The Engineer and The Plumber: Mediating Mumbai's Conflicting Infrastructural Imaginaries

Abstract

Two decades ago, the rules governing the provision of piped municipal water supply in Mumbai became linked to the policy frameworks governing eligibility for a property titling scheme. This article outlines the ideological basis and practical implications of the shift, as well as the contradictions of the new regulatory regime. The article demonstrates how these contradictions have been mediated by the material and practical knowledge, embodied expertise, local authority and wide‐ranging socio‐political work of two sets of actors: municipal water engineers and a cast of characters known locally as ‘plumbers’. The social, political and hydraulic imaginaries animating the work of ‘plumbing’ are bound up with a temporal and spatial imaginary distinctly at odds with the network‐flow conception of hydraulic engineering within which the work of water supply planning and distribution in Mumbai is conceptualized, materialized and institutionalized. The hydraulic and legal contradictions of these clashing infrastructural idioms––of flow and event––have rendered the regulatory framework highly unstable. These contradictions eventually erupted in Mumbai's waterscape, leaving the city's water infrastructures suspended in a highly politicized state of limbo between dueling infrastructural imaginaries.

Everyday practices in the production of uneven water pricing regimes in Lilongwe, Malawi

“…Other studies suggest that water users are not just passive consumers, but rather actively engage in constructing or adapting water infrastructures to their needs (Allen et al, 2006;Furlong, 2014;Schramm and Wright-Contreras, 2017). Directing the everyday lens to water utility engineers and administrators revealed how structural processes may be reinforced or disrupted by routinised or improvised everyday operations of the water supply network that will determine who gets water, how much and for how long (Alda-Vidal et al, 2018;Anand, 2017;Bj€ orkman, 2018). Others have highlighted that everyday practices of water access are mediated and intersect with multiple social relations (Hofmann, 2017;Sultana, 2009;Truelove, 2016;Velzeboer et al, 2018;Zug and Graefe, 2014).…”

Rethinking water insecurity, inequality and infrastructure through an embodied urban political ecology

“…Attention to everyday practices also reveals the complex negotiations that residents, informal authorities, and officials of the state engage in to make water flow in particular urban spaces. This scholarship shows that even the urban poor within a city experience highly uneven water access and provisioning that is shaped by maneuverings of pipes, pumps, wells, forms of expertise, and political pressure (Anand, 2011;Truelove, 2018;Birkenholtz, 2010;Birkinshaw, 2018;Björkman, 2018;Jepson & Brown, 2014;Peloso & Morinville, 2014). If such micropolitics are bypassed within approaches to water in/security, the poor become grouped together as uniform recipients of unequal and insecure water flows, rather than citizens that experience differing forms and gradations of access, control and socio-political power in relation to the urban waterscape.…”

Unmapped Water Access: Locating the Role of Religion in Access to Municipal Water Supply in Ahmedabad

“…Furthermore, as has been noted by Grindle and Thomas [35], the journey of a planning proposition from formulation to implementation is not linear, but rather interactive, with actors with diverse interests intervening, mediating, and influencing what gets practically implemented. Indeed, as has been demonstrated by empirical work in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore, the everyday work of producing water access-laying pipes, installing connections, and so on-is often determined by site-and time-specific socio-political and hydraulic conditions [36][37][38], and often the logics directing such work are not in alignment with the abstract planning logics determining how water supply planning and distribution is "conceptualized, materialized and institutionalized" [36] (p. 278). While institutional practices might well be instantiations of dominant power and interests at the time of codification, their implementation is animated by knowledge and authority serving numerous other socio-political and hydraulic interests.…”

“…Calling for examining water governance in terms of the conceptual "disembedding" of land and water infrastructures from socio-economic, legal, political, and hydraulic networks in which they are in reality entangled [5], this work highlights the role of myriad social actors-water mafias, water tanker operators, plumbers, local councillors, water department engineers, to name a few-in mediating water access in Indian cities [33,36,38,47]. Building on broader accounts examining the role of "the intermediary", "the middleman", "the fixer" [48], "the hustler", "the hard man", and "the wheeler-dealer" [49] (p. 15), this scholarship shows how everyday knowledge and authority are constituted, exercised, experienced, and narrated in relation to water governance in India.…”