discourses of citizenship and criminality in clean, green delhi

CHAPTER 1

A Companion to the Anthropology of India, edited by Isabelle Clark-Decès© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

It is evident that there has been in the last decade or so a concerted attempt to clean up Indian cities, to rid streets and public lands of squatters and encroachers, and to reclaim public spaces for the use of proper citizens.

Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, p. 131 (emphasis added)

INTRODUCTION

Released on April 8, 2005, the Draft 2021 Master Plan for Delhi calls for the trans-formation of Delhi into a “World Class City” (D. Roy 2005:7). While the details of how to effect Delhi’s cosmopolitan transformation are at times vague, the thrust of the Draft Plan centers on developing the city into a key node of international finance and investment. In particular, the plan presents a growing state impetus to “clean” and “green” Delhi, creating a legible and attractive cityscape that can mirror Asian urban counterparts such as Singapore and Hong Kong. According to the plan, the “encroachment of public lands” by growing numbers of squatters presents an ongo-ing and highly visible threat to Delhi’s “world class” status and its attempt to forge a new spatial geography. The Draft Plan indicates the city’s increased ambition to expel squatters, or drive them into less visible city spaces, through relocation and resettle-ment (Kackar 2005; Bhan 2009). By fostering international tourism, conventions, sports events, and the establishment of new shopping centers, restaurants, and hotels

Discourses of Citizenship and Criminality in Clean, Green Delhi

Yaffa Truelove and Emma Mawdsley

CHAPTER 22

Clark-Decès_c22.indd 407Clark-Decès_c22.indd 407 9/24/2010 9:44:57 AM9/24/2010 9:44:57 AM

408 YAFFA TRUELOVE AND EMMA MAWDSLEY

to support these activities, the “new” Delhi will assert its prestige as both a national capital and a global city (Roy 2005).

Water governance is one arena within which we can observe and evaluate the “remaking” of Delhi. We build on the work of urban political ecologists who expose the power relations embedded in the infrastructures, distribution, access to, and costs of water (Bakker 2003; Swyngedouw 1995; 2004; Swyngedouw et al. 2002; Gandy 2006; 2008); and that of feminist political ecologists who highlight the social prac-tices of securing water (Sultana 2009; Truelove, forthcoming). Our specific focus is on the discourses of “citizenship” and “criminality” that are increasingly being entrenched around class identities. We examine the ways in which new governmen-talities in Delhi act to highlight and criminalize the informal and illegal practices of poor people seeking to access water, while at the same time remaining almost entirely silent on the informalities and illegalities of middle-class water practices. Indeed, beyond this, we argue that an examination of the practices of water governance in Delhi shows the ways that the state is actively engaged in a construction of the middle classes as “law-abiding citizens,” inducting them into a regressive biopolitics of the city as they are asked to actively police and discipline each other. We suggest that attention to the construction of the “citizen” as well as the “criminal” is an important task for critical scholars seeking to contest the revanchist direction of urban govern-ance and class relations.

The chapter is set out as follows. We start with the dialectic between the “planned” and “unplanned” city of Delhi, highlighting their coevolution and dependence in the colonial and postcolonial periods. The next section offers a brief account of the chang-ing approaches to city governance that have accompanied neoliberal globalization in India, and, in particular, the construction and pursuit of “world class city” status by Delhi. Here we are particularly interested in the role played by the judiciary, and the mobilization of the language of (il)legality in affirming the rights of wealthier groups, while seeking to render the poor invisible. A key institution that is highlighted here is Delhi’s “bhagidari” system of participatory governance, which provides a privileged arena for interaction between the various state agencies and departments and the city’s better-off residents. In this section we also reflect briefly on the specificities of “revanchism” in postcolonial contexts, specifically how discourses of a clean green city serve to bolster elite interests and spaces in the city at the expense of the rights and citizenship of Delhi’s poorer populations. The second half of the chapter turns to water politics. Zerah (2000), Sagane (2000), and Davis (2004) all show that although income levels and geographical differentiations in water provision shape the precise nature and profile of the compensation strategies deployed by different individuals and families, water informalities and illegalities can be found across all class groups in Delhi. However, it is the slums and “unauthorized” communities which are consist-ently set up as the threat to water sustainability, while elite and middle-class infor-malities are obscured. Indeed, the middle classes are actively constructed as citizens contributing to the sustainable management of the city. We uncover the ways in which municipal agencies like the Delhi Jal Board (DJB, the Delhi Water Board) unevenly construct and prosecute water criminals, and create the notion of the “proper envi-ronmental citizen” of Delhi.

However, before starting, we have to offer some caveats about our rather heuristic use of “middle classes” in the context of contemporary India, and more specifically


CITIZENSHIP AND CRIMINALITY IN GREEN DELHI 409

Delhi. There are a number of sophisticated and insightful attempts to conceptualize class in India, which look to define and analyze the parameters, practices, and arenas of privilege. These include Deshpande (2003), Mazzarella (2005), Fernandes (2004; 2006), and Fernandes and Heller (2006). Other analysts provide rich accounts of middle-class particularities, finessed by place, gender, and social position (e.g. Osella and Osella 2000; Dwyer 2000: Donner 2008). Notwithstanding different arguments and emphases, these authors all point to contested indicators (income, education, con-sumption practices, etc.); continuities and transformations between the “Nehruvian” middle class and the “new” middle class; the ambivalent centrality of neoliberal glo-balization in the imaginations, interests, and practices of the middle classes; and above all, the extraordinary complexity of India’s “class” structures and relations, notably in relation to caste, region, and religion. We recognize that here we simplify these catego-ries in making our argument, and do not (in this instance) actively explore differences within and between the elites and middle classes, or for that matter, within and between Delhi’s poor (an equally heterogeneous population). While this gives us some pur-chase on wider-scale shifts in the politics and discourses of water governance in Delhi, we are acutely aware of the loss of detailed resolution in this discussion, and the dan-gers of essentializing both the poor and the middle classes. The test of the thesis set out here must be more nuanced, empirically derived studies, attentive to the tremen-dous social variations within and between Delhi’s poor, middle classes, and elites.

DELHI SINCE INDEPENDENCE: THE PLANNED AND UNPLANNED CITY

The history of Delhi, both colonial and postcolonial, is one of deep divisions and dualisms marked by efforts to remake and reshape the cityscape. The shift of the colonial capital from Calcutta (Kolkata) to Delhi led the British to create a “New” Delhi – an urban center that would be distinctly different and separate from Shahja-hanabad, the historical Mughal city first built in the sixteenth century. The building of New Delhi started from plans as early as 1910 to create an orderly and grand impe-rial city, and began with the acquisition of extensive land areas south of Shahjahanabad that could be built into spacious homes, offices, avenues and parks for the new capital (Sajha Manch 1999; Metcalf 2002). The development of this land entailed a large displacement of untouchable castes which were forced to move to the city’s western periphery (where to date the area is largely composed of these caste groups) (Sajha Manch 1999; Baviskar 2003). The new architecture of south Delhi forged new colonial structures that “segregated the white rulers from the brown babus in a finely calibrated hierarchy of status” (Baviskar 2003:91; see also Metcalf 2002; Legg 2007). Sanitation and water infrastructure not only reflected differential physical investment in racially segregated parts of the city, but also embodied and (re)produced Oriental-ist constructions of race and cleanliness. Prashad argues that the colonial authorities were able to “resolve” the tensions between their paternalistic colonial ideologies and the demand to minimize social expenditure by constructing a discourse which naturalized the manual removal of sewage and waste, and endowed the “natives” with lower hygiene standards: “The subjugated natives … came to be represented as having a special fondness for dirt as well as an inability to make the crucial separation between it and cleanliness.” (2001:117); “From the standpoint of the colonial officials of the



1860s, it was easier to bemoan the native’s putative lack of hygiene than to produce the systems of sanitation to remedy the lack of amenities” (2000:120–1).

At Independence in 1947, both New Delhi and the older parts of the city under-went another drastic reconfiguration of their populations as a result of the partition-ing of India and Pakistan. Delhi was flooded by refugees from across the new border with Pakistan, and simultaneously experienced an exodus of large portions of its Muslim population. A circle of colonies around Delhi’s periphery was formed to rehouse in-migrants, and the Ministry of Rehabilitation was given the task of provid-ing economic and social rehabilitation for displaced residents. Yet municipal adminis-trators and politicians felt rapidly overwhelmed by demand, and from the first decade of its independence, the state government declared Delhi to be threatened by “hap-hazard and unplanned growth” (quoted in Sajha Manch 1999:3). In response, in 1957 it launched the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which authored and attempted to enact Delhi’s First Master Plan, calling for a “hygienic” and “properly ordered” city (Baviskar 2003:91; Verma 2003). Ironically, the planning of such a city, and the subsequent construction and state rationalization of urban space, relied upon large populations of working-class laborers for whom the city had no plans for hous-ing or incorporation. Thus Baviskar notes that the building of planned Delhi was mirrored in the simultaneous mushrooming of the unplanned Delhi which consisted of migrants and poor workers (and their spaces of home and livelihood) whom the city desperately needed for its development initiatives, and indeed, whom it invited in. Yet this population could only find residences through building shantytowns and residing in slums within the city and on its periphery – the very structures and specter the city planners wished to eradicate.

While clearly marginal within the state’s vision of its new orderly city, residents residing in slums nonetheless began to secure their housing and livelihoods through both bribes and the intervention of local politicians who needed to secure the votes of this burgeoning population. As this section of the city began to grow into the millions, Chatterjee notes the rise of vast informal structures to accommodate the needs of the “unplanned city” – a trend that occurred in urban centers all across India. He suggests that the 1970s and 1980s witnessed “the emergence of an entire sub-structure of paralegal arrangements, created or at least recognized by governmental authorities, for the integration of low-wage laboring and service populations into the public life of the city” (2004:137).

While the degree to which the urban poor were actually able to secure rights is certainly contentious, the state nonetheless was forced during particular development projects to at least “tolerate” and even extend amenities to slum dwellers in order to facilitate the building of its planned architecture. For example, the city underwent rapid construction in the 1970s to erect facilities for the 1982 Asian Games, which required negotiations and accommodations (albeit temporary) for the housing and employment of an estimated 1 million laborers (Baviskar 2003:92). Ironically, as Baviskar notes, much of the infrastructure for the Games was itself in violation of Delhi’s Master Plan, defying the city’s official zoning.

In contemporary times, the “unplanned” city continues to encompass a wide range of informal spaces and practices necessary to supplement inadequate, ineffective or inequitable state planning. For example, a study by the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group (CERAG) analyzes the informalities associated with solid



waste disposal in Delhi. In light of the city’s historical and continuing failure to pro-vide adequate waste disposal across its neighborhoods, a whole host of informal work-ers, middlemen and recycling plants have emerged to recycle and dispose of waste across the municipality. CERAG calculated that in 2002 this informal industry saved the city an estimated 4 million dollars (CERAG, n.d.:1). The Chintan group’s study illustrates how a failure of adequate planning and funding resulted in an entire infor-mal industry to handle waste collection across all areas of Delhi. City planners effec-tively rely on the subsidies provided by urban informalities as a component of its modernizing project (AlSayyad 2004).

As Priya (1993) documents, the relationship between the “planned” and the “unplanned” city has always been characterized by tension and contradiction. Notwith-standing the recent shifts in urban governmentality widely associated with the dynamics of neoliberal globalization and an increasingly assertive middle class, hostility to Delhi’s poor is not new (Tarlo 2003). Thus we should not be tempted to overly romanticize the state welfarist period. In her powerful analysis of town planning and public health in Delhi, Priya argues that social and political elites have long subscribed to the “popu-lar notion of the uncivil, illiterate, superstitious rural migrant who also becomes crimi-nalized in the process of becoming the urban poor” (1993:828). She documents changing approaches to public health in Delhi, noting that even when the newly inde-pendent state was ostensibly committed to directly seeking to redress disparities, and to intervene purposively in the healthcare of all of its population, the municipal discourse on public health put the interests of the middle classes in urban beautification above those of the poor. The city was to be sanitized by treating the poor as the problem, rather than in the interests of the poor as co-citizens of the city. Thus Priya reveals how elitist disdain, allied to an obsession with inappropriate Western technologies and poor planning capacities, have led to a grossly inadequate public health infrastructure in Delhi, notably in relation to water and sewage, but also to housing and waste.

Nonetheless, for most of the post-Independence period, the city government artic-ulated a formal commitment to the provision of social housing. By the 1980s, in the face of overwhelming demand and changing international approaches, in situ slum upgrading and slum authorization were adopted as solutions to the housing shortage, granting residents security of tenure. However, many analysts and activists point to shifts of both degree and kind in approaches to the urban poor in the later 1990s – a politics of social and spatial violence that can be traced to the economic and cultural workings of neoliberalizing Delhi. It is to this that we now turn.

RESHAPING DELHI AS A “WORLD CLASS CITY”

Apart from critical issues such as land, physical infrastructure, transport, ecology and environment, housing, socio-cultural and other institutional facilities, the cornerstone for making Delhi a world-class city is the planning process itself and related aspects of governance and management

DDA 2005:1

Like many cities across the world, Delhi is engaged in a process of retuning its “hard-wiring” (transport, energy and sanitation infrastructures, housing, retail and leisure



spaces) and “soft-wiring” (taxation and finance regimes, planning and regulation, policing and security) in ways that reflect and promote the interests of social and economic elites, and which are explicitly designed to attract them as investors, con-sumers and citizens (Fernandes 2004; Nair 2005; Caldeira 2000; Baviskar 2003; 2006; Anjaria and McFarlane, forthcoming). A host of specific historical, social and geographical factors shape the precise forms and trajectories of revanchism and resist-ance to it (following Ong 2006, we might call this “actually existing revanchism”). Bhan (2009) argues that the particular logics and practices of Delhi’s aggressive pur-suit of a clean, green city are influenced by, among other things, its unique political configuration (both having a municipal government, and also being the seat of the central government in its role as the National Capital Territory); the electoral strate-gies of the ruling Congress Party in the state; and the presence of the Supreme Court, which has played a very particular role in supporting bourgeois environmental agendas for the city.

Scholars of urban India are documenting the burgeoning alliance between middle and upper class “environmental” interests and the city’s endeavors to remake itself (Baviskar 2003; Mawdsley 2004; 2009; Baviskar et al. 2006; Veron 2006; Bhan and Menon-Sen 2007; Ghertner 2008; 2010). Urban elites are increasingly moving to gate off their communities, and pressing the city for protected parks and green spaces (Waldrop 2004). One strategic environmental focus of the Delhi government over the last decade has been air pollution. Amita Baviskar has detailed these middle-class assertions of the law in her study on efforts to curtail industrial pollution, describing the ways that middle-class agents target the government of Delhi through a critical focus on its “corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy” (Baviskar et al. 2006:213). As middle-class activists successfully petition courts to shut down industrial polluters through accusations that polluters were violating the law, Baviskar notes the ways that middle-class aspirations for a “clean” Delhi are mobilized through assertions of legality. By increasingly defining themselves as champions of the law, middle-class activists rein-force their rights to a clean and green Delhi, at the expense of those who threaten this ideal through illegal practices. Baviskar describes the “middle-class utopian dream” for the city as being a place in which “spitting on the streets is punished by a hefty fine” – a vision that follows the normative model of Singapore with its strict enforce-ment of the law (Baviskar et al. 2006:213). Baviskar’s (2003; 2006) compelling stud-ies of this and other middle-class efforts to counter pollution document the ways that “environmental concerns” and the “public interest” serve as discursive devices for the middle class to successfully press the state for measures that favor them but all too often work against the interests of the poor (see also Dembowski 2001; Veron 2006). Chatterjee (2004:131) locates this within a larger movement that “has been propelled by citizens’ groups and staunchly supported by an activist judiciary claiming to defend the rights of citizens to a healthy environment in which everyone abides by the law.”

However, in its discourses and imagery, the Delhi Development Authority now mobilizes the idea that the “malaise” of the urban poor and the specter of poverty and noncompliant spaces pose a distinct threat to the pursuit of “high tech modes of accu-mulation and consumption” (Batra 2005:29). The Draft 2021 Master Plan states that Delhi should not permit any “new major economic activities, which may result in the large-scale generation of employment” (cited in Batra 2005). In other words, the city is purposively repressing the growth of manufacturing jobs that would employ more



of the poor, while facilitating retail jobs for the upwardly mobile lower middle classes (also employed in the lower echelons of the civil service), and, of course, jobs in infor-mation technology, higher education, and corporate and financial services for the upper middle classes and elites. At the same time, Delhi’s public finances have been increasingly diverted “away from education, public housing, healthcare, and food subsidies toward large, highly visible and ‘modern’ infrastructure projects like the Delhi Metro Rail, more than 50 new flyovers, two new toll roads to Delhi’s posh, satellite cities, and the Commonwealth Games village” (Ghertner 2010:20).

The striking obverse of the explosion of malls, luxury residential developments and leisure facilities in the re-landscaping of Delhi are the slum demolitions. The Hazards Centre (2005) estimates that no fewer than 400,000–500,000 people have been dis-placed since 2000. In a powerful paper on Delhi’s slum clearances, Bhan (2009) argues that this new phase of “urban beautification” marks not only a shift in degree (accelerating demolitions) but also in kind. He observes that these demolitions are not being ordered by the planning agency, municipal authorities, or the state govern-ment, as they would have been in the past, but as a result of judicial orders. Middle-class individuals and groups (including residents’ welfare associations), are filing Public Interest Litigation cases to demolish slums, clear squatter settlements, and oust pavement dwellers. These demands are being enthusiastically supported by a judiciary that, in large part, appears to have redefined “public” interest as that of globalizing India’s emblematic middle classes (Baviskar 2003; Fernandes 2004). Ghertner (2010) examines the changing legal procedures that have facilitated this accelerated slum removal. He shows how earlier slum demolitions required rigorous calculative prac-tices by the municipal authorities, such as detailed enumeration and mapping, formally reflecting the governmentalities of “rational planning.” In the same governmental paradigm, slum dwellers sought to resist relocation (or improve its terms) through demonstrations of their “badges” of citizenship – ration cards, identity cards, Below the Poverty Line (BPL) cards, “VP Singh tokens” (issued under the government of V. P.Singh to provide slum dwellers with a formal proof of residence). and so on. However, Ghertner argues, following a series of decisions in the early 2000s, all that the judiciary now requires to issue a demolition order is evidence that a community looks unaesthetic – that is, that it does not conform to the image that the city’s govern-ment and wealthier residents wish to promote. Normative constructions of the clean, green city are thus elevated to constitute an aesthetic rationality of rule. As well as opening the way for many more slum demolitions, this has implications for the “coun-terconduct” of the harried slum dwellers, and Ghertner charts the ways in which many are increasingly internalizing their exclusion, subduing (although by no means eradicating) protest. Ghertner documents the case of one slum that was recently demolished, even though it was authorized, that is, legally occupying the land. It was enough that it looked unsightly and was declared to be a visual affront by nearby middle-class residents. Ghertner also documents the flip side to this – the willingness of the municipal agencies, and indeed the judiciary, to allow “elite” construction on illegal sites because their developments look “planned” and modern. Here, a recursive relationship between the state and the middle class interests is at work, at times led by powerful members of the middle class (as in the Supreme Court cases) as well as by municipal agencies that effectively decriminalize the illegal building of “aestheti-cally pleasing” developments.



As we argued in the introduction to this chapter, the state, judiciary and middle-class dominated public sphere is symbolically and materially engaged in a process not only of criminalizing the poor, but of constructing middle-class residents as Delhi’s “model, law-abiding and law-enforcing citizens.” Here, we contend that although illegal everyday practices are part of life for residents across all class groups, elements of the state collude with middle-class aspirations for an orderly and “green” Delhi by consistently framing the middle class as law-upholding modern citizens. This process can be observed, for example, in Delhi’s bhagidari scheme, which aims to promote “participatory” governance, although it is limited to authorized colonies, and thus elites and middle classes (Mawdsley 2009).

Sanjay Srivastava (2009) describes his experience at one bhagidari meeting between a residents welfare association (RWA) and representatives of the local state. His account captures both their fear of the poor and the dependence of middle-class households on the cheap services the poor provide. Srivastava’s account reveals a fix-ated concern with issues of “security.” He details the subjects that came up for dis-cussion over the three-day event: (1) cooperation between the police and the RWA; (2) servant verification; (3) the RWA alerting police to those houses where both husband and wife went out to work, leaving them vacant in the day, plus surveillance of any unoccupied houses; (4) listing all the maids, hawkers, plumbers and others in the area so as only to allow “authorized” people within the colony; (5) the “security threat” from Jhuggi-Jhopri (slum) dwellers; and finally, (6) surprise checks by the police on the private security personnel employed by the RWAs. Srivastava quotes the Deputy Commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, who reported to the meeting that by 2006, “all Jhuggi-Jhopri (JJ) colonies along the Yamuna banks would be demolished,” and that the area would be transformed into a “tourist spot” (Srivastava 2009:344).

The Deputy Commissioner of Police (North Delhi) then addressed the audience to talk about police activities regarding regular surveillance of “bad characters” and “his-tory sheeters,” as well as police cooperation with RWAs and Nagarik Suraksha Samitis (citizen security committees) – a police-sponsored network. “He asked the RWAs to be a regular source of information on strangers and ‘young men with mobiles and motorbikes, but with no obvious source of income.’ The police, he concluded, was very active in ‘JJ clusters,’ trying to prevent crime” (Srivastava 2009:344). Srivastava argues that the Bhagidari scheme is a guide to the contemporary consciousness of the official city: “the citizenry and the state are tightly entwined through the ideas of legality, cooperation, criminality, transparency, and the rights and responsibilities of the citizen with respect to the city” (2009:343).

Many scholars and activists in Delhi argue that this move in governmental and administrative priorities results from the dual pressures of global finance capital on the one hand, and an increasingly assertive middle class on the other. In this sense, Delhi’s current transformation can be compared to Neil Smith’s (1996) analysis of the “revanchist city” (see also Mitchell 2003; Banerjee-Guha 2009). While Delhi’s postcolonial trajectory and place-specific history certainly distinguish it from the trajectories of cities in the North such as New York, where scholarship on revan-chism has primarily been focused (see Smith 1996; Mitchell 2003), there remain emerging parallels between the collusion of bourgeois desires and state neoliberal reforms across these urban sites. In particular, the criminalization of the homeless1



and urban poor, justified through the logic of cleansing city space so that it will be enticing to consumerism and economic growth, represents an aspect of revanchism that can be seen in Southern cities such as Delhi. However, rather than following an American urban pattern of gentrification and the privileging of white middle-class interests, as Smith has suggested in the case of New York, Delhi’s revanchism needs to be understood in the context of its own postcolonial development and citywide initiatives (see also Swanson 2007). Specifically, attention to the liberaliza-tion of land in Delhi, and middle-class desires for improved housing and spaces of recreation and commerce, have threatened squatters’ housing on DDA-controlled “public” land. As the DDA seeks to increase its profits through the commercializa-tion of its land into real estate for the middle and upper classes, as well as for shopping and recreation centers, the social and spatial positions of the poor are made increasingly vulnerable in attempts to push them out of the city. While Smith argues that revanchism in America is based on a conservative movement of “revenge” for the liberal excesses of the 1960s, a different logic may be at work in Delhi (Smith 1996; Mitchell 2003:164). As one Delhi activist writes in an analysis of the Draft Delhi 2021 Master Plan, the city’s current transformation attacks the affirmative activities of the welfare state as the root cause of the environmental, social and political mismanagement of the city. He suggests that the argument goes like this: “It is the politicians who have over the years actively encouraged the growth of illegal industries and encroachment on public lands by slum clusters in order to create a captive vote bank and a ready source of income. This has resulted in the law-abiding, tax-paying citizens being denied their legitimate rights in the city” (Batra 2005:29).

Batra’s insights remind us that we should be careful about assuming too close a collusion between “the state” and “the middle classes.” Here we note the obvious but important point that “the state” is complex and multifaceted, and that its relations with varied and contingently positioned citizen-consumers cannot be captured by recourse to simplistic categories (Fuller and Bénéï 2001; Corbridge et al 2005; Gupta 2005). Thus, in some contexts, political representatives of the state have closer rela-tions with the poor, while the middle classes feel alienated from the style and (some-times) the substance of debate and activity (Chatterjee 2004; Harriss 2005; 2006). Different components and levels of the state evidently have very different relations with diverse constituencies.2

To return to our argument, we submit that the criminalization of the poor provides substantiation for changing notions of rights and citizenship in the city, mirroring what Mitchell calls, in reference to New York City, the “re-establishment of exclusion-ary citizenship as just and good” (Mitchell 2003:183). Here, quality of life and urban citizenship are proclaimed as distinct rights of the middle and upper classes, at the expense (and in some cases the erasure) of the “quality of life” of the urban poor. Yet the codependence of Delhi’s poor and its more elite residents, particularly in informal arrangements that subsidize inadequate city planning, creates an arena of informalities that cannot be understood through parallels to cities in the West such as New York. The implications of criminalizing a population that the city and its residents continue to rely on for tasks as critical as waste disposal and those fulfilled by domestic servants and security guards merit much further analysis into the consequences and contradic-tions of an emerging revanchist middle-class fervor in cities in the global South.



DISCOURSES OF SUSTAINABILITY: VISIBLE CRIMINALS, (IN)VISIBLE CITIZENS IN DELHI

The city’s ambition to green, clean and commercialize its spaces, enticing interna-tional tourism and capital as well as national investment, emerges in the language of sustainable development. From imagining the ways that harvesting rainwater can pro-vide green beltways and public parks, to producing an aesthetically pleasing Yamuna riverside (through the removal of “waste,” including “unsustainable” slum areas), the discourse of this new Delhi combines ideals of aesthetic beauty, efficiency and sustain-ability, all interlacing to produce a high-tech, visually pleasurable city (DDA 2005; Srivastava 2009). In particular, state discourses on a sustainable water supply center on ideas of the model urban citizen, as well as its opposite, the urban criminal, who threatens the overall development and sustainability of the city. This threat of crimi-nality, inherently associated with the informality and illegality of some of the practices of Delhi’s poor, is particularly menacing because it represents the “backward” prac-tices against which the city seeks to define itself and its citizenry. The water criminal thus “steals” and “wastes” water, while the model citizen informs others on how to most efficiently and sustainably manage their water for the benefit of all.

Because the state articulates Delhi’s water problem as one embedded in a rising population and an overall threat of a diminishing water supply (rather than uneven distribution),3 “sustainability” and “conservation” oriented water initiatives and poli-cies have targeted the problem of “unaccounted for water.” While data differ on the quantity of this missing water, estimates indicate that as much as 50 percent of Delhi’s water is unaccounted for in official meter readings, and thus “wasted.” In documents ranging from the nation’s five-year plans (see the Tenth Plan specifically: Government of India Planning Commission 2002) to Delhi Jal Board records (DJB 2010a, 2010b) and the DDA’s master plans for Delhi (most recently the Draft Plan 2021: see DDA 2005), unaccounted for water represents one of the most obvious targets for unleash-ing conservation reform. The DDA states: “About half of the water that is treated and distributed at public expense is non-revenue water. This is due to unrecorded usage or illegal taps and water connections. Reducing water losses is cheaper than augment-ing water capacity for such losses” (DDA 2005:105).

The factors contributing to unaccounted for water are of course multiple and com-plex, from faulty infrastructure to a range of unsanctioned water access activities. Meters are often inaccurate or broken, pipes often break and have leaks, and some poorer neighborhoods have access to nonmetered running taps (Zerah 2000; Shiva 2004; Delhi HDR 2006). A key point to emphasize here is that, like other residents of the city, Delhi’s elites and middle classes are also engaged in a wide variety of infor-mal and illegal practices to secure water. Even though they are far more likely to be connected to the piped water system, the flows are frequently contaminated, erratic, infrequent and of low pressure, demanding compensatory strategies (Zerah 1998; 2000; Sagane 2000). These include investing in storage devices, but also illegal water pumps (from the mains to the storage areas) and tube wells, as well as bribing engi-neers, water sellers, meter readers and officials (Davis 2004).

Although leaks and faulty infrastructure are acknowledged in policy reports as con-tributing to water losses, such “technical” problems are nonetheless coupled with the



clear threat of entire populations who are said to “steal” water from the city. The state defines water stealers as those who have illegal (or unauthorized) connections to the water supply – most often those who live in unauthorized colonies as well as on “quasi-legal” land (see Sivam 2003). For example, a former chief executive of the Delhi Jal Board, P. K. Tripathy, blames “entire colonies” as being the primary culprits of water theft. In a statement about conserving water in the city, Tripathy calls atten-tion to the “illegal tapping by certain colonies,” targeting and criminalizing poor communities who are the primary residents in the city who live in unauthorized colo-nies with illegal unauthorized water connections (Vasisht 2002). Despite evidence that suggests that the middle and upper classes are able to access some of the largest amounts of unaccounted for water (Zerah 2000; Davis 2004), illegality is instead consistently mapped onto the bodies of the poor, who are framed as posing a constant threat to the city’s sustainability.

By making unauthorized water connections the most publicized modality of “theft” and “illegality,” the state and the middle classes are able to channel attention to the city’s poor. Middle and upper class illegality, which often consists of the falsification of meter readings and technologies that can enhance water amounts extracted from already legal connections or from illegal/unregistered ground water sources (Davis 2004), are kept distinct from the more criminalized offense of actually initiating a tap into piped infrastructure without any legal right to do so. The illegal use of tube and bore wells provides an excellent demonstration of the unevenness of state prosecution of criminality. Legally, tube and bore wells have to be registered with the Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA). Because of growing concerns about declining water tables, the CGWA has now “notified” large areas of South Delhi, officially pro-hibiting the sinking of more tube and bore wells. However, as the CGWA admits (Daga 2003), people still continue to dig them illegally, and very few private wells are registered. In practice, Daga observes, the CGWA does not have the personnel or institutional impetus to track down violators and enforce the law. Daga quotes groundwater engineers who estimate that there are some 300,000 unregistered tube and bore wells in Delhi, which supply some 250 MGD (million gallons per day) to private individuals (the DJB extracts a further 100 MGD from groundwater supplies). Typically, because they are initially costly to purchase, tube and bore wells are concen-trated in affluent areas. After installation, tube wells and bore wells provide reliable and almost free access to water from the city’s ground water tables. Daga reports severe effects on Delhi’s water table, noting the connection with wealthier areas, such as Sainik Farms – an affluent but illegally constructed residential complex. Tube and bore wells allow more affluent households to bypass (or supplement) their depend-ence on the city’s urban water infrastructure by reverting to a method of water retrieval most often associated with rural areas (Zerah 2000). In this regard, they represent a “demodernizing” of the water supply, debunking narratives (and assumptions) that the urban water supply is characterized by modern urban infrastructure and its prom-ises, rather than unconnected and unregulated wells.

The neglect of middle-class informalities and the focus on the poor, specifically on their unauthorized connections, remains highly contradictory given the state’s own data that demonstrate that, per capita, the poor consume the very least amount of water in Delhi – often below water minimums suggested for basic survival (Govern-ment of India 2001; Gleick 1996). Because of their often marginal water status, poor



residents (particularly women) are often more concerned with recycling and conserv-ing the limited water supplies they manage (Batra 2004; Voluntary Health Associa-tion 2004; Bapat and Agarwal 2003; Truelove, forthcoming), a fact that actually turns the state’s discourse of conservation, and those bodies that threaten it, on its head. Here the logic and practice of sustainability, through the policing of particular water practices, actually trump the human right to even the most basic quantities of water for domestic use. Thus, as “water sustainability” is linked to the city’s overall modernizing project and transformation into a world center, it becomes a tool by which to arbitrate who belongs to, and who is (often violently) excluded from, the emerging cosmopolitan Delhi.

The targeted criminalization of the poor has strong legal and material impacts that are increasingly backed by the threat of state violence. While the most recent five-year plan states that “[s]evere penalties should be levied on those found responsible for leakage and wastage of water” (Government of India Planning Commission 2002:640), Delhi’s 2021 Draft Master Plan employs the most ferocious language yet, stating: “Wastage and theft of water will have to be curbed mercilessly. Suitable amendments are necessary in the Delhi Water Board Act to provide for stringent measures for enforcing curbs on theft/wastage of water” (DDA 2005:143, emphasis added).

The state’s plan to escalate the consequences levied on the poor for water “thefts” is particularly alarming given the DJB’s already severe policies that impose heavy pen-alties on those who are found to have illegal connections. Not only does the DJB currently have the authority to disconnect all unauthorized connections that it locates, but it also fines residents who have such connections a penalty of three years’ worth of (estimated) retroactive water charges as well as an additional 3,000 rupees, a sum that may be equivalent to six months’ worth of wages for Delhi’s poorest. How often these penalties are inflicted in practice remains uncertain, but the call for a more “merciless” policing of this population signals growing state efforts to push back the rights, spaces and practices of Delhi’s poorest through using a discourse of “sustain-ability.” Although there is a lack of data on fines levied for illegal water use, this push to increasingly police “water thefts” nonetheless serves to justify, and perhaps propel, the harsh and at times abusive stance that some tanker drivers adopt toward poorer communities, who often receive insufficient and erratic water deliveries. On numer-ous occasions while conducting research in Delhi,4 we witnessed drivers berating slum dwellers who had ventured onto a middle-class road to collect water that was dripping freely from tankers servicing local households, and even overturning their modest water vessels. Although the water would have nonetheless run onto the street had poorer residents not thought to capture it, the disdain of drivers toward poorer groups suggests a growing antipathy toward the water plight of slum residents. As Davis (2004) documents the ways that water officials in the past have bent rules to accom-modate thirsty populations, much more empirical study is needed to examine how shifting ideas of sustainability, aesthetic beauty, and the remaking of Delhi are altering the daily activities of water board employees in ways that are increasingly threatening to the needs of working-class residents.

To turn now to our corollary, we submit that while the state’s focus on “water thefts” brings particular visibility to water practices of the poor as criminal, it simulta-neously promotes policies and narratives that highlight the opposite: the model, law-abiding citizen who helps green the city through enforcing water sustainability



practices. The state propagates and valorizes the image of the law-abiding, “green” and sustainability oriented citizen not just through discourse, but through recent initiatives to recruit “common” citizens as “water wardens” for the city. As part of a call for increased water conservation and efficiency, the Delhi Jal Board now recruits and trains middle-class residents (those who are connected legally to the city’s water, including students and members of residents’ welfare associations: DJB 2007) to police and report on the water activities of others, including (as outlined above) through the auspices of bhagidari. Not unlike the “volunteer” policing of the US–Mexico border by “common citizens,” the water warden is a volunteer who receives prestige from helping his or her city to uphold the purported common values of sus-tainability, efficiency, and legality. Trained though a DJB program with the purpose of involving “citizens” in water conservation, these wardens observe water activities across Delhi’s neighborhoods and then report back on misuses of water, particularly water “wastes” and “thefts.” Those residents who report the most on water misuses compete for a city award, called the Water Saviour Certificate (DJB 2007).

Thus the water warden program represents another rearticulation of what consti-tutes theft and criminality on the one hand, and the upholding of laws and the city’s sustainability on the other. As water wardens act as the state’s exemplary citizens who can save the city from unsustainable, illegal withdrawals of water, citizenship in a transforming Delhi comes to be defined against those who are the targets of the water wardens’ campaign: the illegal criminals whose nonmodern, backward and corrupt practices jeopardize conservation and quality of life. The discourse of sustainability, and its rubric of upholding the city’s laws to the betterment of all, attributes legiti-macy to the wardens who, as model citizens, attempt to green and protect the city’s resources. However, this narrative must erase or silence the multiple informalities and illegalities of middle-class and elite attempts to secure water for themselves. The irony of the water warden program is, of course, that wardens themselves are members of the households in the city that arguably use, “waste,” and steal the most water (Davis 2004; Zerah 2000; Hazards Center 2005).

CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter we have argued that middle-class illegalities form part of the dialectic of the planned-unplanned city – the rise of informal infrastructures and practices to supplement the partialities and inadequacies of state provision and modernization of the urban sphere. Although wealthier residents may experience relative advantages in their water compensation options and security, everyday informal water practices arise because even the affluent are not free from the scramble to supplement the city’s inadequate water flows (Zerah 2000). However, rather than framing middle-class illegal water extractions as jeopardizing state efforts to achieve urban sustainability – as is the case with working-class illegal water practices – middle-class activities are usually subject to a privileged invisibility within state water policy and governance. The use of tube wells reveals some of the most striking contradictions within the state and the middle class’s intersecting discourses of sustainability and legality in the city. Since the practice poses serious threats to the sustainability of the city’s ground water tables, providing technology for larger quantities of water withdrawal than most any



other domestic method of access (Zerah 2000; Daga 2003; Soni 2003), it contradicts both state and middle-class assertions of Delhi’s growing law-abiding, sustainability oriented citizenry. The use of such tubes also indicates the city’s failure to meet the water needs and desires of the middle and upper classes. Enforcement of tube well regulations necessarily entails a state acknowledgment of the much wider range of activities that encompass the “unplanned,” yet necessary, city – threatening the state’s efforts to recast Delhi as a high-tech hub for global capital.

Provocatively, perhaps, we further suggest that while the state directs attention away from middle and upper class informalities as it attempts to recast the city and its subjects, much scholarship on urban informality also follows a similar linking of the poor, rather than other groups or classes, with urban informality – this time through research that often critiques the state. For example, in a volume edited by Roy and AlSayyad (2004) that analyzes Third World urban informality, chapters by a variety of scholars and activists across the globe connect urban informality with the plight of the poor to carve out housing and livelihoods in cities. Because scholarship on informali-ties in Southern cities has emerged especially strongly from a history of Latin Ameri-can research on urbanization and housing, this linkage and consequent overall focus is not surprising, and provides a critical venue for analyzing the struggles of millions of people who remain without “legal” housing and employment in Southern cities. However, the predominant assumption that the poor are the main enactors of infor-mal practices reinforces the view that poverty (and a lack of housing rights) is the primary basis, and perpetuator, of urban informality. This implicit view permeates much critical scholarship on urban life, including work on urban India. While analyses that link the poor to the construction of an “informal sector” are certainly imperative to understanding the positions of the working class in relation to “unplanned” (and planned) aspects of the city, too singular an association of informality with the urban poor risks eclipsing the many ways that other classes, and bodies, participate in, and are dependent on, informal and extralegal practices.

Clearly, that the middle class is defining itself as law-upholding, and pressing its legal rights, demonstrates less about actual, on-the-ground realities of upholding the law and more about what kinds of practices become visible (and invisible) in discourses of sustainability, legality, and ultimately rights in the city. In fact, research on water in urban India shows that incremental increases in income levels actually enable middle (and upper) class residents to offer increased bribes in exchange for illegal water access improvements, ranging from the installation of illegal tube and bore wells, larger pipes or motors, as well as the falsification of meter readings (Davis 2004). The middle class itself has a strong impetus to hide or disavow its own connections to informal and extralegal practices in efforts to press the state for increasing legalized rights to the city (Mitchell 2003). Unlike the position of the middle class within the revanchist efforts of Northern cities (Smith 1996; Mitchell 2003), Delhi’s middle-class residents remain in the sticky position of participating in illegal and informal practices around water procurement, while simultaneously seeking to define themselves as “proper citizens” that hold the state (and themselves) accountable to the law. We thus propose that ethnographies of the water discourses and practices of India’s highly varied “middle classes” (from lower middle class to the hegemonic bourgeois) will make a vital con-tribution to progressive scholarship seeking to contest the increasingly repressive and exclusionary processes of neoliberal urban development in Delhi and elsewhere.



NOTES

1 Here, homelessness is also a term that does not translate well from Smith’s study in New York (1996) to research on the urban South, which has complicated and broken apart the term “homeless” to delineate a variety of differing positionalities and housing arrange-ments, including squatters, sidewalk dwellers, and slum inhabitants (see Roy and AlSayyad 2004).

2 We can further disrupt the common presumption of the relationship between the middle classes and neoliberal globalization. The middle classes are not fully committed to neoliberal globalization, but to those elements which suit their interests (or rather, those of the hege-monic middle classes). Thus in Delhi, the middle classes protested successfully against the privatization of the electricity supply, preferring the state-supported system. Like other glo-bal champions of neoliberalism, they are selective about which elements work best for them.

3 See Truelove (forthcoming) for a more detailed analysis and critique of the “scarcity” nar-rative in Delhi. See also Kaika 2003.

4 This research was conducted by Yaffa Truelove and Jeetesh Rai over the period of February–August 2008.

REFERENCES

AlSayyad, Nezar2004 Urban Informality as a “New” Way of Life. In Urban Informality: Transnational

Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. A. Roy and N. AlSayyad, eds. Pp. 7–30. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Anjaria, J. S., and C. McFarlaneForthcoming Urban Navigations: Politics, Space and the City in South Asia. New Delhi:

Routledge.Bakker, Karen

2003 Archipelagos and Networks: Urbanization and Water Privatization in the South. Geographical Journal 169(4):328–341.

Banerjee-Guha, Swapna2009 New Urbanism, Urban Neoliberalism and Restructuring in Mumbai. In New

Economic Policy in India. Richard Peet and Amitabh Kundu, eds. New York: Routledge.Bapat, Meera, and Indu Agarwal

2003 Our Needs, Our Priorities: Women and Men from the Slums in Mumbai and Pune Talk about Their Needs for Water Sanitation. Environment and Urbanization 15(2):71–86.

Batra, Lalit2004 Pani ki kahani: Shehri garibon ki zubaani (The story of water: from the voices of the

urban poor). Final report. Delhi: Hazards Centre.2005 Vanishing Livelihoods in a Global Metropolis. In Draft Delhi Master Plan 2021:

Blueprint for an Apartheid City. Pp. 22–30. Delhi: Hazards Centre.Baviskar, Amita

2003 Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power, and Identity in the Making of Metro-politan Delhi. International Social Science Journal 55(175):89–98.

2006 Demolishing Delhi: World Class City in the Making. Mute 2(3):88–95.Baviskar, Amita, Subir Sinha, and Kavita Philip

2006 Rethinking Indian Environmentalism: Industrial Pollution in Delhi and Fisheries in Kerala. In Forging Environmentalism: Justice, Livelihood and Contested Environments. J. Bauer, ed. Pp. 189–256. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe.



Bhan, Gautam2009 “This Is No Longer the City I Once Knew”: Evictions, the Urban Poor and the

Right to the City in Millennial Delhi. Environment and Urbanisation 21(1):127–142.Bhan, Gautam, and Kalyani Menon-Sen

2007 Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi. New Delhi: Yoda Press.

Caldeira, Theresa2000 City of Walls. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CERAG (Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group)N.d. Project Report: Space for Waste: Planning for the Informal Recycling Sector. New

Delhi: Chintan.Chatterjee, Partha

2004 The Politics of the Governed. New York: Columbia University Press.Corbridge, S. E., G. Williams, M. Srivastava, and R. Veron

2005 Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Daga, Shivani2003 Private Supply of Water in Delhi. Centre for Civil Society Working Paper 59. At

www.ccsindia.org/ccsindia/policy/trans/studies/wp0059.pdf (accessed Feb. 23, 2010).

Davis, Jennifer2004 Corruption in Public Service Delivery: Experience from South Asia’s Water and

Sanitation Sector. World Development 32(1):53–71.DDA (Delhi Development Authority)

2005 Draft Master Plan for Delhi 2021. At www.dda.org.in/planning/draft_master_plans.htm (accessed Feb. 23, 2010).

Delhi HDR2006 Delhi Human Development Report. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Dembowski, Hans2001 Taking the State to Court: Public Interest Litigation and the Public Sphere in Met-

ropolitan India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Deshpande, S.

2003 Contemporary India: A Sociological View. New Delhi: Penguin.DJB (Delhi Jal Board)

2010a About the Delhi Jal Board. At www.delhijalboard.nic.in/djbdocs/about_us/about.htm (accessed Feb. 23, 2010).

2010b The Delhi Jal Board. At www.delhijalboard.nic.in/ (accessed Feb. 23, 2010).Donner, Henrike

2008 Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, Globalisation and Middle-Class Identity in Con-temporary India. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Dwyer, Rachel2000 All You Need Is Money, All You Want is Love: Sex and Romance in Modern India.

London: Cassell.Fernandes, L.

2004 The Politics of Forgetting: Class Politics, State Power and the Re-structuring of Urban Space in India. Urban Studies 41(12):2415–2430.

2006 India’s New Middle Classes: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fernandes, L., and P. Heller2006 Hegemonic Aspirations: New Middle Class Politics and India’s Democracy in Com-

parative Perspective. Critical Asian Studies 38(4):495–522.Fuller, Christopher, and Veronique Bénéï, eds.

2001 The Everyday State and Society in Modern India. London: Hurst.



Gandy, Matthew2006 Water, Sanitation and the Modern City: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in

Lagos and Mumbai. Human Development Report Offi ce Occasional Paper. New York: United Nations Development Programme.

2008 Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity and Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai. Environment and Planning 40(1):108–30.

Ghertner, Asher D.2008 An Analysis of New Legal Discourse behind Delhi’s Slum Demolitions. Economic

and Political Weekly 43(20):57–66.2010 Calculating without Numbers: Aesthetic Governmentality in Delhi’s Slums. Econ-

omy and Society 39(2):185–217.Gleick, Peter

1996 Minimum Water Requirements for Human Activities: Meeting Basic Needs. Water International 21:83–92.

Government of India2001 Census of India 2001: Part B. At www.censusindia.gov.in/ (accessed Feb. 23,

2010).Government of India Planning Commission

2002 Tenth Five-Year Plan 2002–2007. At http://planningcommission.nic.in/plans/planrel/fi veyr/welcome.html (accessed Feb. 23, 2010).

Gupta, Akhil2005 Narratives of Corruption: Anthropological and Fictional Accounts of the Indian

State. Ethnography 6 (1):5–34.Harriss, John

2005 Political Participation, Representation and the Urban Poor: Findings from Research in Delhi. Economic and Political Weekly, Mar. 12: 1041–1054.

2006 Middle-Class Activism and the Politics of the Informal Working Class. Critical Asian Studies 38(4):445–65.

Hazards Centre2005 Draft Delhi Master Plan 2021: Blueprint for an Apartheid City. Delhi: Hazards

Centre.Kackar, Sunitha Dasappa

2005 MPD-2021 and the Vision of a “Slum-Free” Delhi. In Draft Delhi Master Plan 2021: Blueprint for an Apartheid City. Hazards Centre. Pp. 17–21. Delhi: Hazards Centre.

Kaika, Maria2003 Constructing Scarcity and Sensationalising Water Politics: 170 Days That Shook

Athens. Antipode 35(5):919–954.Legg, Stephen

2007 Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Mawdsley, Emma

2004 India’s Middle Classes and the Environment. Development and Change 35(1):79–103.

Mawdsley, Emma2009 “Environmentality” in the Neoliberal City: Attitudes, Governance and Social Jus-

tice. In The New Middle Classes: Globalizing Lifestyles, Consumerism and Environmen-tal Concern. H. Lange and L. Meier, eds. Pp. 237–252. London: Springer.

Mazzarella, William2005 Middle Class. In Keywords in South Asian Studies (School of Oriental and African

Studies, University of London). At www.soas.ac.uk/southasianstudies/ keywords/ (accessed Mar. 4, 2010).

Metcalf, Thomas R.2002 An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.



Mitchell, Don2003 The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York:

Guilford.Nair, J.

2005 The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Ong, Aiwa2006 Neoliberalism as Exception. Durham: Duke University Press.

Osella, F., and C. Osella2000 Social Mobility in Kerala: Modernity and Identity in Confl ict. London: Pluto Press.

Prashad, Vijay2001 The Technology of Sanitation in Colonial Delhi. Modern Asian Studies 35(1):

113–155.Priya, Ritu

1993 Town Planning, Public Health and Urban Poor: Some Explorations from Delhi. Economic and Political Weekly 28(17):824–834.

Roy, A., and N. AlSayyad, eds.2004 Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America,

and South Asia. Lanham: Lexington Books.Roy, Dunu

2005 Introducing the Draft Master Plan for Delhi 2021. In Draft Delhi Master Plan 2021: Blueprint for an Apartheid City. Pp. 7–9. Delhi: Hazards Centre.

Sagane, Rajendra2000 Water Management in Mega-cities in India: Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, and Chennai.

In Water for Urban Areas: Challenges and Perspectives. J. Uitto and A. Biswas, eds. Pp. 84–111. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.

Sajha Manch1999 The City Is Ours: Delhi’s Master Plan and Delhi’s People. Delhi: Sajha Manch.

Sivam, Alpana2003 Housing Supply in Delhi. Cities 20(2):135–141.

Shiva, Vandana2004 Water Tariff Increase: Rushing towards Privatization. ZNET Magazine. At www.

zcommunications.org/water-tariff-increase-rushing-towards-water-privatisation-by-vandana2-shiva (accessed Aug. 2010).

Smith, Neil1996 The New Urban Frontier: Gentrifi cation and the Revanchist City. London:

Routledge.Soni, Vikram

2003 Water and Carry Capacity of a City: Delhi. Economic and Political Weekly 38(45):4745–4749.

Srivastava, Sanjay2009 Urban Spaces, Disney-Divinity and Moral Middle Classes in Delhi. Economic and

Political Weekly 44(26–27):338–345.Sultana, F.

2009 Community and Participation in Water Resources Management: Gendering and Naturing Development Debates from Bangladesh. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34(3):346–363.

Swanson, Kate2007 Revanchist Urbanism Heads South: The Regulation of Indigenous Beggars and

Street Vendors in Ecuador. Antipode 39(4):708–728.Swyngedouw, Erik

1995 The Contradictions of Urban Water Provision: A Study of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Third World Planning Review 17(4):387–405.



2004 Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Swyngedouw, Erik, Maria Kaika, and Esteban Castro2002 Urban Water: A Political Ecology Perspective. Built Environment 28(2):124–137.

Tarlo, Emma2003 Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. Berkeley: University of

California Press.Truelove, Yaffa

Forthcoming (Re-)Conceptualizing Water Inequality through a Feminist Political Ecology Framework. Geoforum.

Vasisht, Viwa2002 Water Water Wasted Everywhere. Times of India. At http://timesofi ndia.indiatimes.

com/articleshow/26483326.cms (accessed Feb. 23, 2010).Verma, Gita Dewan

2003 Slumming India: A Chronicle of Slums and Their Saviours. New Delhi: Penguin.Veron, R.

2006 Remaking Urban Environments: The Political Ecology of Air Pollution in Delhi. Environment and Planning 38(11):2093–2019.

Voluntary Health Association (Delhi)1994 Assessment of Health Knowledge, Practices and Services in Delhi Slums. New Delhi:

Indian Human Settlements Programme.Waldrop, Anne

2004 Gating and Class Relations: The Case of a New Delhi Colony. City and Society 16(2):93–116.

Zerah, Marie-Helene1998 How to Assess the Quality Dimension of Urban Infrastructure: The Case of Water

Supply in Delhi. Cities 15(4):285–290.Zerah, Marie-Helene

2000 Water: Unreliable Supply in Delhi. Delhi: Manohar.


discourses of citizenship and criminality in clean, green delhi

Documents