Re:Locations Online Journal

Delhi Water Politics:

Institutionalized Ways of Knowing
Disenfranchised Communities
Mariah Stewart, University of Toronto

Introduction

Delhi’s pace of growth and urbanization are among the most rapid in India;
however, water quality and supply continue to be highly contentious within
the media and everyday lived experience. This paper seeks to break down
how issues of water supply and quality are presented in the media towards
more critical approaches to water access. Namely, I will investigate less
visible narratives in relation to water that do not hold a spotlight in
mainstream media.

In this paper, I will first provide an overview of Delhi’s water supply and
management scheme, diving into what this means at an everyday level. I
will then present how traditional media sources portray issues of water
management. Last, this paper will seek to understand how water impacts
individuals in a holistic way, going beyond water quality reports that
diminish individual experience to a number. I will argue that water
management, as presented in mainstream news sources and government
reports, deliberately ignores how unequal water access creates
opportunities for exclusion from urban spaces through embodied burdens of
water acquisition.

Overview of Delhi’s Urbanization

Delhi is one of the fastest growing urban centres in the past few decades.
Rapid urbanization will place Delhi as the most populous urban centre by
2028. By 2050, the city will witness an additional 400 million new urban
residents (“2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects” 2018; “Urban
Growth of New Delhi” 2018). Population density has increased dramatically

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over the past two decades. In 1951, the urban population constituted 82.4%
of Delhi; as of 2011, 97.5% of Delhi is now urban, with two out of nine
districts being completely so (Singh and Grover 2015, 1). With population
increases, Delhi has also seen a rise in prosperity: in the 2018 Delhi
Economic Survey, Delhi’s per capita income was approximately three times
higher than the national average (“Highlights of Economic Survey of Delhi
2018-19,” n.d.) and is one of the most attractive destinations for migrants to
settle (“How Delhi Became the Migrant Capital of India” 2018). Croplands
and grasslands are being converted into city infrastructure on the
periphery of Delhi and the land size of the city has doubled between 1991
and 2011,[1] with rural households rapidly being replaced by urban
residences (“Urban Growth of New Delhi” 2018). Social services
expenditures have increased from 68.71% in 2014-2015 to 83.60% in 2018-
2019 out of total budget allocation for the city while water and sanitation
capture 10.68% of the total budget, the sixth biggest expenditure category.
Delhi continues to be a promising global city. Despite increases in
prosperity, social services, and water provision, there are glaring instances
of unequal and insufficient access to resources, especially water.

Water Quality in Delhi

Water quality and access in India continue to dominate the news, especially
in comparing water quality in major cities such as Mumbai and Delhi.
Water quality reporting is highly controversial: half of the 19 million
individuals living in Delhi do not have formal connections to the centralized
water network of the city (Truelove 2019b, 1759). There are conflicting
reports about Delhi’s water quality, with some government officials arguing
that the city’s tap water is cleaner than most European cities, where many
residents feel comfortable drinking directly from the sink (Jeelani 2019).
Other officials remark that Delhi’s water quality tests fail almost every
water safety standard set out by the government (Ibid). The Supreme Court
of India has recently ruled more definitively that the government must
compensate citizens who do not have access to clean water and air, arguing
that citizens have a constitutional right to these resources (Ellis-Petersen
2019). The court has also been critical of these conflicting reports, arguing
that politics should never have a place in environmental concerns especially
when in relation to pollution levels in water. Though these protections have
been put in place, actual implementation of these measures has continued
to be inconsistent, with many living on the periphery taking on the physical
burden of insufficient water supply. In terms of understanding the scope of
the problem, it is critical to ask what do water quality measures and
provisions currently look like in Delhi today?

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Empirical Evaluations of Delhi’s Water Supply

The Delhi Jal Board (DJB) manages the city’s water supply, with over
12,000 kilometres of pipelines and 1.8 million unique water connections.
Water is treated by 13 water treatment plants that circulate 900 million
gallons per day (Roy 2013, 98). The DJB acquires 60% of its water from the
Yamuna, 34% from the Ganga, and the rest from groundwater sources
(Nagpal 2019). Additionally, the DJB owns 250 water tanks and has
established contracts for an additional 700 privately owned tankers to
deliver water to low supply areas due to illegal tapping and leakages (Roy
2013, 98). Though these tankers are supposed to reach those who do not
have more formal access to water pipelines, private tankers frequently sell
water without permission from the DJB (Haider 2016, 4). Though these
additional tankers have been put into place under the pretense of
improving water access to underserved communities, it is common that
these water providers extort the poor with high water prices and unreliable
service.

70% of the population receives water from the DJB, 55% of which is
metered while the rest is uncounted for (Roy 2013, 98). The DJB has been
making efforts to establish meters in unauthorized colonies[2] to extract
revenue from these communities (Nagpal 2019). The Ministry of Consumer
Affairs, Food & Public Distribution released a PR statement in November
2019 on water quality tests in Delhi under regulations from the Bureau of
India Standards – 11 samples from different parts of Delhi failed to comply
with water standards that test for bacterial, physical, and toxic content
among other parameters, totaling to 19 separate violations (“Union
Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution Shri Ram Vilas
Paswan Releases Water Quality Report for State Capitals & Delhi as
Analysed by BIS” 2019). Therefore, over one third of urban households in
Delhi rely on electric water purifiers and twenty percent of individuals
living in rural areas of Delhi use these purifiers as well (Dipak 2019).
However, the Aam Aadmi Party also claims that these water quality
reports are false, and have been fabricated to benefit electric purifier
companies (“Water Quality Report Fabricated to Benefit RO Companies:
AAP” 2019). As one of the managers of Delhi’s water supply from the DJB,
Rajendra Singh, stated, “Delhi Jal Board is only functioning as a
contractor, not focused on maintaining the sustainability of the sources of
water,” indicating a conflict of interest (as cited in Nagpal 2019). Despite
these conflicting reports, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that
unequal water access permeates Delhi society, especially in unauthorized
colonies.

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Delhi’s population continues to grow and, as a result, the number of

unauthorized settlements in Delhi has increased from 110 in 1962 to more
than 1,600 in 2014 (Haider 2016, 1). Some localities are fortunate to receive
a modest 29 litres per capita per day (lcpd) whereas other communities
receive as much as 500 lcpd (Haider 2016, 2). Even when residents have
access to clean water, this does not guarantee sufficient water for every
household. The “high tap-to-user ratio” leads to long lines and limited
water supply access, two hours’ wait in the morning and two in the evening
(Kher, Aggarwal, and Punhani 2015, 23). Limited access and inadequate
amounts of water frequently lead to individuals resorting to illegal
channels to procure water (Ibid). Beyond this, individuals may not even be
connected to networked pipelines as many unauthorized colonies do not
have legal access to water. Half of the 19 million individuals living in Delhi
do not have formal connections to the centralized water network of the city
(Truelove 2019b, 1759). Theft of water and pipelines is presented as
damaging the physical and social fabric of Delhi, leading to underground
water depletion and decreasing revenue for water companies (“One Held
from Delhi 3 from UP for Stealing Water Supply Pipes from Chanakyapuri
Police” 2019). Water reporting is incredibly political, with officials,
journalists, and residents shifting blame to not be held responsible. For
example, an official from the Delhi Jal Board remarked that the supply
network continues to expand into rural and unauthorized colonies in Delhi;
yet, individuals continue to choose illegal means of water procurement due
to not being able to provide property documents or other methods to prove
occupancy (P. Singh 2019).Those living on the periphery in unauthorized
colonies are further marginalized with this rhetoric: instead of seeing these
populations as vulnerable in lacking access to water, they are positioned as
the primary problem behind unequal water distribution.

Critical Approaches to Water Inequality in Delhi

I seek to critique traditional approaches to issues of water quality and

management within Delhi by filtering my understanding through a
situated urban political ecology lens. This approach accounts for the
“unique histories and trajectories of urbanism in Southern cities” and
“everyday practices and politics that produce uneven infrastructures and
lived experiences for city-dwellers” (Truelove 2016, 4; 2019b, 1760). This
perspective looks beyond rationalized management, such as water
sampling, and investigates how provisions ultimately disadvantage already
marginalized communities. In several news reports mentioned above, the
focus is not on accessing legal water connections. Instead, these articles
place responsibility on individuals living in unauthorized colonies to
procure property documents, as an example. The process is seemingly fair

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in the eyes of the DJB and the media without taking into consideration the
structural inequalities that may prevent someone from providing property
documents to government authorities in the first place.

Government reports and news agencies tend to focus on water quality in

Delhi and how many water-related crimes have been committed; this
numbers-based approach depoliticizes water inequality among residents in
Delhi, rendering fundamental problems of access invisible:

…detailed disciplines of measurement and classification…

were the twin techniques through which an equitable policy
of revenue was envisioned, based on principles of the most
general applicability that would simultaneously be as sensitive
as possible to local variation. (Appadurai 1996, 123)

When the state frames itself as knowing its residents, structural

inequalities towards slum dwellers persist. Within this, government reports
and media accounts of water provisions do not ask if the needs of slum
dwellers are even met; rather, they fixate over water quality for residents
that already have access to the water. In general, water policy in Delhi
relies on fragmented approaches that are based on intense measurements
as a way to depoliticize access to water (Truelove 2016, 2). This fits well
into Truelove’s critique in her situated urban political ecology framework –
the author seeks to more holistically understand the heterogeneity of lived
experiences among individuals living in Delhi.

Even though water inequality in Delhi is rampant, “dominant approaches

to water security tend to forego analyses of embodied water experiences
and the connection between water insecurity and patterns of
gender/class/race differentiation and inequality” (Truelove 2019a, 2).
Though there is resistance at the individual and community level –such as
men and women coming together to break earthen water pots– these
protests fail to manifest long term structural change because many protests
are motivated by personal gains (Roy 2013, 102). Further, true change is
unlikely to take root given the chokehold the state has over defining people
and their communities. For instance, the state has reigning power in
determining the legality of colonies, and whether or not these communities
are entitled to this water through legal channels (Ibid, 99). However, the
duality of legal versus illegal is merely constructed: illegality and legality
are deliberately positioned in “gray zones” to maintain state power and
final discretion over water provision (Truelove 2019b, 1760).

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Simply understanding the state as reinforcing the ‘legal’ and dismissing the
‘illegal’ would be too simple of a picture. For example, the state through
private and public means does occasionally provide water for residents
living in illegal settlements. On the other hand, middle class Delhi
residents living in legal colonies may not always have reliable water access
and will resort to illegal means to obtain water (Truelove 2016, 6–7). Thus,
fragmented state policy towards water provision leads to “uneven social
and infrastructural effects within and across colonies” (Ibid, 7). However,
the state attempts to shield feelings of structural inequality by relying on
precise measurements to create zones of neutrality. This approach
disavows the lens of urban political ecology by seeking to treat each
resident as receiving the best provisions they possibly could while ignoring
structural differences in opportunity and resources. This is clearly denying
the individual water by seeking to reorient the burden of lack of water onto
the marginalized. This may simply be done by claiming that the resident is
unable to procure proper property documents to prove occupancy for a
water pipeline connection.

This denial of water, “essentially a part of the right to life” is a mode of

power in which the bodies of Delhi residents are being “denied the right to
live in the city” (Roy 2013, 103). Even when slum dwellers living on the
periphery are recognized as individuals that have claims upon the state
and the city, their rights to water are never institutionalized, which one
can observe physically through insufficient water coverage by the DJB
(Ibid, 100). Public policy shapes the experience of its people, and
policymakers create a schism between the haves and have nots (Teo 2018,
1135). One’s access or lack thereof can be seen in terms of whether or not
one can be classified as urban, and therefore deserving of water, or anti-
urban, living in the slums (Roy 2013, 100). It is not just the state that
abandons the excluded and marginalized: many NGOs, including the World
Bank, have come into Delhi with lofty goals of improving the city’s water
infrastructure through privatization. However, once the World Bank and
its partners recognized that there were few profits to be had, project efforts
dried up as they worried that urban slums would pose a financial risk for
them (Gandy 2008, 121). Water inequalities are embodied forms of
marginalization and exclusion from being an active and recognized citizen
of Delhi, an extension of reminding residents of their supposed illegality.
Moments of resistance and reclaiming water sources prove to counter this
hegemonic state approach: protests from the periphery recognize the
injustice they live with, thus reasserting their right to live in the city (Roy
2013, 103).

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Marginalized Women through Water Inequality

Due to women’s roles often including maintaining the household through

cooking, cleaning and sanitation, the burden to acquire water falls
disproportionately upon them (Kher, Aggarwal, and Punhani 2015, 16).
Consequently, women sacrifice their own water intake, hygiene, and work
to make keeping up the household possible. Truelove provides a clear
example of this gendered inequality in her study of informal settlements in
Delhi through the story of a Muslim woman named Naila:

While her husband begins his 12-hr shift at a local construction site…Naila
waits for a tanker truck carrying state water to arrive outside the lanes of
the settlement. She balances this gendered household labor in between her
own paid work…[A]fter 2 hr [hours] of waiting with her empty water
containers on the side of the road, Naila becomes convinced that this day
will mark the second time in a row that the tanker has failed to deliver
vital water needed for getting her family through the day…She instead opts
to ask one of her employers to fill a few buckets of water from the home
where she works. In exchange, Naila’s employer asks her to work late that
day for extra unpaid hours, a barter for which Naila feels she cannot refuse,
given the water needs of her household. In the late afternoon when Naila
returns home, she first prioritizes the water for her son to drink, and later
gives it to her husband for bathing, while also saving the leftover bathing
water for cleaning his clothes…While Naila’s gendered everyday water
practices help to enable her family’s water security within the complex
matrix of Delhi’s unequal water supply, improvements in her family
members’ water security often come at the expense of her own. (Truelove
2019a, 1–2)

Within this, the burden of water inequality that goes unaddressed by the
state imposes itself physically onto the body of Naila and others that share
similar experiences. Naila cannot reclaim her rights to water. Instead, she
physically and emotionally takes on the burden of unequal state water
distribution in her everyday life to the point of deprioritizing her own water
intake and hygiene for the sake of her family (Teo 2018, 1135). Simply
being in urban environments is gendered. Entering into the public sphere
makes women vulnerable to harassment and discipline. Previously clear
boundaries between men’s and women’s spheres of engagement are no
longer so evident. In this, “[w]ater, then, emerges as a commodity, a
necessity, a means for exercising control in the city and as a socially
differentiated product” (Roy 2013, 99). Decisions about which communities
have access to tankers and what communities the DJB chooses to service

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all factor into women’s everyday lives in Delhi. However, state decisions
regarding water distribution do not take gender into account, never mind
how the burden to procure water legally or illegally burdens the bodies of
the marginalized.

Additionally, state ‘neutrality’ towards water policy also fundamentally

determines the manners in which household work is divided in the home.
Teo argues that “[p]ublic policies shape how families are defined and
function” through understandings of time allocation between wage work
and care and “the consequent experiences, wellbeing, and risks women
versus men bear” (Teo 2018, 1135). This is particularly true in
understandings of water provision responsibilities within the household.
Though one might be tempted to see the previously mentioned Supreme
Court ruling as a step in the right direction for water provision, these sorts
of rulings come every few years; government inaction ensures these rulings
bring about little change. Stories like Naila’s bring to light the ways in
which state policy, or lack thereof, to properly provide water to
communities directly influences Naila’s personal life and her wage work.
Her body and other similarly ‘peripheral’ bodies physically take on the
burden of unequal water policy in Delhi.

Broader Implications of Delhi’s Water Inequality

Truelove’s understandings of “gray zones” permits a more thorough

investigation into the informal spheres of global cities through the use of
situated urban political ecology (2019b, 1760). For example, there is a
fundamental questioning of what urban water provisions should look like –
does urban water have to be understood through pipes or is there more to
household water delivery? Seeing urban water sources as a combination of
a “range of practices and technologies that unite people, nature and
artefacts in a complex socio-ecological politics of water” permits a deeper
understanding of the uneven and disparate experiences of residents
acquiring water (Furlong and Kooy 2017, 888). In Furlong and Kooy’s study
of water networks in Jakarta, they argue that reconceptualizing what
water provisions look like in urbanized contexts provides the opportunity to
understand the importance of interconnectivity between “piped water,
groundwater, wastewater, and floodwater” (Ibid, 888). A broader
understanding of water politics from the Delhi case can properly situate
water as deeply political, and quite strange. Water provisions are not
simply about testing the bacterial content of piped water but rather
understanding the ways in which water is a commodity and unequally

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impacts residents of Delhi, within the parameters of legal and illegal

colonies.

Further, linking to Truelove’s (2016) analysis, in which she demystifies the

seemingly dualistic understanding of state establishments of legal and
illegal water use, these deterministic categories are malleable and erodible.
Thus, the manners by which colonies are understood as legitimate or
unauthorized create a similar sort of mixed justificatory practice as to what
individuals are entitled to. Despite attempts to entrench the right to water
for Indian citizens, the state still holds control over whether or not
residents of Delhi will be entitled to water at all. State policy makers in
Delhi use numbers to know ‘desirable’ populations and forget the less
deserving, ‘anti-urban’ slum dwellers. Through these understanding and
specific case studies, the strangeness of access to water becomes clear.

To connect with Appadurai’s (1996) reading of the way that numbers and
measurements are used to depoliticize and justify fragmented and
insufficient approaches to water policy, Anderson’s understanding of the
census too became a justificatory tool by which to know and understand a
population. This occurred through “an extraordinarily rapid, superficially
arbitrary, series of changes, in which categories are continuously
agglomerated, disaggregated, recombined, intermixed, and reordered”
(1991, 164). In a similar way, who is entitled to water and who is deemed
worthy of scrutinizing in the news is another manifestation of creating
identity categories for individuals. Further, the census overtime became
more and more embedded in colonial institutional understandings of
governance and “organized the new educational, juridical, public-health,
police and immigration bureaucracies it was building on the principle of
ethno-racial hierarches” (Ibid, 169). Though a different context in
contemporary India, Delhi policymakers are able to maintain and define
what counts as a legal and illegal colony, which impacts provisions and
access to resources that individuals may have.

Additionally, in Anderson’s reading of the ‘census,’ ‘map,’ and ‘museum,’

water infrastructure fragmentation in Delhi has colonial roots. The British-
built infrastructure, including piped water connections, to serve the needs
of the colonists while ignoring the needs of local populations when
establishing vast water networks (Truelove 2019b, 1763). Where the
colonial water networks existed, older networks were actively prohibited,
creating the fragmented system that Delhi still has to this day (Ibid).
Anderson notes the rigidity of colonial systems through the census: “The
fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one –

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and only one – extremely clear place. No fractions” (1991, 165). The colonial
narrative was very clear in its mission, which was not to fully incorporate
its subjects but instead, to deliberately exclude the periphery.

Though this may only seem like an issue based in the roots of colonialism,
the marginalization of the periphery and those with little power still occurs
to this day. Women like Naila do not have the choice to declare water as
their right and as fundamental, and thus, every day is a perpetual site of
embodied struggle in which their bodies bear the brunt of unreliable water
provisions. Additionally, in terms of Delhi being built up as an urban city,
the expansion of the planned city requires an expansion of the unplanned
city – laborers who build standard and recognized infrastructure are not
given places to stay and must resort to negotiating their way into informal
settlements (Truelove 2019b, 1763). Within this came a whole new sort of
informal economy in which water was accessed through water mafias and
unsanctioned water pumps (Ibid, 1763). Thus, legality recognized by the
state would not exist without its dependence on more informal solutions to
address insufficient infrastructure and resource provisions. Thus, water
inequality is intrinsically tied to structural conditions placed upon the
bodies of residents from historical and scientific forms of knowing.

Conclusion

Despite Delhi’s fast paced urbanization, deeply embodied structural

inequalities that impact individuals’ access to universal resources continue.
Water inequality continues to play out physically and socially through the
bodies of women and other marginalized communities and through
insufficient state policy. These policies define the ways that individuals
spend their time due to long wait lines and the stress that comes with
illegal water connections. By reinterpreting the ways in which water supply
issues are addressed in mainstream media, one can begin to unravel water
politics in Delhi at a more nuanced level. The fabrication of water quality
reports matters much less given that millions of Delhi residents do not
have access to this water in the first place. Thus, understanding how water
policy is deliberately fragmented sheds light on the ways in which
individuals are continuously and structurally marginalized.

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[1] Note: The most up to date census is from 2011, with the previous census
conducted in 2001. More up to date statistics may not always be available.

[2] Note: In Delhi, colonies refer to districts, authorized and unauthorized.

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