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Abstract

Chinese

In this paper, we use the notion of administrative precarity to refer to the vulnerability and insecurity experienced by marginalised and disadvantaged groups as a result of their interactions with ambiguous administrative procedures. Using the example of water infrastructure administration in Mumbai, specifically the experiences of ‘Pani Haq Samiti’– the ‘Right to Water campaign’– we formulate how administrative precarity and infrastructural violence intersect in transcalar practices of ambiguation in urban governance. We build on a nascent set of literature that illustrates how ambiguity in administrative processes is used as a tactic to avoid or deny the impacts of bureaucratic process of water and sanitation governance in Mumbai. We work through several examples of the ambiguous practices and paperwork involved in implementing the universal right to water in urban Mumbai with a specific focus on the challenges in non-notified slums. We demonstrate that the practices of ambiguation, are often entrenched in everyday interactions between citizens or activists and administrators on the ground. In enabling the continued withholding of water infrastructure these ambiguous bureaucracies create an administrative precarity and are thus constitutive to persistent infrastructural violence against marginalised groups. We show that everyday practices of activists and administrators provoke the labours of de-ambiguation as a pre-requisite to the implementation of infrastructural solutions to achieve the ‘Right to Water’ under administrative precarity. We call for more research on everyday practices of (de-)ambiguation, including highlighting the potentially transformative role that urban scholarship may take to support the labour of de-ambiguation.

Keywords

Mumbai right to water administrative precarity everyday practices of ambiguation de-ambiguation infrastructural violence

Introduction

In India, although the right to water is recognised at the national level, it is not explicitly stated in the constitution but subsumed under the right to life, leading to ‘important gaps in the legal frameworks’ (Cullet, 2013: 61). The drinking water legislation differs not only between states but also between rural and urban areas, creating substantial inequalities within and between cities and regions. Without a clear legal definition, and as Bakker (2007: 434) explained, failure to distinguish between ‘categories of resource management and between targets and types of reforms’, a ‘right to water’ does not translate into a universal entitlement of access to the same quality and quantity of drinking water. The country’s legislation distinguishes further between water entitlement in urban areas where water is supplied through public stand posts, such as in slums¹ (45 litres per person (capita) per day (lpcd) in Mumbai) and formal areas with private connections (135 lpcd) (Ministry of Urban Development, 1999).

When the Government of Maharashtra launched its Slum Rehabilitation Scheme, a further distinction emerged (Björkman, 2015a). Slums established before the year 2000 (notified slums) were entitled to water and other basic services; in contrast, non-notified slums (those established after 2000) were not. Although Mumbai could supply every resident with an average of 150 lpcd of purified water, around 20–30% of its residents lack legal access to the municipal water network (Björkman, 2018; Contractor and Kannan, 2020; Subbaraman et al., 2015; Subbaraman and Murthy, 2015). Affected are some 3 million people who resort to buying water from other sources at 30–40 times the cost of standard municipal water charges or tapping into Mumbai’s water pipes illegally (Subbaraman et al., 2015). To access water through the public water system, residents and communities in non-notified slums must draw on various hybrid or informal practices and networks.

In 2011, Pani Haq Samiti (PHS) – an activist group in Mumbai campaigning for water rights – filed a petition accusing the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) of discrimination and calling for implementation of the universal right to water. Following a long legal battle, in December 2014, the High Court ruled that it should be the responsibility of the city government to ensure everyone has equal access to water (Pani Haq Samiti and Ors. v. Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation and Ors., 2014); devolving the responsibilities of water provision to lower levels of government (Bakker, 2007). The court order meant that the local corporation could no longer uphold the distinction between notified and non-notified slums and had to ensure the provision of water for all (Subbaraman and Murthy, 2015). However, failing to provide a framework for the local execution of its order, the Court had effectively allowed MCGM to decide in what way, at what rate and against what charge water should be supplied to non-notified slums (Singh, 2022). Consequently, although the judgement was a step in the right direction, the struggle to realise the right to water in the form of legal tap connections in non-notified slums continues; and as we will show throughout this paper continues a form of state water resource governance in Mumbai that devolves the labour of mapping, making visible, and performing the bureaucracy of applying to overcome water exclusions onto individual water users, communities and activists (echoing Bakker, 2007).

By way of introduction, this summary of events is necessary in that it begins to demonstrate the disconnect between the abstract right to water and its realisation and implementation on the ground. Ambiguity emerges here as the space between a legal framework and its on-the-ground implementation – a space characterised by a high degree of uncertainty and precariousness in that it simultaneously invites action and enables inaction. As we argue in this paper, the lack of an agreed, transparent, formal standard operation process for implementing the court order leaves room for ambiguous interpretation across all levels of governance and administration, thereby enabling the persistence of transcalar administrative precarity for all actors involved. By following the actions of a licensed plumber of PHS, who aims to ensure Universal Water Access, their encounters with uncertain and ambiguous bureaucratic procedures (within the water department at the ward level from the junior engineer to the senior level executive engineers, and also the administrative professionals who ambivalently replicate, rather than redress, the uncertainty of the right to water within their bureaucratic procedures), our contribution to current debates in critical urban scholarship on infrastructure is threefold.

We show how administrative precarity and infrastructural violence intersect in transcalar practices of the ambiguation (Anand et al., 2022). We define administrative precarity as the vulnerability experienced by marginalised groups, such as residents of non-notified slums, leading to insecurity. By infrastructural violence, we mean the ways in which inadequate infrastructure and services (such as access to affordable clean water) can harm individuals and communities, particularly those who are already marginalised (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012), reinforcing and perpetuating social inequality. Administrative precarity and infrastructural violence can be considered forms of structural violence (Galtung, 1969; Nixon, 2011). In doing so, we demonstrate that practices of ambiguation within administrative bureaucracy create conditions of administrative precarity and infrastructural violence and that these forms of structural violence are often entrenched in everyday interactions between citizens or activists and administrators making, remaking or undoing administrative uncertainty on the ground. Second, we argue that (the undoing of) these transcalar practices of ambiguation provokes a type of infrastructural labour (Anand, 2020; De Coss-Corzo, 2022; Gidwani, 2015; Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022), namely the labour of de-ambiguation that preconfigures infrastructural configurations under administrative precarity. Finally, we call for more research on everyday practices of administrative ambiguation and argue that critical scholarship in urban studies can do much to support, even constitute, activist de-ambiguation labour.

Through these three contributions, we connect recent debates on administrative ambiguation, infrastructural labour and infrastructural violence in critical urban studies. Through the example of the right-to-water struggles in Mumbai, we highlight the need for a sharper focus on everyday practices of ambiguation as constitutive of administrative precarity in Southern cities. Through rich empirical examples, we illustrate how the legal and administrative uncertainties are reinforced in the everyday practices of activists, professionals, and administrators responsible for shifting from a ‘framework’ to a specific set of actions that implement the universal right to water in Mumbai. In doing so, we extend the notion of infrastructural labour to the context of administrative precarity, demonstrating how the de-ambiguation as a form of infrastructural labour as a prerequisite to operationalising legal rulings and striving for the actual implementation of universal water access policies.

Everyday practices of administrative ambiguation, infrastructural violence, and infrastructural labour

Recent scholarship in Mumbai shows the role of precarious urban administration in producing and reproducing infrastructural violence against urban citizens. Scholars use the language of obscuration and ambiguation to describe the bureaucratic practices that produce and reproduce urban injustices (Anand et al., 2022). Anand (2022: 688) examines how Mumbai sustains its sewage treatment system through ‘bureaucratic practices of ambiguation’ (emphasis in original) enacted by the engineers of its sanitation department, who alter waste-water standards obscuring their harmful material effects and prevent ‘rendering toxicity an actionable problem of urban living and distributed vulnerability in the city’. Kamath and Tiwari (2022: 677) demonstrate how ambiguity‘is actively mobilised by state agencies in diverse ways to avoid acknowledging the consequences of their bureaucratic process or taking just and remedial actions’. Deekshit and Sumbre (2022), examine the judicial process and the resulting influence on bureaucratic practices of water provision to slum dwellers. They show how the city works to administratively obscure its responsibility to provide slum dwellers with access to municipal water through the creation and repeated alteration of multiple eligibility standards. The scholars above demonstrate ambiguity through the making and remaking of standards. However, our empirical starting point in this paper is the creation and maintenance of administrative ambiguity through the failure to formulate any standards that can be used to frame, let alone implement, equal access to water in Mumbai.

To demonstrate that administrative ambiguation can be created and maintained by persistently not defining any standards, we look to Harms (2016). His review of urban exclusion highlights six modes of exclusions; specifically relevant to this paper is the ‘paperwork’ mode of inclusions/exclusion, which refers to written documents that regulate people and the use of space – land titles, master plans, and petitions. Harms concludes through various examples that paperwork – from maps to titles, drawings to laws – can cut both ways, sometimes promoting inclusion, sometimes legitimising exclusion. Building on this, we argue that paperwork without standards is also a site of ambiguation without standardised procedures. We empirically show how the lack of an agreed protocol for water applications and their processing enables administrative ambiguity to seep into all administration scales (from junior to executive levels) and entrench administrative precarity.

Our contribution recognises that ambiguity facilitates obscuration and how administrative obscuration produces exclusionary impacts; the studies outlined above acknowledge the centrality of precarious governance processes in the (re)production of urban vulnerability. Previous studies demonstrate the entanglement of administrative precarity with ‘slow violence’–‘a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon, 2011: 2). Truelove and O’Reilly (2021) demonstrate in the example of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission the hollowness of the various cleanliness measures and metrics used by administrators to rank municipalities and/or declare them open defecation-free. They show that achieving the desirable open defecation-free status promoted by higher levels of governance is tied to the making and unmaking of multiple urban infrastructures and their intersecting processes on the ground. It is therefore not difficult to see how

infrastructure is not just a material embodiment of violence (structural or otherwise), but often its instrumental medium, insofar as the material organisation and form of a landscape not only reflect but also reinforce social orders, thereby becoming a contributing factor to reoccurring forms of harm. (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012: 404, emphasis added)

Examining structural violence through the lens of infrastructure – including how it is planned, administered, implemented and maintained – allows us to respond to Waite’s (2009: 421) call to study who is responsible for the ‘interconnected geographies that create vulnerability for certain people and places’. In this work, we have advanced this by explicitly pointing out the specific events in the everyday bureaucracy that facilitate the withholding of water access to certain population groups.

In these contexts of administrative ambiguity, the prominence of research on infrastructural labour highlights infrastructures – and proposed infrastructural solutions – are not merely material artefacts that can be planned and implemented according to set rules. On the contrary, recognising the situatedness and heterogeneity of the infrastructure (Lawhon et al., 2018) has opened up ways to trace and think through the entanglement of bodies, objects, systems, governance, and visions. This work teaches us to think of bodies as infrastructure and infrastructural labour as highly exploitative, embodied and gendered (Alda-Vidal et al., 2018; Andueza et al., 2021; Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022). Developing the notions of invisible labour, in his 2015 study on the contributions made by informal waste workers, Gidwani explores the concept of ‘infrastructure labour’, which is based on Marxist political economy theories on the necessary material ‘conditions of production’ for capitalism. For him, ‘precarity’ refers to the unstable and insecure conditions under which much waste work is carried out. However, we understand ‘precarity’ as denoting the opposite of stability, a state of uncertainty characterised by the unpredictability of the systems in which we operate. In this sense, precarity is ‘the condition of being vulnerable to others’, in which ‘we are not in control’ (Tsing, 2015: 20). Pointing out that the work of waste transformation involves various forms of ‘infrastructural labour’, Gidwani (2015) argues that waste workers repair and renew cities, re-creating conditions for urban life and enterprise. These invisible forms of labour are ‘infrastructural’– as they create the underlying conditions that allow urban spaces to function and serve capital accumulation. They often go unseen and unrecognised, particularly because marginalised groups perform them. This notion of infrastructural labour has been expanded beyond denoting the labour of maintaining infrastructure and preventing its dissipation; in responding to the many and persistent instances of infrastructural breakdown in Southern cities, infrastructural labour continuously reinvents and reconfigures – in fact, reconstitutes – infrastructure and its relations (Anand, 2020; De Coss-Corzo, 2022).

Taking on Gidwani’s call to study invisible labour, we suggest that shifting the analytical focus of research on infrastructural labour under administrative precarity from infrastructural breakdown to the preconfiguration of infrastructure will reveal a different type of labour, namely the labour that follows from and is provoked by entrenched transcalar practices of ambiguation. The everyday practices that constitute and perpetuate administrative precarity are continuously challenged and countered by activists and so-called human intermediaries who engage in the predominantly unpaid labour of de-ambiguation. As some may argue, their very existence may be seen as extending conditions of ambiguity, uncertainty and precarity. In contrast, Chatterjee and Kundu (2022) argue that we need to call into question the state’s involvement in service delivery where water is considered a public right. Björkman (2018) illustrates the role of intermediaries in the production of precarity through the case of Mumbai, where the coexistence of, and conflict between, two groups of actors operating according to vastly different principles – water engineers and ‘licensed plumbers’ (LPs) – result in the destabilisation of the city’s waterscape. She traces this new state to recent shifts in Mumbai’s property titling scheme, where entitlement to municipal services (including connections to water supply) has historically been legally tied to land tenure (Björkman, 2015a, 2015b, 2018).

Zooming into the spaces of everyday encounters between the LP and the engineer, in this paper, we show how administrative precarity is continuously challenged and undone by the labour of de-ambiguation conducted by LPs of PHS. We call this form of infrastructural labour the labour of ‘de-ambiguation’. Scholars have examined everyday practices of the state, including how residents interact with bureaucratic systems and how such interactions shape their access to resources (Chatterjee, 2004; Gupta, 1995; Kaviraj and Khilnani, 2001). Here, we are interested in adding detail to abstract descriptions and interpretations of everyday ambiguation to help unmask some practices that sustain administrative precarity and engender infrastructural violence in preventing the implementation of infrastructural solutions on the ground. We build on and depart from the analytical focus of previous work on abstract notions of governance, municipal decision making and bureaucratic administration to argue that the everyday practices of ambiguation we discover are constitutional to the very condition of administrative precarity that may, and often does, result in the failure to implement infrastructural solutions, thereby preconfiguring and/or upholding slow infrastructural violence in perpetually withholding life-sustaining infrastructure and resources. In the following sections, we demonstrate the importance and impact of everyday practices of ambiguation and the labour of de-ambiguation in the case of Mumbai, more specifically, their role in implementing infrastructural solutions to the currently unrealised universal right to water in the city.

Methodological approach

We base our arguments on analysing the legal and bureaucratic contexts within which the implementation of infrastructural solutions to the unrealised universal right to water occurs, tracing this from the abstract to the local context of non-notified slums in Mumbai. We ask: ‘How and where can [this right] be enforced?’ (Staddon et al., 2012: 63, emphasis in original).

The paper has emerged from the first author’s (Purva) engaged activism in collaboration with PHS, a right-to-water campaign based in Mumbai. Purva, an urban designer and architect belonging to the middle class and upper caste, is also an activist, researcher, and licenced plumber registered with the water department of the local corporation in Mumbai. Our approach builds on recognising her ‘virtuosity and true expertise’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006: 223), achieved on the ground through her experience as an ‘insider’ activist (Mills, 1980; Savvides et al., 2014). Traditional data collection in the field, for instance, through ethnographic methods like observation, shadowing or follow-along, was not feasible between 2020 and 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions to travel and fieldwork. Instead of collecting data in this way, we draw here on the first author’s lived experiences, documented as detailed notes and recollections of her involvement in campaigning for water rights and later helping the residents of non-notified settlements apply for communal water connections between 2014 and 2019. This autoethnography was written as a part of her PhD (see Dewoolkar, 2024); serving as the foundational material, the authorship team (which includes individuals from academia and PHS) collectively reflected on this text, allowing for an analytical enquiry into administrative ambiguation and the unpaid labour of dis-ambiguation.

Autoethnography uses personal experiences as an analytical lens through which the wider practices are understood (Ellis et al., 2011). We layer this autoethnography (outlined in Dewoolkar, 2024) with collective analysis that starts to tease out the implications of this example for the urban studies literature. Therefore, this paper is not presented as an individual autoethnographic analytical reflection but as an outcome of many conversations about ‘paperwork’, ‘intermediaries/intermediation’ and the role of activists that took place between the authorship team since 2020, with her emplaced as an activist researcher working closely with PHS since 2014.

We offer a critical analysis of the conventional concept of individual authorship and align ourselves with the feminist call for equitable and consensus-driven recognition of contributions throughout the various stages of knowledge creation, as advocated by Liboiron et al. (2017). In doing so, this paper actively seeks to explore the hyphenated relationship (Fine, 1994) Activist–Research. The outcome of this paper is that it is challenging to distinguish the boundary between the activist’s personal account and the collective reflections emerging within the campaign and academia. This complexity arises because the activist’s account is not solely her perspective; instead, it is informed by the collective efforts of the campaign in navigating the intricate legal and administrative challenges. This has led us to identify a fruitful space that can enable ‘action-oriented’ research ‘towards the solution and/or amelioration of real-world problems’ (Bowen et al., 2010: 217) – with the role of Activist–Research in identifying and operating within these sites of administrative ambiguity.

Following the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggles in administrative precarity

In the following sections, we work through four instances of paperwork as a site of ambiguation in the water connection application process for the residents of non-notified slums. We work through four vignettes of certain moments throughout this process: (i) understanding the process of application for a stand-post water connection; (ii) becoming and staying a licensed plumber and the role of address proof; (iii) mapping of non-notified slums; and (iv) ambiguous encounters with other professionals – getting acquainted. Empirically, we offer insights into the stand-post water application process and the administrative practices across multiple levels of governance that act as hurdles to submitting and seeing water access applications through to implementation. These empirical examples illustrate the importance of an analytical focus on everyday practices of ambiguation and lead to our invitation to urban studies scholars to engage closer with the labour of de-ambiguation.

Administrative ambiguation and the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggles in administrative precarity

Following the 2014 High Court ruling that the MCGM had to ensure the provision of water for all and was no longer permitted to distinguish between notified and non-notified slums, PHS activists campaigned to make residents aware of their newly gained legal entitlement to water connections. However, it took the Corporation two years to introduce a ratified ‘Water for All’ policy, and even then, this policy remained conveniently hidden from public access or scrutiny. That the policy was not made public meant that residents wishing to apply for the water connections they were now entitled to could not do so because it remained unclear – ambiguous – what an application should entail and what process they should follow. A formal protocol did not exist. PHS activists had to request access to the policy from the MCGM under the Right to Information (RTI) Act to uncover any potentially relevant information and formulate an operational protocol for water connection applications for residents of non-notified slums. They had to engage in the labour of de-ambiguation. It was only through their activist labour of de-ambiguation that the 2014 court ruling was made operational – albeit, as we shall see in the following sections, not unambiguous.

Based on the information obtained from the MCGM through multiple RTIs filed by PHS, PHS managed to develop an effective operational application protocol that encompassed the following stages:

(a) forming a ‘tap committee’ and designating a secretary;

(b) compiling all documents necessary for an online application;

(d) depositing scrutiny fees at the ward office;

(e) acquiring notarised undertakings on an INR 500 stamp paper³ with signatures of all applicants and the LP;

(f) drawing and appending a community location map signed by a LP;

(g) appointing an unlicensed plumber by a LP; and

(h) submitting the complete application to the appropriate ward office.⁴

These steps demonstrate the multiple forms of paperwork requirements that impose an additional and undue burden on the time and resources of slum dwellers who already experience precariousness in every aspect of their everyday lives, from the availability of critical resources (such as water) to access to essential public services (such as sanitation). They ‘have a background threat of evictions, disconnections and shut-downs because of how they are located regarding the rules of property titling, building plan approval, trade licencing and myriad other forms of state control’ (Singh, 2022: 2). Putting together an application for water connection requires that residents of non-notified slums ‘organise themselves to get the municipality to act’– including learning to navigate the ‘ambiguity in the rules and in how (and perhaps to what extent) these rules can be applied to idiosyncratic municipal water supply lines’ (Singh, 2022: 2). They must do so in ways that those with access to infrastructure would never have to consider. Consistent with the neoliberal paradigm of placing the ‘emphasis on the personal responsibilities of individuals, their families and their communities for their future well-being and upon their obligation to take active steps to secure this’ (Rose, 1996: 327–328), the individual, the household and the ‘infrastructure-compromised community’ (Pacheco-Vega, 2019: 1) are here decisively and deliberately put in charge of their fate.

To minimise the experience of administrative precarity for slum dwellers, PHS activists guide and assist them in putting together their applications for water connections. Underpinning their everyday practices of de-ambiguation is a broad set of skills, knowledges, and sensibilities that are nurtured through hands-on experience. As Purva recollects:

One application includes a minimum of a group of five households; one person is appointed as the head of the group (secretary), and their contact details are used for further communication. The communities make their groups, considering no fights happen amongst the group. We (PHS members) instruct them to keep the houses spatially closer, making it easier to place a tap connection.

Once a ‘tap committee’ is formed and a secretary designated, residents must compile all necessary documents for their online application. Importantly, they must acquire the signature of a LP as a prerequisite to further progress. LPs were first enlisted in Mumbai’s Water Charges Bylaws nearly a century ago to facilitate domestic water supply applications and complete the plumbing needed to connect private residences to the public distribution network (Björkman, 2018). The same rules are followed for public tap connections. Today, Mumbai’s LPs charge between two and eight times the official fee of INR 8000 to assist residents with their applications. Although it may be read as an instrument for ensuring water infrastructure is planned and installed according to agreed standards and drawing on appropriate technical expertise, the requirement to involve LPs in the process of applying for and sanctioning water connections in Mumbai’s non-notified slums is also evidence of the responsibilisation of residents. It is evidence of the state’s disregard for the time and other resources of slum dwellers. In expecting that slum dwellers source and pay LPs to produce the required paperwork, MCGM (intentionally) slows down the application process or even makes it impossible; effectively, the Corporation uses LPs as a tool for control over water applications and, ultimately, water connections for non-notified slums. This intentionality of using open-ended 100-year-old rules designed for private residences highlights the procedural nature of ambiguity that facilitates the tap connections in a shorter time frame with more money. PHS activists recognised that having LPs operate from within its network of collaborators would enable low-income residents to access LPs for the actual cost, thereby demonstrating the redundancy of human intermediaries.

Becoming (and staying) a licensed plumber: Proving an address

On paper, becoming a LP seems relatively uncomplicated: anyone aspiring to obtain a plumber licence in Mumbai must be a citizen of India, over 21 years of age and in possession of necessary educational qualifications and experience, including a degree in construction technology, civil, mechanical or electric engineering, architecture or similar fields (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai [MCGM], 2021). The first author, Purva – an architect – volunteered to become a LP in 2014. Initially worried that her knowledge of plumbing was limited to that acquired during her architectural training, she was reassured by the campaign members that there was sufficient expertise in the community. The so-called unlicensed plumbers (ULPs) working in non-notified slums had been learning-by-doing and knew ‘how to get things done in real life’ (Purva’s notes, 2021). To become a LP, she had to pay a security deposit (INR 1000), licence fees (INR 500) and other charges upfront; she had to visit the municipal engineer’s office to submit her application forms and verify her signature and address. However, at the time, she did not live at her permanent address (Purva’s notes, 2021):

I had two addresses, one permanent and one temporary. All my identity proofs mentioned the permanent address, yet I lived at my temporary address and wanted correspondence from MCGM addressed there. Although the administrator filing my application sympathised with my situation, he rejected my request to include my temporary address. He further instructed me that I now had to wait for a month before reapplying, using my permanent address.

She knew that her request for correspondence to be sent to her temporary address could be rejected. However, as a middle-class, upper-caste woman, based on her previous encounters with Mumbai’s administration, she had fully expected the municipal administrator to consider accommodating her request. Familiar with the ambiguity embedded in any administrative process, she was expecting to see the protocol adjusted to meet her needs. The administrator’s refusal to do just that provides a different perspective on the condition of administrative precarity and how it seeps into the lived experience of the activist, who is somewhat accustomed to benefitting from ‘grey space’ (Yiftachel, 2009) due to their (privileged) social identity. We speculate that the administrator could have acted either way (in fact, was expected to act differently).

The instance shows the ambivalent nature of administrative precarity: the space provided by administrative ambiguity could have enabled Purva to begin her work a LP sooner had the administrator chosen to depart from the protocol on this occasion. It demonstrates how a relatively minor moment, or detail, within the administrative process of becoming a licensed plumber (one LP’s request to send communication to a temporary address) succeeds in triggering a one-month delay in progressing water connection applications that could, otherwise, have been submitted, approved and sanctioned. As such, the administrator’s decision to follow protocol rather than applying lenience has significant consequences in precluding, if only temporarily, the implementation of an infrastructural solution. In this context, it should be noted that not only acquiring but also maintaining a plumber’s licence in Mumbai appears to be highly precarious:

Once my identity was verified, I received my licence. This has to be renewed annually, during April – and only during April. Failure to comply could mean the licence is revoked.

The requirement to renew their licence annually and exclusively during the month of April has the potential to strip LPs of their licence, thereby precluding the filing of water connection applications should LPs like Purva indeed fail to meet the designated time window. According to Purva, licences can also be revoked for several other reasons, including random document checks or site visits by the engineers, sometimes involving no fault of their own and often subject to the whim of a municipal administrator or engineer, as there is no standard operating procedure for water connections.

The accumulation of everyday encounters and everyday practices in the interaction between slum dwellers or their representatives and state representatives in the ambiguous administrative process outlined above constitutes administrative precarity. Administrative precarity contributes to the perpetuation of infrastructural violence towards the residents of non-notified slums in Mumbai by slowing down, holding up or even precluding altogether the filing of applications for and the eventual sanctioning of the water connections to which all slum residents are now rightfully entitled. This reinforces our call for more scholarship on (the success of) infrastructural solutions through the lens of administrative precarity and the everyday practices of de-/ambiguation underpinning it.

Mapping non-notified slums

In applications for legal water connections, contextual maps are required to determine where water lines and communal water taps should be positioned. For the residents of non-notified slums, this requirement represents an important hurdle in the processing of their application because their neighbourhoods – as explained above – are not formally recognised by municipal planners and, therefore, are habitually left out of official plans and maps. The failure to acknowledge the existence of slums in Southern cities is well documented and characteristic of the disconnect between abstract moral claims (such as the right to water) and conditions on the ground (Alda-Vidal et al., 2018; Archer et al., 2012; Livengood and Kunte, 2012). In selectively showing and conveniently hiding what exists, maps are instruments of power and tools for ambiguation (Crampton and Krygier, 2005). We suggest that the labour of undoing the maps that have resulted from the entrenched practices of ambiguation can be considered de-ambiguation labour. Such de-ambiguation labour includes mapping the intricate fabric of non-notified slums to produce the maps required for water connection applications. In the case of water connection applications in Mumbai, the labour of de-ambiguation often falls on activist LPs:

As a LP, I was responsible for making maps of the communities and specifically marking the houses to which that application belongs with a tentative location of the stand post connection. With all my QGIS training, I plotted all tap locations and the houses on QGIS for my first application. I shared a soft copy and attached a printout of the same with the application that I submitted, in person, to a junior engineer at the ward office.

In this case, Purva’s de-ambiguation labour could have saved time for residents, community activists, plumbers and engineers, allowing the easy dissemination of digital maps and their effortless replication and enabling the faster processing of applications for and implementation of water connections. It would have fully aligned with MCGM’s efforts to move towards digital governance and a fully online application process. However, the junior engineer rejected the application on the basis that it did not comply with his expectations:

The engineer dismissed my application, saying that we needed a hand-drawn map. He opened the door of his cabinet, gesturing at a series of maps attached with cello tape to the inside. He told me to make maps that were more like these. What I had produced did not conform with the straight-line roads and networks that the engineers used as a representation tool.

Purva’s attempt to introduce digital technology to replace, or at least support, the unnecessarily labour-intensive production of hand-drawn maps is dismissed quite literally by the gesture of a junior engineer. In preventing the speeding-up and upscaling of urban infrastructural transformation with the potential to improve lives and livelihoods for communities in non-notified slums, the junior engineer actively intervened to re-confirm existing injustices and inequalities. Here, the lack of a formal agreed process or protocol allows ambiguity to seep into the everyday practices of government officials and administrators to dissipate both power and accountability. By the dissipation of power, we mean that fugitive moments in the ambiguous administrative process and the seemingly minor decisions made by lower-level administrators can have disproportionately huge consequences and significant implications for disadvantaged communities on the ground. As lower-level government officials and administrators are less constrained by protocol, they are enabled to make decisions that may lead to outcomes that are not necessarily aligned with the aims and objectives of abstract legal frameworks.

Ambiguous encounters with other professionals: Getting acquainted

Purva’s encounter with the junior engineer at the ward office demonstrates a further aspect of administrative precarity and how it is engendered and maintained through everyday practices of ambiguation. The ambiguity produced at higher levels of governance (here, the MCGM) in refraining from developing an operational protocol for the implementation of the right to water ruling enables each ward – even each administrator or engineer – to develop and practice their own protocol to set different requirements for water connection applications; to decide how much, or how little, they are prepared to support the residents of non-notified slums and their representatives in making applications.

When I asked for a copy of the hand-drawn maps to take with me as an example, I was told [by the junior engineer] that this is confidential, and that I should be grateful for the opportunity to see the maps, as another engineer may not have shown me.

Purva’s recollection demonstrates precarious administration: although this engineer, on this occasion, chose to support her in showing her what kind of maps he expected, he may have chosen not to do so; in fact, he may choose not to show the next applicant; different engineers, at the same or other wards, may choose to act in different ways.

Every administrative ward and junior engineer will have their way of processing the applications once submitted. For instance, the F/North ward needed the LP’s signature on every document, whereas the M/East ward didn’t.

Filing applications as a relatively new LP at the time, Purva had to participate in the time- and resource-consuming ritual of ‘getting acquainted’ with senior engineers and their requirements for water applications.

I was called at every ward office to ‘get acquainted’ as a new plumber and outsider in the existing ‘middle persons’ system. Most engineers would glance and try to enquire about my background. I quickly responded: ‘Sir, are you now well acquainted, or do you need anything more?’ I tried to hint at money/any other favours they may have expected. They used to nod their head and let me go.

Such encounters can be read in multiple ways; on the one hand, they provide opportunities for LPs to understand and potentially negotiate the requirements of different administrators and engineers for water connection applications. As such, they can be considered spaces of de-ambiguation. On the other, however, such encounters sit firmly outside what could be considered ‘due process’. They enable further ambiguation by folding into the already complicated relationship between LP and administrator/engineer identity markers like class, caste, religion or gender and how they are expressed in everyday practices. ‘Getting acquainted’ is where power hierarchies and make-or-break relationships are established and consolidated – potentially impacting the success of subsequently submitted water connection applications. Of the over 1000 applications for water connections in non-notified slums submitted by PHS activists, to date, only 72 have resulted in actual water taps.

The labour and limits of transforming water infrastructures

In this paper, we highlight the role of everyday ambiguation practices in the production and maintenance of administrative precarity in Southern cities, specifically focussing on the case of water infrastructure for Mumbai’s non-notified slums. Through rich empirical exploration of the water application process in Mumbai, we highlight not only the labour as a dynamic in the building, operation, maintenance and repair of water infrastructures but also the governance and administrative labour that sits behind rights to water in a highly ambiguous administrative context. Through our analytical focus on four administrative and governance dynamics of water access applications in Mumbai – applying for water connections, becoming and staying a licensed plumber, mapping non-notified slums, and professional encounters – we extend the concept of infrastructural labour (De Coss-Corzo, 2022; Gidwani, 2015) to also include the labour of de-ambiguation as a prerequisite for the implementation of infrastructure under administrative precarity. We connect this to the broader literature in urban studies on infrastructural violence (Datta and Ahmed, 2020; Truelove and O’Reilly, 2021; Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022) and bureaucratic obscuration (Anand, 2022; Anand et al., 2022), calling for a sharper focus on everyday practices of ambiguation to address and potentially transform the conditions of administrative precarity.

The example of Purva as a LP (an activist–researcher–practitioner plumber) and links to the role of Sitaram within PHS’s wider campaigns and strategies provide a situated analysis of the professional practices that activist LPs in PHS have to undertake in materialising the right to water for non-modified slums in Mumbai. The analysis highlights the ambiguations embedded in intensely detailed, mundane bureaucratic processes and how attempts at dis-ambiguation through formal applications can occur but with limited success. All of these situated empirical details of attempts at disambiguation highlight wider systemic exclusions and violences written into the current state-led water governance system that devolves responsibilities to map and change these wider exclusions to local governments, professionals, communities, users, and activist actors. In these situated bureaucratic accounts of professional action and activism towards a right to water, we demonstrate ‘how infrastructures are actually being changed in practice’ (a key rationale for the Special Issue).

The research highlights the challenges faced by water-rights activists and residents of non-notified slums in Mumbai in their efforts to secure access to water through the implementation of the ‘Water for All’ policy, following a 2014 court ruling that devolved responsibility of securing access to water resources (Bakker, 2007) to the city government, and with the lack of clarity on implementation mechanisms, placing additional burdens on slum residents. With no transparent standardised protocol for water connection applications, ambiguity in the rules and practices of the MCGM results in a significant additional burden on the time and resources of communities already facing precarity in their everyday lives. Activists must, therefore, engage in the labour of de-ambiguation to navigate ambiguity and make water connection applications on behalf of slum dwellers. We draw empirically on the recollections and notes of Purva who worked with the campaign organisation PHS between 2014 and 2019 to help residents navigate the requirements of an application process fraught with ambiguity. Through the four vignettes of certain moments throughout the process of securing the legal stand-post water connection, we show how ambiguity seeps into the everyday practices of government officials and administrators, dissipating both power and accountability in a complex and burdensome process, highlighting the labour of de-ambiguation.

For instance, the application process is complicated by the requirement for the signature of LPs. We show that becoming and staying a LP is tied to precarious administrative practices, including seemingly marginal aspects, such as address verifications and the requirement to renew licences annually during a specific time frame. We demonstrate that the water connection process is further complicated by challenges such as the lack of recognition of non-notified slums in official plans and maps, which requires residents (or their LPs) to engage in the labour of de-ambiguation by mapping their own neighbourhoods. Activists responsible for filing water connection applications must participate in the time-consuming and uncertain ritual of ‘getting acquainted’ with local administrators and engineers to understand their requirements on a case-by-case basis. Steeped with ambiguity, these everyday encounters in the administrative process can have significant consequences for the implementation of infrastructural solutions. The labour of de-ambiguation challenges the prevailing bureaucratic processes by revealing the redundancy of LPs as a necessary entity. Only 72 of over 1000 applications submitted by PHS activists over the years resulted in actual water taps, demonstrating the persistence of the political economy governing access to water supply despite de-ambiguation efforts. It underscores how deeply entrenched and resistant the existing system can be to change.

Methodologically, we enable a space for the working of the hyphen (Fine, 1994) in Activist–Research; during COVID-19 times when field research was not possible, a space for collective reflections and collaborations like these would enable more symmetrical and possibly less extractive scholarship. These open opportunities for continued discussion of approaches in urban studies, a field of inter- and, supposedly, even transdisciplinary research into cities and their transformation (Bowen et al., 2010; Iossifova et al., 2018; Paddison, 1998). In contrast to highly specialised processes of knowledge generation in the different academic disciplines and subfields it comprises, urban studies claims to integrate knowledge from these disciplines ‘to come to know about, understand, and possibly improve’ urban realities on the ground (Bowen et al., 2010: 207). We are particularly interested in the last element of this tripartite distinction, namely the emphasis on ‘action-oriented’ research ‘towards the solution and/or amelioration of problems’ in the real world (Bowen et al., 2010: 207). Especially where the lives and livelihoods of marginalised people are of concern, as is the case in research on practices of ambiguation, administrative precarity and infrastructural violence, it is useful to remind ourselves of the action-oriented origins of urban studies and the prerequisite to draw out practical implications that have the potential to achieve transformative change in cities and their development.

We call for more attention to the everyday practices that give rise to and maintain administrative precarity and infrastructural violence in Southern cities. In aiming for (solely) theoretical or conceptual innovation, current urban infrastructure scholarship routinely fails to identify the key actors, practices and socio-material relations that perpetuate these issues. We ask: are we, as researchers, potentially complicit in generating the very ‘grey spaces’ (Yiftachel, 2009) within which ambiguation, precarity and violence operate? In failing to name and call out the places, practices, and actors through which ambiguation is emplaced and enacted on the ground, could our abstract vocabulary serve to ambiguate (even conceal) responsibilities rather than open up ‘an analytical space for agency’ (Waite, 2009: 418)? What kind of research and insights are required to uncover where everyday practices of ambiguation are emplaced and how they are enacted? We call for a sharper focus on the specific practices that engender these problems; and for more urban studies geared at providing action-oriented responses to urban challenges.

Footnotes

We thank the special issue editors for their early comments and feedback. Dewoolkar would like to thank Nate Millington for his supervision and mentorship and Leandro Minuchin for feedback during the annual reviews.

Author contributions

The first two authors have contributed equally to the leadership and development of this specific paper. Shelar acknowledges Pani Haq Samiti (PHS) and has contributed to the conceptualisation and analysis of the paper. Browne contributed to the development of the research design and analysis,and to the development and editing of the final paper. Holm contributed to the conceptualisation and editing of the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: Dewoolkar would like to acknowledge the School of Environment,Education and Development for the PhD scholarship that underpinned the reflections from the field that are used within,and funding received from the ESRC (Impact Acceleration Award,Right to Water) and Pani Haq Samiti (PHS). Iossifova received funding from the ESRC (Impact Acceleration Award,Right to Water) and the Royal Society (Resilient Futures Challenge-Led Grant,‘Towards Sustainable Sanitation in India and Brazil’ (TOSSIB),CHL\R1\180122).

ORCID iDs

Purva Dewoolkar

Deljana Iossifova

Sitaram Shelar

Alison L Browne

Elsa Holm

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Everyday practices of administrative ambiguation and the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggling for water infrastructure in Mumbai

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Everyday practices of administrative ambiguation, infrastructural violence, and infrastructural labour

Methodological approach

Following the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggles in administrative precarity

Administrative ambiguation and the labour of de-ambiguation: Struggles in administrative precarity

Becoming (and staying) a licensed plumber: Proving an address

Mapping non-notified slums

Ambiguous encounters with other professionals: Getting acquainted

The labour and limits of transforming water infrastructures

Footnotes

Author contributions

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iDs

References