Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. xi, 281 pp. (Illustrations.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5969-2.
Mumbai’s ambitions to be a world-class city are constantly under threat by infrastructural challenges—be they related to rail, road, water, or power. Rapid rates of construction and re-landscaping in the city have also created new challenges for the routine provision of basic services. Lisa Björkman’s focus in Pipe Politics is on water. Water scarcity is a major source of political and economic risk for much of the world, and an impending source of conflict in many cities of the global south. But Björkman starts with more of a puzzle in Mumbai, where it is not water scarcity itself that is the essential problem. Mumbai is estimated to have as much water, and estimated leakage levels, on a per capita basis as London. Rather, Pipe Politics shows that it is the growing mismatch between the means by which urban development has been taking place above ground and the underground life of pipes and water below ground that disrupts and hinders flows of water around the city. Mumbai’s economic transformation has created a chasm between the water infrastructure and the rapidly changing landscapes that the city’s water engineers have to serve.
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork within residential neighbourhoods and the water department, accompanied by close textual analysis, Björkman seeks to get to the bottom of the puzzling story of Mumbai’s dry taps. The book begins by detailing how administrative capacity to manage the city’s water infrastructure was hollowed out in the 1980s and 1990s as debates about public-sector restructuring and privatization led to an effective recruitment freeze and dwindling investment in the face of ongoing uncertainty about the future of water management in the city. This resulted in a situation in which the department’s survey section ceased functioning, and knowledge about the location of pipes, flows, and pressure became increasingly fractured and personalized. Yet even despite the chronic challenges within the department, water department labourers or chaviwallas (key men) continued to perform a “stunningly elaborate choreography” every day to keep water flowing through the city by managing water pressure and flow through the opening and closing of valves. Björkman goes on to document how the creation of a new market in transferable development rights in return for slum rehabilitation projects facilitated a construction boom in Mumbai that radically reshaped the urban landscape. In the process, the regulatory frameworks governing the built environment were divorced from the management of its water infrastructure. The continual bending of planning rules by “Mumbai’s world-class-city boosters” created “hydraulic chaos” for the city’s water department engineers (84).
Different communities of actors have sought to make sense of the city’s continuing water problems in varying ways. In chapter 4, Björkman shows that one way the city’s water engineers explain the problems they face is through reference to the city’s slums and the issue of “illegal” constructions where people steal water through “illegal” connections. Björkman carefully shows, however, that what has been happening—driven by the new market in development rights—is the recategorization of certain settlements as slums. This recategorization makes them targets for slum rehabilitation and the lucrative transferable development rights that come with it. She examines the neighbourhood of Shivajinagar-Bainganwadi, which was originally a planned municipal housing colony but has become known as a slum. Residents in this area have become dependent on ever more improvised “microtechnologies” to access water. Such micro-innovations have themselves helped to recast the housing colony as informal and illegal, driving the water department to focus on policing illegal encroachments rather than improving water distribution. This leaves the residents of the neighbourhood reliant on improvized strategies that are constantly vulnerable to disruption, either by the water department or other residents diverting water for their own purposes.
The unpredictability of flows of pipes and water produces a deep reliance on local knowledge and rumour in both “slum” areas and middle-class residential neighbourhoods alike. In this context, a second form of explanation for the perennial problem of dry taps focuses on corruption: either private profiteering by water engineers or by politically motivated tampering. Björkman writes: “Popular discourse suggests a general belief that rational and complete knowledge of the water grid actually exists among department engineers and planners but that corrupt engineers and labourers simply do not act on their knowledge and power to produce water in certain neighbourhoods” (168). The discourse of corruption allows for the reproduction of the idea that the water department does have coherent knowledge and authority despite the constant experience of water shortages and volatility in supply. Politicians themselves are caught in the act, too, as chapter 7 shows. Aware that water flows in his area will be interpreted as a sign of someone’s power, Suresh (a.k.a. Bullet) Patil, the municipal councillor, is driven to claim credit for alleged works of the water department, or to demonstrate his ability to prevent them from disconnecting pipes even when those pipes had been responsible for the spread of disease (201). The book ends with the story of a chaviwallah who himself wins a seat on the municipal corporation, defeating the Congress Party incumbent who had held the seat for twenty-two years. In M-East Ward, where Björkman was based, over half of the thirteen elected councillors have a connection to water, either through vendors, engineers, or plumbers.
This is a book written with a sense of fondness for the poetics of water, as well as the mundane routines that shape its everyday movement through the city. Through water, it illuminates the contradictory and overlapping logics that shape the political economy of urban governance in Mumbai, offering insights that will resonate in many other fast developing mega-cities.
Louise Tillin
King’s College London, London, United Kingdom
pp. 611-613