassy-side residents of illegitimately acquiring better access. Residents vocalized the co-production of these spaces via water, gender, and class, which they defined through descriptions of stagnancy and affluence.

This article argues that basti residents identify two points on a larger continuum that expose heterogeneity in informal settlement residents’ relationship to water. It documents the precise ways in which hegemonic water disparity is reproduced in struggling communities through narratives that entangle transactions of water access and women’s everyday movements with complex, neoliberal political debates in broader national and global contexts. Scholars in several fields have investigated this relationship, though particular insight has come from literatures that critically examine the link between intersectional subjectivities and developmental processes. This article draws from understandings of the way gender is made through water, expanding on the applications of Sultana’s (2009) argument of social and spatial fluidity and O’Reilly’s (2006) mutual construction of meanings of women and water. It elucidates the spatiotemporal rhythms of fluidity of women and water access, tracking how universalistic narratives of economic development are paralleled within the community but marked by a critical emphasis on the imbedded informality of state-led development. This articulates the processes involved in Roy’s (2009) argument decoupling poverty and informality by using grounded, contextualized examples that implicitly correlate integration into state-sanctioned development with informality and corruption. Further, community narratives demonstrate Hellberg’s (2014) assertions about the differential agencies required of citizens by fragmented urban water services, showing that stagnancy, a form of remaining stationary to facilitate flow, is a limited form of agency that defines some women’s lives. This agency is both a product of ineffective state water delivery systems and a producer of varying economic stabilities that impact social relationships through mutuality and reciprocity. This article uses a comparative approach to situate the relevance of contextual peculiarities that make this narrative unique to the basti in broader discussions about justice in gender, development, and natural resources. These narratives challenge the role of informality in urban water services development, establishing primacy in the perceived pace of relationships over typical development strategic priorities such as formality and monetization.

Reading Human Relationships Through Water: Affluence and Stagnancy in Context

In Delhi’s underserved water communities, the pace of resource exchange is monitored closely, and impacts the identities of residents. Gomez-Temesio’s (2016) work in Senegal underscores the strategic use of social relationships to increase flows of water, rendering social relationships as partly defined by water. This same reconfiguration happens in Delhi as women enter the workforce and their identities reflect their increased water access to the point where they are defined by their fluidity.

Under particular scrutiny in the basti was the disparity between women working outside the home and their nonworking¹ female neighbors. Water access often means waiting for hours for inconsistent flows at tanker pickup points or community spigots.² Tanker water deliveries fulfill the basic needs of Delhi’s growing informal communities without investing in permanent physical infrastructures that, generally argued, legitimize these settlements. Waiting for water complicates the lives of workers, who must negotiate the time spent waiting for water and working for wages. Workers, more physically mobile in the city, can capitalize on their access to alternative flows. This involves building new flow patterns that circumvent those of their nonworking neighbors, including informal arrangements to bring home water from employers, to “opt out” of municipal systems by purchasing private water services, and to gain “black market” access to public-sector water elicited through bribery.

Domestic water management is one of the most time-consuming activities in informal communities, drastically affecting the ability to efficiently manage other responsibilities. Water technologies make water collection easier and faster, enabling “space–time compression” with implications for other economic and temporal flows (Harvey 1989). As domestic workers cross into the water-rich areas where they are employed, their conceptions of water—its appropriate use, quality, per-capita allotment, and meaning—are confronted by Massey’s (1994) power geometry, showing the incongruent control of employers on myriad interconnected flows and mobilities enabled by the compression. This change in access to infrastructure disrupts values of water that are rooted in difficult access, creating new relationships to water and water management strategies.

Impacting this, domestic workers are exposed to the rhetoric of bourgeois, modern middle-class³ households that value a high degree of cleanliness enabled by relatively easily accessible water. The importance of the commitment to using increased amounts of water as a hallmark of elite Indian household management has persisted through history since its propagation in the colonial era in India (Walsh 2004) and represents a global colonial legacy of tiered water management linked to social hierarchy (Kooy and Bakker 2008b). Delhi’s history of class-differentiated cultures of water management is founded on what Chatterjee (1994) calls a broader “scale of civilization” argument that legitimizes social classification based on deviation from European standards of development. The “Victorian fetish about cleanliness” led to stricter delineations in Delhi’s enclaves and to disparate development of water infrastructures (Gupta 1981). As Kooy and Bakker argue, “the optic of postcolonial governmentality provides a powerful lens for dissecting the power relations that continue to structure access to water” (Kooy and Bakker 2008a, 1844). In the “splintered” water supply systems they observed in Jakarta, both colonial and postcolonial government projects used macrolevel water projects selectively as a method of social and hydraulic differentiation. This history is similar in Delhi’s microlevel water access technologies and infrastructures.

Water infrastructures reflect and reshape social tensions, particularly in legitimizing human residence—making homes both physically viable and socially recognized as such (Bønnelykke Robertson 2016). Social relationships are further developed in infrastructural modalities that hierarchically categorize forms of living while simultaneously defining them. Informal urban communities are often seen as homogeneous, but even within them, variability in access to water flows compounds social hierarchy. In the lived development of women in lower-class Delhi, water is a marker for other flows. The importance of water moves beyond basic needs into a conceptualization of fluidity that delineates and maintains power relations, both stratifying and jeopardizing the ability to cope with marginalization.

Remaining Stationary to Facilitate Flow

Heterogeneous hydrosocial realities define Delhi’s informal communities, externally and internally. Like those externalized from macrolevel urban water, the marginalized within low-flow communities also seek alternative methods of water access. Panchtare,⁴ one of the city’s wealthier “five-star slum” areas, was held as an asymptote of a growing alternate middle-class lifestyle. Yet residents lacked adequate access to critical physical infrastructures. Much infrastructure was pirated, such as illegal power and water siphoned from legal connections; government-sanctioned infrastructure was not adequate to serve the burgeoning population. As in most of Delhi’s bastiya, residents relied on daily water-tanker deliveries and a few hours of pressure in communal taps. Water collection hinged on the ability to wait, to fill, and to carry—processes that required remaining stationary. For this reason, the wait for water (and its circumvention) took on significant value for residents.

The wait for water in Panchtare basti was not entirely stationary; it was resplendent with flows of social, hydrological, and economic discourse, formed by collective narratives that defined the identities and social norms of the community. For these hours, there were representatives from every family on the street, producing and strengthening critical community flows in a way that indicated urban vitality (Jacobs 1993) and vibrant market flows (Elyachar 2005). Contrary to describing the circulation of narratives and exchange of information as social affluence or flow, the residents instead described this waiting time as a feeling of insurmountable stagnation. Constant refrains waiting by the roadside were that there was “nothing to do but wait,”⁵ “there is nothing for us except waiting,” and “what can I do, but wait?” Some women frankly discussed their waiting bodies as depleting resources described as pools of water, evaporating in the sun. The metaphor of stagnation operated in the women’s descriptions of the choices they made about water circulation in their homes and in their own ability to circulate in their settlements, city, and, ultimately, economy.

The Pace of Hydrosocial Relations

Disputes about fairness in time and timings drove the core water concerns in the basti. As at other water distribution sites in India, arguments ensued over legitimacy of stake in the finite resource (Joy et al. 2010; Zerah 2000; Shiva 2002). Yet in Panchtare, stake was a secondary concern framed in relation to time. The New Delhi Municipal Corporation sent four free deliveries of water each day for the community,⁶ stopping on each side of the basti in the morning and evening, and returning to the filling station before each delivery. The vehicle took roughly an hour after its stop at the Embassy-side to return to its stop at the Road-side. But the tanker often arrived late, after being waylaid by traffic, by trouble filling, and so forth. Despite relative parity in deliveries, Road-side residents (whose women were largely nonworking) suspected Embassy-side residents (whose women had fewer aspersions about working outside of the home) of illegitimately acquiring better access.

Complicating matters, Road-side residents cited the consistent arrival time of the tanker at the Embassy-side to underscore the illegitimacy of Embassy-side latecomers claiming Road-side water. Sejal tsk-tsked, “They know when their tanker will come; they should be there. If they are late, they should not get water. They don’t care; they just take our water.” Of even greater concern, some Embassy-side residents actively planned to collect at the Road-side so that they could commit to another hour of work outside the home. Some Embassy-side residents regularly collected water at both sites, either because they wanted to top off a capacious reserve or because the amount they had been able to collect was inadequate. Jalahasani sighed, “Aagr pipe ho, to sub aa jaega,” if there is a pipe, then everyone will come.

Jalahasani expressed her frustration with the disparate water access linked to a deeper disparity of lifestyle. The Embassy-side families had very different economic flows from the Road-side families. The Embassy-side had been settled 25 years earlier, and was in its third generation. This was enough time for children who came to the basti in their early years to be shaped by its unique social formations and inculcate these values in families of their own. About 40% of Embassy-side residents were original settlers, a large percentage of whom had acquired additional homes, which they leased. Rental income allowed them to have leeway for days off work, with some surviving on rent income alone. But the change with even wider scope, affecting long- and short-term residents, was that women became mobile in the economic flows of outside work.

Sultana (2009) examines the fluidity of water in Bangladesh between women’s physical spatial mobility and patriarchal social norms in a way that understands spatial and social realities as products of each other. Sultana (2009) argues that in everyday life in Bangladesh, the negotiation of water conflicts involves discourse that resurrects and reshapes gendered identities, which consequentially reinforce and challenge gendered access to water. By reading Sultana’s argument of social and spatial fluidity into the context of the basti, anxieties around the expansion of gendered spaces and identities find expression in the narratives of illegitimate water access. Gendered subjectivities are thus in part produced by the waterscapes upon which they are built, as are class subjectivities. Hosagrahar’s (2010) data confirm Delhi has “geographies of inequity created by water” and traces the disparity of water access and consumption as functions of neighborhood linked to class and economic status. The recognition of water as an agent, a “creator,” of inequity is brought to bear as women define their lives through water circulation.

The traditional Indian economic models outlined by Banerjee and Duflo (2011) were reflected in the Road-side's circulation patterns. Although women on the Road-side engaged in extradomestic work, it was to a lesser extent and had a different character. Twenty-five percent of the women on the Road-side worked, and although there were fewer sex workers,⁷ shame around women’s work had much higher incidence. Similar to Sultana’s (2009) observations in Bangladesh, many families on the Road-side considered it disgraceful to allow their women to venture into public spaces, even for enhanced water access. Some of the men said that despite facilitating flows of resources, ultimately women’s work reflected poorly on families. Like men in other countries, they said women’s work challenged their masculinity (Gamburd 2002). Other men did not consider this an affront to their reputations, but contrasted, as Veblen’s (2009) theory purports, that their reputations were enhanced if they could afford to keep their women inside the home. In some households, it was not necessarily the economic earning that threatened women’s reputations, but a women’s mobility (Chen 1995). In these homes in the basti, men were more likely to share the chore of water collection, but also might restrict their women’s movements to within view of their home. Haladara, in her autobiography of growing up in informal communities and working as a maid in India’s burgeoning cities, illustrates that this practice is widespread (Haladara and Butalia 2006). Though basti residents were not homogenous in their support or distaste for specific, gendered economic flows, there were preferred practices on each side. On the Road-side, the circulations of money, women, and water were all under close observation, and this keen management played a role in the creation of an environment of slower circulation resulting in a gendered condition of greater stagnancy and less upward mobility. The overlapping flows of women and water build upon O’Reilly’s (2006) observation that the meanings of water and women are mutually constructed; here, it highlights how gender is made through water, as the fluidity of water determines the fluidity of women in the basti.

These differences fueled prejudices rooted jointly in power and flow. The flows of social and economic power mapped onto flows of water; the social differences between the two sides of the basti paralleled flows of water and the rhetoric of legitimate water authority. As Birkenholtz observes in Jaipur, “waiting on water [ … ] is, therefore, a new form of imposed social power asymmetry that most people in [an] informal slum cannot overcome” (2010). The correlation of socioeconomic power and water is widespread in India at large (Joy et al. 2010), and the connection was sharply grasped by the residents of the basti. Jalahasani explained her perceptions of the Embassy-side: “vha se lalchi log aate hain,” greedy people come from there. She described that the “greediness” of the Embassy-side residents was not limited to water and named a variety of commodities owned by its families: washing machines, air coolers, scooters, and, summing up, “yeh cheez, voh cheez, sub ko paani zarurut hai,” or, “this thing, that thing, water is necessary to it all.” These material possessions were not only needy of water, but also produced by reliable water access.

Reciprocality in Enhanced Pace of Water/Life

In the estimation of Road-side residents, a reliability of water access translated into economic and temporal affluence, and vice versa. Enhancing affluence was not always legitimate, and was viewed at the expense of the flows of others. Nahlah sometimes came to the tanker point early to monitor the Embassy-side. “Oh, you know, don’t you,” she built the tension, “Aare, tum jante ho, hai na?” Her eyes scanned left and right as though to make sure no one was listening. This was a theatrical embellishment, since everyone in the basti, regardless of the side, had heard the urban legend of why half of the basti, the Embassy-side, received its water on time, and why the Road-side residents waited. With calculated precision, she delivered the punchline, “They give him Coke and sandwiches.” She raised her eyebrows to provoke her listeners into response and then delivered the final blow: “Corruption hai,” she said in Hinglish.

The bribery theme in the Road-side’s hydrological narrative reflected a discomfort with the unequal distribution of water and people’s hopes for coping with the disparity. Hydrological narratives are windows into the social and historical context of a society, and as such, the context of bribery is relevant. “Sach hai,” it’s true, said another woman, lugging armfuls of cooking-oil jugs to fill with water. “Every day, they give the tanker driver sandwiches and Coke. They buy the Coke from outside [the basti], and get the bread from the local shop. He sits inside with a cooler running and eats. This is the reason [why he is not late for the Embassy-side].” In the arrangement she proposed, the Embassy-side residents converted money into goods that were exchanged with the driver for reliability in the pace of flows. This implicated the driver in engaging beyond government-sanctioned water exchange: in the informal exchange of consumer goods for priority in resource access.

Basti residents transposed the broader anticorruption narrative (which defined the political discourse in Delhi since 2011) onto the microcosm of daily water struggles between disenfranchised citizens and corrupt government gatekeepers that privilege the already affluent upper and middle classes. The narrative provided insight into the permeability of the anticorruption movement into the mundane elements of everyday life, broadening its context to the general Dilliwalla. The rumors of the Embassy-side’s bribery were diffuse in the times leading up to the spring of 2011, but its retelling rose exorbitantly during the enhanced public discourse on anticorruption. At this moment, Corruption Fever was sweeping the city (Engineer and Puniyani 2012), especially among the middle class (Joseph 2011). Daily text blasts inviting people to Jantar Mantar for protest rallies and boldfaced headlines in English- and Hindi-medium newspapers circulated widely. Though some of the basti residents attended the anticorruption rallies at Jantar Mantar, and others followed the progress of Anna Hazare and the Jan Lokpal campaign closely, the abstract terms and ideas used found little traction in the basti at large in the way that specific, grounded, contextualized examples did.⁸

In this way, water became a proxy for broader questions about development, identity, and justice. De Rijke, Munro, and Melo Zurita (2016) describe the salience of water narratives in interpreting the unseen. Illustrating the importance of variance in stakeholder perspectives, narratives in both Australia and Delhi show the interpretive power of imagining water systems. In each, community members worked through narrative processes that ultimately sought to explain the complex linkages between the unseen—the literal or figurative “underground”—and social and physical consequences to water. In Delhi, the “underground” water markets were operating beyond well-researched middle-class communities, tracking developmental injustice in parallel to the neoliberal infiltration of interstitial places.

The narrative charted “foreign,” neoliberal goods and lifestyles onto growing water injustice.⁹ The bribes in the narrative were representative of transnational consumer patterns, but were also foreign in the sense of being external to the just, officially sanctioned circulation of water. The informal exchange of priority in resource access involved the cooperation of public servants with citizens who had access to consumer goods, rendering an ideally equal distribution system into a weighted system that rewarded economic affluence with hydrological affluence. This is to say that in the minds of residents, access to economic power meant access to water, and that the government was complicit in covertly maintaining this bias while concurrently claiming to be a just, egalitarian, developed city that looked after the human rights of both its citizen-consumers and its marginalized.

Although the tanker deliveries in the basti are free of charge, this does not mean that water was not commodified. O’Reilly (2006) argues that the commodification of water also happens through practices and discourse that associate its value with modernity, a water value which has local resonance with Panchtare women (O’Leary 2015). O’Reilly examines the transformation of “traditional” Rajasthani women into “modern” women in tandem with discourse and efforts to improve their access to “modern” water. O’Reilly’s works from the perspective of NGO workers who orchestrate the transformation and the women who are selected to be “updated,” fleshing out the nuances of acceptances and rejections of meanings and practices associated with agency. By focusing on the Road-side perspective, another sort of agency emerges: the nuanced creation of meaning and empowerment through informal systems. Modern forms of water agency are produced through the sale of labor on the informal market, converted into modern goods exchanged informally.

Encroaching Neoliberal Flows

The ability to affect purportedly just systems of governance with money, foreign goods, or modern consumption patterns is at the core of what Linton (2010) would call the residents’ “hydrosocial” discomfort, impacting the physical flow of water but also the intricacies of entire social systems. The narrative did not suggest bribery with common, domestically produced goods or with liquid currency; rather, it suggested that a certain type of bribe was a part of the transnational, post-economic-liberalization India—a politics and an economy in which much of the population is left behind (Ghertner 2011a; 2011b). In the Road-side narrative, the bribe was not the rotiya¹⁰ of the traditional Indian kitchen, nor was it Thums-Up, one of the original Indian cola brands now owned by Coca-Cola. The origin of the bribe was external: from the industrial bakery that distributed Western-style sliced bread, to the global soda franchise. Even the sandwich ingredients were called into question, churning speculation about whether they were veg or non-veg, dressed with chutney or ketchup. Sejal bemoaned, “We have no money for bread and Embassy-side eats it daily [ … ] gives it freely.” She was uncertain the driver would accept a sandwich from the Road-side, a historically-rooted perception that their hierarchical position limited their participation in reciprocal exchange, despite the neoliberalization of the Indian economy.

The developmental project of moving people along a continuum of the ability to consume world-class goods (Fernandes 2006) is, consistent with neoliberalist agendas, an indicator of India’s legitimacy as a self-ruling nation. The ability to produce a middle-class majority, according to Mankekar (1999), has consisted of systematically prioritizing the inculcation of middle-class aesthetics, consumption, and values. These values have permeated every household of India (Mankekar 1999; Brosius 2010), and whether to reject, embrace, or ignore them is built into a myriad of daily choices. However, this choice is fraught, Rajagopal (2001) argues: “As consumer society has become coterminous with [Indian society], the alternative is not resistance but death” (317). The citizens with combined levels of high water access and consumer power are countered with those with compounding stagnation that threatens their livelihoods and lives when water is withheld. As observed by Hellberg (2014), the biopolitics of water services determine mortality and the interpretation of people’s own lives in South Africa, where services and technologies “distinguish between forms of life.” The basti narrative also suggested hierarchical distinction in technology and the ability to exchange; even the driver, Jaldhar, admitted to imposing hierarchy based on the type of “hospitality” he accepted. Like any other gatekeeper, Jaldhar was not a man to be tempted with the handmade rotiya of “village India,” but a man to be won over with world-class sandwiches bought with wages from domestic service.

Ranganathan gives due attention to the process of constructing meaning around transactions of water access. In Ranganathan’s (2014) analysis of subaltern political agency, peri-urban residents participate in water allocation systems through astute accounting—tracking their contributions to the construction of municipal pipes to demonstrate and negotiate legitimacy as citizens. Like the transactions of the “peripheral middle-class” residents of Bangalore who pay for the infrastructures of water delivery, the basti’s citizens explain their transaction of paying for water with time and/or surrendered wages. This resident–state transaction locates the citizen in broader dialogues of political agency and participation (Ranganathan 2014). Road-side residents, while demonstrating the differential agencies required of citizens by the city’s fragmented water services (Hellberg 2014), simultaneously make a powerful argument about the state’s complicity in their struggle to reach development targets. In their narrative, stagnancy is both a product of ineffective state water delivery systems and a producer of economic instability.

This ties in with discussions of the viability of Delhi’s long-term development strategy of unilaterally formalizing spaces, citizens, and flows. Roy (2005) suggests that poverty does not necessarily mean isolation from global capitalism, as recognized by residents in the basti. Dutta, Chander, and Srivastava (2005) suggest that Delhi’s informal areas show a willingness to pay for formal improved water services, which gains relevance when taken with the bribery narrative. Already, residents monetized water through the link between lost wages and time spent waiting. When lamenting about the time lost in wait, domestic workers from Embassy-side described the time as a function of the number of houses sacrificed. For instance, Marina noted that each day, regular waiting cost her two or three houses of appointments. Many domestic workers from Embassy-side agreed that the waiting came at a loss of at least one home in a daily schedule. Even nonworking women translated waiting time as the largest obstacle to wages. In Renu’s words, “Waiting means I can’t work in a madam’s house, and that money would have gone to my child[ren], buying them proper food and one day a proper home. I want that home to have water so they can continue forward with their lives—not wait like me.” Renu, like others, describe the cycle of stagnancy as an obstacle that is both produced by unreliable water and a producer of it. Without the ability to pay—either by paying rent for improved housing with formal infrastructure, or by bribing tanker drivers like those in the narrative—one is stagnant. To the basti residents, despite divergence in an option’s formality, ultimately, it is payment that facilitates flow.

India’s broader planning regimes also operate with informality that is paralleled in urban governance (Roy 2009). Roy’s (2005) hypothesis that “informality [is] a differentiated process embodying varying degrees of power and exclusion” is confirmed by basti residents, acknowledging informality as a feature of state and urban planning. Nested scales of informality further impact power relations; as Roy (2009) argues, “the [Indian] state itself [ … ] actively utilize[s] informality as an instrument of both accumulation and authority” (81). This articulates with Krause’s (2016) work, where anxieties around the “right” kind of flows become salient in striking a balance between the control of water, the pace of development, and the shouldering of risk. As the Indian state and its urban governments use legitimized informal methods of development in the neoliberal, capitalist pursuit of larger global market shares (Ghertner 2008), in parallel, the informal methods of increasing water control by the urban poor is in line with, not apart from, state models.

Women’s growing informal engagement is depicted as forward progression, aligning with the quietly sanctioned informality of state governance. Similar to Ahlers and Zwarteveen’s “one-dimensional neo-liberal [ … ] market player[s] whose sole objective is to economically maximize her water use” (Ahlers and Zwarteveen 2009, 419), the narratives show a correlation between the integration of new economic practices associated with growing female participation in the neoliberal economy and the conceptualization of these women as primarily economic actors. By decoupling the Embassy-side women with their other social and individual characteristics, the structural transformation of the Embassy-side follows the same universalistic narrative of economic development applied from the outside.

New Narratives of Mutuality

This article takes up the claim of Roy (2009) that informality is not synonymous with poverty, through the observed heterogeneity in an interstitial slum where state-lauded integration into the modern urban economy is to be embroiled in the corruption of informal exchange. This multitiered corruption recognizes the informal flows operating under the purview of state-sanctioned activity, making a system that circumvents equitable flows at all levels. Hosagrahar (2010) notes that among others, “the failure in Delhi is not that of merely failing to reach an ideal of egalitarianism, but of further exacerbating inequities and the exploitative extraction of natural resources” (129). The marginalized residents of the basti, like the majority of India, are not enveloped in flows of development the way the Indian elite is (Gidwani and Reddy 2011). In a very real sense, as India surges forward with economic and social change, millions by comparison seem stagnant. This is acute in Delhi, where the 30% of the city’s population that live in bastis must wait for 3% of the city’s water allocation (Centre for Science and Environment [CSE] 2012). However, this disparity is not only about absolute equity in quality or quantity; rather, it is about rhythms and spatiotemporal availability in the necessity of waiting for water.

This fits with the larger argument made in this article, that the people sitting on the side of the road are not just waiting for water, they are waiting for the government to treat them with equity, and waiting to be incorporated into the new India. This equity and incorporation require the government to acknowledge the legitimacy of the urban poor as productive citizens, without whom a world-class city would be impossible (Chaturvedi 2010). But equally, it necessitates that the private sector value the time of the urban poor, since reconfiguring water-supply technology can enhance democratic participation (Birkenholtz 2010). For equity and incorporation to begin, at a minimum the poor—their time and work inside or beyond their own homes—must no longer be externalized.

Delhi’s struggles tell a narrative beyond its own. Roy (2005) shows how the dialogue of policy response and urban informality inherently raise questions of social justice with “multiple and contested answers” The understanding of how rapidly urbanizing populations are coping with natural resource scarcity is not only of value to the “megacities” of the developing world—rather, these cities are at the forefront of natural resource management solutions which can be applied to cities globally. This perspective echoes that called for by Roy (2005), to transcend the false dichotomy of “problematic” megacities of the global south and the “model” world cities of the developed world. More accurately, “developed” colonial forces intentionally fostered extremes of hierarchical water governance in the global south, resulting in a reciprocal legacy of hierarchical materialities and subjectivities (Kooy and Bakker 2008b). Interstitial areas in cities like Delhi provide insight to the politics of urban-environmental limitations and developmental opportunities that enrich our understanding of the parameters of change. The changing pace of hydrosocial relations is further hierarchized by intersectional complexities within these cities. By deeply engaging with nature–society relations from a gender perspective, hydrosocial intersectionality demonstrates the unequal effects of disparate development (Harris 2009). In the context of the waterscape of the basti, flows of water, women, and money are so interdependent, they form a social, political, and economic fluidity that establishes the right to water as inextricably interwoven with the right for women to pursue development opportunities. As women become identified as workers with (albeit very limited) agency in transnational flows, they are equated with the broader neoliberal discourse of exploitation and divestment of rights and profitability. It is not surprising that the hegemonic discourse of agency-through-economic-participation is present, but, as Harris suggests, it would be remiss to think it uniform. The contextual peculiarities that make this narrative a unique part of the basti are also those that remain rich starting points in adding the necessary complexity to contemporary depictions of justice in gender, development, and natural resources.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Veronica Strang and Franz Krause and the SNR editorial board for organizing this special issue. The author additionally recognizes with gratitude the anonymous reviewers whose comments strengthened this article and who are not responsible for any errors herein.

Notes

The term “nonworking” is used to denote that the person does not work outside of the home for wages. This term includes ghrvaliya, or homemakers, whose work is critical to Delhi.

In this specific neighborhood, time was more important than quantity of water or quality of water delivered. Not only did the tanker sometimes drive away with some water still inside, but tests of the tanker water upon delivery revealed a very high quality of water.

The concept of the middle class follows Shridarhan’s (2004); poverty levels are determined according to the Government of Delhi Directorate of Economics and Statistics (2008).

The name of this basti has been changed. Panchtare literally means “five stars” in Hindi.

All speech has been translated from Hindi unless otherwise noted.

Slightly more than many other informal communities receive.

Female sex work is considered shameful in contemporary Delhi.

Baviskar (2012) notes just one example, Kejriwal’s Parivartan campaign, that engaged basti residents in resistance to corrupt ration shops.

The community also repressed some alternative narratives. Tracking the circulation of the water tanker over months elicited no significant difference in priority—both locations were erratic even on days the driver was offered refreshments.

A roti is a type of Indian bread.