The Quest for Water, Rights and Freedoms: Informal Urban Settlements in India

Abstract

In this article, we draw on the narratives of residents and development workers to understand what freedoms hinder and enable access to water services in informal settlements in the Indian cities of Faridabad, Delhi and Mumbai. We show that although development practice and thinking in the water sector often frame water deficiencies as politically neutral technical and governance challenges, residents and development workers on the ground identify a lack of freedoms relating to first of all, residents’ rights to the city and its resources, and secondly, meaningful engagement between residents and the political establishment as key causes for inadequate access to water services. Our findings indicate that water‐service development efforts can be more effective if they include strategies to strengthen informal settlers’ rights to the city through a politicization of public engagement. We discuss the implications of our findings for practice and outline a future research agenda geared towards operationalizing our key findings.

AFTER THE RIGHT TO WATER: Rethinking the State and Justice in Mumbai

“…While the constant engagement of activists before, during and after the interim order has kept the right‐to‐water discourse alive in the city, the MCGM continues to provide water connections to those who settled in Mumbai's slums prior to 2000 (Gimelli et al ., 2018). Thanks to the efforts of PHS, the MCGM was forced to come up with a policy to supply water to non‐notified settlements, albeit with several conditions and exclusions.…”

Assessment of water supply in the informal settlement of Lagos Mainland local government area, Lagos, Nigeria

“…Informal settlements, socio-economic exclusion, and urban poverty are prevalent in most urban centers, which housed 55% of the world's population in 2015 and are projected to accommodate over 60% of the world's population by 2030 (UN- Habitat, 2015). Informal settlements are areas with substandard housing conditions, limited infrastructure, and inadequate social services (Gimelli et al, 2018). Although, some scholars, such as (Tarsi, 2020), assert that state institutions use the term "informality of settlements" to avoid accountability and deny the urban poor access to resources, including potable water.…”