Ranganathan2014PayingforPipesClaimingCitizenshipPoliticalAgencyandWaterReformsattheUrbanPeriphery.pdf

Paying for Pipes, Claiming Citizenship:Political Agency and Water Reformsat the Urban Periphery

MALINI RANGANATHAN

AbstractThis article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites ofmarket-oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a waterproject mandating significant ‘beneficiary’ cash contributions from lower-middle-classdwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city’s peripheries. Drawingon quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lackformal water access and land tenure — groups referred to in this article as the‘peripheralized middle class’ — consent to paying for pipes rather than resist alltogether despite the high cost involved. It argues that far from reflecting aninternalization of a ‘willingness to pay’or ‘stakeholder’ethos celebrated by developmentpractitioners today, payment for water provides an insurgent means to bargain forgreater symbolic recognition, respectability and material benefits from the state. Inparticular, payment for pipes enables peripheral dwellers to strengthen their claims tosecure land tenure in an era of exclusionary and punitive spatial policies. Payment thuscomprises a terrain of contested meaning making and political struggle, at the heart ofwhich lie the stakes of urban citizenship. In documenting the process by which propertyrelated interests and tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of reforms, this articlecontributes to Gramscian political-ecological conversations on subaltern politicalagency and the lived character of hegemony in urban environments.

IntroductionIn 2003, the city of Bangalore in the southern Indian state of Karnataka launched theGreater Bangalore water project to connect over a million peripheral residents to thepiped water network. For the first time in the history of the city’s infrastructure, amarket-oriented cost recovery framework was experimented with by the public waterutility. Unlike previous grid extensions that were funded by the state, this time peripheral‘beneficiaries’1 — also dubbed ‘stakeholders’ by project proponents — were told thatthey had to bear part of the burden of paying for the pipes connecting their homes.Despite the high cost relative to incomes in the area, over the next 6 years nearly double

I would like to sincerely thank Ananya Roy, Jeremiah Bohr, Jesse Ribot, Ashwini Chhatre, and threeanonymous IJURR reviewers for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. All shortcomings remain myown. This research was supported by an American Institute of Indian Studies Dissertation ResearchFellowship and a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant(#727308).1 Following the convention used by Katherine Rankin (2010: 195), I place ‘beneficiaries’ in quotations

throughout this article to signal my interrogation of the use of this term by project proponents.

bs_bs_banner

Volume 38.2 March 2014 590–608 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12028

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

the anticipated amount was collected across the peripheries, largely from propertyowners with informal land tenure. In many neighborhoods, residents kept careful rostersof the amounts they paid, and leveraged this information to engage with state authoritiesover the status of their settlements. How are we to understand the nature of politicalagency deployed at sites of market-oriented water reforms at the peripheries of citiestoday?

Development practitioners might understand the case of the Greater Bangalore waterproject as evidence of consumers’ ‘willingness to pay’ for improved services in whichthey have a stake. Indeed, the best practice rhetoric accompanying the project insistedthat collections from citizens were predicated on their sense of ‘ownership’ in theproject.2 Governmentality scholars, however, might interpret the conduct of peripheraldwellers through the idea of neoliberal moral ‘responsibilization’ — or the successfulinculcation of an ethos of self-care in subjects in line with rational market principles (e.g.Rose, 1999; Lemke, 2001; Ong, 2006).

This article takes a different view. It shows how peripheral ‘beneficiaries’, most ofwhom are property owners with tenuously legal tenure, used payment for water pipesunder the project — often in excess of one month’s household income — as a way tobargain for legitimate tenure and recognition in the eyes of the state. Struggles overtenure have taken on a particularly urgent tenor in the current moment in light ofmoralizing policies that penalize illegal settlements at the fringes. The analysis herelends insight into the little studied political agency of India’s informal peri-urban middleclass, or members that I group under the term ‘peripheralized middle class’. It alsoreveals how market-oriented water policies win consent and legitimacy because theyharness ‘the general interests of the subordinate groups’ (Gramsci, 2000: 205, emphasisadded), articulating with their claims to recognition and belonging. The conduct ofpaying for water pipes thus needs to be situated within a history of micro-politics andcitizenship practices at the urban periphery.

The broader relevance of this work lies in the ubiquity of cost recovery-drivenwater-pricing policies, especially at the outskirts of cities where massive newinfrastructural investments are needed. As Karen Bakker (2011: 353) has noted, with the‘partial retreat’ of the private sector in the water sector since the early 2000s followingmultiple financial crises and anti-privatization protests, a host of alternatives are beingconsidered today. Instead of — or sometimes as a precursor to — privatization, publicwater utilities across the developing world are implementing institutional reforms thatcall on consumers to take an active role in the financing and management of services.This ‘second wave’ of water reforms, as Laïla Smith (2004: 375) refers to it, still hasneoliberal echoes in that it involves the ‘incursion of private sector principles into atraditional public sector ethos’. Although the literature has reported on the modalities ofsecond wave neoliberalism, it has not probed how such rationalities become intertwinedwith existing micro-political formations, the cultural meanings attached to payment, andthe grounded negotiations that enable new policies to take root. In documenting theprocess by which tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of water reforms, thearticle’s goal is to improve our understanding of why and how market-oriented pricinglogics in infrastructure sectors, rather than simply being ‘resisted’, ultimately do gainlegitimacy. Such an endeavor is crucial for challenging technocratic constructions ofsuccess and for contributing to theoretical debates on ‘how top-down schemes “take”in everyday situations’ (Barnett, 2005: 9), or how rule is compromised over andaccomplished (Li, 1999).

Theoretically, this article takes up the call of Ekers and Loftus (2008: 710) for aresearch approach to water politics and power that leverages the productive tensions

2 See for instance how the UN Habitat’s best practices database (2008) lauds the Greater Bangalorewater project: URL http://www.unhabitat.org/bestpractices/2008/mainview.asp?BPID=1932(accessed 25 March 2012).

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 591

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

between Foucault and Gramsci — between the subjectifying rationalities of rule and thebroader struggles and compromises surrounding rule (see also Moore, 2005; Li, 2007).It contributes to Gramscian political-ecological conversations on the lived character ofhegemony in the urban waterscape (Loftus and Lumsden, 2008), and, in particular, therole of meaning making among marginalized groups. I understand hegemony, followingRoseberry (1994) and others, not as a monolithic ideological formation, but as aproblematic, contested, political process of struggle. Specifically, I understand it as theprocess by which the subordinated are recruited into projects of their own rule through‘identifying their particular interests with a more universalizing one’ (Moore, 2005: 11).I show how peripheral agents consent to water reforms because they identify theirinterests in claiming propertied citizenship with the neoliberal push for devolving costson marginalized users like themselves. The situated meanings they ascribe to the act ofpaying for water pipes are key to the production of consent. Pricing reforms in the watersector thus evolve through ‘parasitical co-presence’ (Peck et al., 2010: 96) with existingsocio-cultural rhythms and political formations.

To grasp the workings of hegemony and explain the contradictory and historicallymolded political agency of peripheral dwellers, I navigate the literature on urban politicsand resistance, drawing in particular on notions of ‘occupancy urbanism’ (Benjamin,2008), ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ (Bayat, 2000) and ‘insurgent citizenship’(Holston, 1999; 2008). While the actions of peripheral dwellers cannot be read ascounter-hegemonic, we will see how their payment strategies nonetheless open up the‘room to maneuver’ — i.e. the space of political possibility — within the operation ofhegemony (Hart, 2002: 36).

I start with my research methodology and then move to a theoretical discussion ofpolitical agency at the urban periphery. I then address the evolution of ‘second wave’water reforms in urban India, focusing on the multiple (neoliberal and liberal)rationalities that animated the Greater Bangalore water project. Following this, I turn tothe quantitative data I collected between 2007 and 2009 on the payment behavior ofperipheral citizens and triangulate this with ethnographic findings on how peripheralagents constructed a meaningful and material framework through which to interpret andact on their payments for water pipes. I conclude by returning to the question of politicalagency and what the Bangalore case tells us about a philosophy of urban water praxis.

MethodologyThis article stems from a larger multi-sited ethnography on the politics of water reformsin peripheral Bangalore, research for which was conducted between 2007 and 2009. Dataon the rationalities of the Greater Bangalore water project, including the ‘beneficiary’contribution policy, governmental technologies and decision-making processes weregathered through 50 in-depth interviews with technocrats at the Karnataka UrbanInfrastructure Development and Finance Corporation (the main state agency throughwhich financing for urban reforms flows), engineers at the Bangalore Water Supply andSewerage Board (BWSSB), bureaucrats at urban development line agencies, privateconsultants, and development practitioners. These interviews were corroborated througha coding of project documents, meeting minutes and news articles.

Data on the payment behaviors and political strategies of peripheral dwellerswere collected through fieldwork conducted primarily in the peripheral zone ofBommanahalli, located roughly 15 km from central Bangalore on the southeasternfringes. This area was selected because of its density of informal, poorly servicedsettlements along a major radial highway leading to the city’s premier technology park,Electronic City. Formerly a cash-strapped city municipal council (CMC), Bommanahallinow forms one of eight zones officially incorporated into the Greater Bangalore CityCorporation as of 2007. To collect payment data, I made routine visits to the zonal head

592 Malini Ranganathan

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

office in Bommanahalli to build enough trust with frontline workers for them to sharepayment profiles with me. To understand the political practices of peripheral agents, Icarried out 44 semi-structured interviews with residents, several of whom belong tohomeowner associations known as ‘resident welfare associations’ (RWAs) in India. Thesemi-structured nature of these interviews allowed me to probe forms of engagementwith the state, perceptions of the new water project, reasons for and bargains made bypaying, and the situated meanings attached to payment. I also collected petitions filed byresidents to government agencies and attended neighborhood and city-wide meetings inwhich they discussed their involvement in the water project and their struggles against‘regularization’ drives — periodic punitive moves by the city government to formalizeor ‘regularize’ land tenure via monetary penalties. In sourcing multiple modes ofself-representation, these ethnographic approaches yielded insights into the complexcontours of political practice.

Urban peripheries and political agencyThe urban periphery is a critical milieu for the enactment of citizenship struggles and theexercise of hegemony (Simone, 2007; Holston and Caldeira, 2008; Roy, 2011). AsAnanya Roy (2003: 217) argued in her study of Calcutta’s fringes, the inherent volatilityof peripheries ‘shapes the logic, mechanisms, and possibilities of hegemonicarticulations’. In recent scholarship, peripheries have been interpreted as the physicalspace fringing cities — the constantly evolving, equivocal boundary between urban andrural, between the city and its other, referred to by practitioners as the ‘peri-urbaninterface’ — and as a metaphor connoting myriad ‘site(s) for remaking urban life’(Simone, 2010: 39). In this section, while focusing on the periphery as the physical spaceencompassing Bangalore’s outer municipalities and villages, I am also interested in howperipheries shape the possibilities and limits of particular forms of agency.

Bangalore’s peripheries are perhaps best known for concentrating large-scaleland speculation and illegalities (Nair, 2005; Goldman, 2011). Michael Goldman’s(2011) research on ‘world-city making’ projects in Bangalore has recently shown thatspeculative global investment in the real estate sector and land brokering by governmentparastatals at the outskirts have combined to dispossess farmers of their land. Such darkrenditions of contemporary processes are crucial for understanding how Bangalore’speripheral land is shaped by global capital flows and rescaled regulatory regimes. Yetthey do not capture the ordinary, everyday nature of claim making at the peripheries thatimplicates not only the global rich, but also a variegated middle class and a host of localand regional state actors. In other words, ‘informal’ or ‘illegal’ dealings around land areneither exceptional nor are they restricted to the poles of the income spectrum. Rather,they describe the actually existing tenure conditions and settlement patterns of 40–70%of urban dwellers in most Indian cities (ALF, 2003: 98).

In Bangalore, informal settlements are referred to colloquially as ‘revenue layouts’because they are built on land officially designated as agricultural or ‘revenue’ land incolonial census language. My archival review shows that although such layouts can betraced to the 1960s, they experienced a spurt in growth in the 1990s following India’sliberalization. Widely prevalent at the peripheries, revenue layouts are affordable,minimally serviced peripheral settlements occupied by a wide spectrum of lower- andmiddle-class urban buyers who yearn to own property. Born out of the ‘the oldest dreamof owning a house’ (Citizen Matters, 2008), the vast majority of homes in revenuelayouts are owned rather than rented.

Formed by private fly-by-night developers who buy parcels of land from farmersseeking to avoid acquisition by the state, revenue layouts are deemed ‘unauthorized’ inthe eyes of the main parastatal planning entity, the Bangalore Development Authority(BDA). This is because revenue layouts have not been formally approved by the BDA

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 593

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

and do not conform to its planning norms. As a result, unlike the more expensive plannedBDA-approved layouts that are pre-serviced with utility connections, in revenue layouts,people move in even without network connections and paved roads. Revenue layouts canstill acquire a certain degree of legitimacy if residents convert them to residential landuse via a regional authority (the District Commissioner), pay taxes and fees to localgovernments, and make small investments in infrastructure over time. The legalityof such settlements is highly fluid, entailing opaque transactions between residents,politicians, middlemen, landowners, and municipal and regional authorities. As I haveargued elsewhere, rather than a clear demarcation between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, revenuelayouts exhibit a spectrum of land tenure conditions ranging from ‘more unauthorized’to ‘less unauthorized’ (Ranganathan, 2011).

The political agency of those inhabiting such spaces is inextricably linked with theirfluid land tenure conditions and the material and symbolic borders that they inhabit.Solomon Benjamin’s (2008: 723) notion of ‘occupancy urbanism’ aptly captures the‘subversive politics on the ground’ deployed by those living under dubiously legal tenure.‘Occupancy urbanism’ constitutes a politics that is materially centered on land relationsthrough which the lower bureaucracy is leveraged to negotiate infrastructuralimprovements and regularize tenure over time. For Benjamin, it is these processes thatexplain the ‘extensive political consciousness’ of the poor and that, in turn, pose‘stringent resistance to neoliberal globalization’ (ibid.: 720). My ethnographic researchconfirms the centrality of land relations to the political agency of Bangalore’s peripheralresidents and the deep implication of local and regional state entities in mediating thematerialities of peripheries. However, my interpretation of the political agency ofperipheral dwellers differs from Benjamin’s in two respects.

First, rather than being confined to the poor, I find that occupancy urbanism describesa much broader set of groups, including the vernacular and lower middle classes. Thesevernacular groups are not contenders for India’s gentrifying, securely propertied,English-speaking ‘new middle class’ on which important scholarship exists (e.g.Fernandes, 2006; Upadhya, 2009; Ghertner, 2011), but they are also by no means thepoor. Rooted in regional cultures and languages,3 educated, and crucially, propertyowning (though not securely so), these are groups that I refer to as the peripheralizedmiddle class — groups that are far more numerous than their elite counterparts. This isurban India’s ‘missing middle’ (cf. Skocpol, 2000), its ‘lumpen middle class’ (Bayat,2000), which includes, among others, those who have witnessed a decline in their socialpositions accompanying the decline of the public sector and concomitant rise of the newglobal economy. Several inhabitants of peripheral revenue layouts, for instance, areretirees from public sector factories once located in distant townships. For these retireeswho moved to the peripheries because there was ‘no other option’ if they wanted tosecure the dream of ‘a small place to own’4 on a modest pension of US $125–2005 amonth, revenue layouts were far more affordable and accessible than planned BDA areas.Today, many among the peripheralized middle class are retired, self-employed or workin lower-level white-collar jobs (e.g. as technicians or nurses) with uncertain scope forupward mobility. It is the peripheralized middle class and their propertied dreams ofcitizenship that are being targeted by many new infrastructure policies today.

Second, rather than see the ‘occupancy urbanism’ strategies of the peripheralizedmiddle class as ‘resisting’ neoliberal governmental schemes as Benjamin does, I foundthat the strategies of this grouping are politically far more ambiguous. Resistance issimply not a comprehensive description of agency in this case. Sometimes the strategies

3 Bangalore’s location between four linguistic regions contributes to its linguistic diversity. In theBangalore urban district, Kannada is spoken by about a third of the population, followed by Telegu,Tamil and Urdu. As in other major Indian cities, English is also spoken but tends to be theconversational language for an elite minority (Srinivas, 2001).

4 Interview, 17 July 2008.5 All dollar amounts are stated at the 2008 exchange rate of US $1 = Rs 40.

594 Malini Ranganathan

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

of this grouping do pose resistance to market-based governmental programs, but atothers, they appear to be rehearsing elements and discourses of those very programs ‘soas not to jeopardize their standing within the rubrics of hegemonic power’ (Rankin, 2010:187). Strategies of the peripheralized middle class tend to move between ‘invited’ and‘invented’ spaces of public participation (Miraftab, 2009), typically involving organizedcollective action in the form of RWAs to lobby for neighborhood improvements and to‘build good rapport with the government’.6 As one resident (a retiree of a public sectorautomotive parts factory) of a Bommanahalli revenue layout told me:

Everyone here has the same problems — no UGD [underground drainage], no roads, nostreetlights, no water. In 2003, we formed an association and got it registered under theSocieties Act.7 Now for a complaint, we go through the association; otherwise no work getsdone. We have to coordinate between society and government. We contacted the panchayat[village elected council] and the councilors8 about our complaints. We also got peoples’donations for streetlights and metalling of roads.9

As this quote depicts, forming an association and getting it officially registered so that itis recognized by the state, and liaising between residents and government officials overcivic complaints, are key tactics deployed by peripheral homeowners. Such tactics werementioned repeatedly in my interviews. In addition, residents engage in performativestreet protests and blockages [horatas in Kannada] to direct media attention to thestate’s neglect of peripheral areas.10 Importantly, collecting donations for communityinfrastructure and organizing property tax payments are also key strategies, an aspect ofpolitical agency that we will revisit later. In brief, the political agency of the peripheralizedmiddle class does not show signs of resistance so much as it demonstrates a range of tacticsand strategic positionings to advance material interests and respectability vis à vis the state— often in ways that reproduce rather than challenge given power structures. In this way,agency here resembles Asef Bayat’s (2000) ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ — anebulous politics that involves action to acquire the basic necessities of urban livability, butone that is expressly not a politics of resistance. However, in contrast to the largelyindividualized nature of Bayat’s ‘quiet encroachment’, in Bangalore, the actions of theperipheralized middle class are largely collective.11

Thus, while both ‘occupancy urbanism’ and ‘quiet encroachment’ are useful inclarifying aspects of political agency at the periphery, they do not by themselves describethe political ambiguity and collective nature of agency in this context. It is JamesHolston’s (1999; 2008) ‘insurgent citizenship’ that perhaps best captures both missingaspects. For Holston, insurgence is found fundamentally in struggles over substantivemembership in the modern state. It is characterized not by acts of radical resistance to thestatus quo, but by acts that in some way ‘empower, parody, derail, or subvert stateagendas’ (Holston, 1999: 167). Crucially, insurgent citizenship involves the formation oforganized collectivities. In his study of Sao Paulo’s peripheries, for instance, Holstonfinds that informal residents invested in ‘new and reinvented forms of organization . . . inwhich the criterion of membership is residence and the core agenda the articulationof claims to resources’ (Holston, 2008: 247). Once formed, however, neighborhood

6 Interview, 12 August 2008.7 The Indian Societies Registration Act of 1860 enacted under British Rule provides for the formal

registration (and thus state sanction) of charitable, voluntary or educational organizations.8 Note that the very fact that village and municipal elected representatives were mentioned in the

same breath is evidence of the fluid rural and urban jurisdictions that characterize Bangalore’speripheries.

9 Interview, 1 September 2007.10 See for instance The Hindu (2007).11 Bayat himself recognizes that the prevalence of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East (the

context for his research) prevents organized collective action among urban informals.

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 595

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

associations advance their interests at the expense of new poorer immigrants; in otherwords, insurgent citizenship can also act to maintain social hierarchies.

It is precisely because insurgence presents such a complicated picture of agency — asadvancing material interests, yet operating within and reinforcing prevailing relations ofpower — that it provides such a useful vocabulary for understanding the texture ofpolitical consciousness or ‘common sense’ as Antonio Gramsci put it. Grappling with thefailure of the revolutionary project in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci wrote thatcommon sense — a mode of conceiving the world created through fragments of folklore,religion and philosophy — must be overcome for radical social change to occur. Becausesubaltern groups belong to ‘multiple social worlds . . . composed of heterogeneousfragments of fossilized cultures’ (Gramsci, 1989: 217), their common sense is not‘critical and coherent12 but disjointed and episodic’ (Gramsci, 2000: 325), leading to atype of ‘contradictory consciousness’ (ibid.: 333). While contradictory consciousnessmay contain the seeds of radical critique, most often people use it to justify and therebyreproduce the hegemonic relations in which they are embedded (Crehan, 2002; Loftus,2012; Perkins, 2013). This incoherence is, for Gramsci, typical for classes trappedin structurally subaltern positions (Thomas, 2010). Similarly, I see the politicalconsciousness of Bangalore’s peripheralized middle class — a group that is subalternrelative to the securely propertied, wealthier middle classes and subordinated to newreform rationalities — as profoundly contradictory. The associations representing theperipheralized middle class aim to improve living conditions while simultaneouslyreinforcing social hierarchies; they oppose particular governmental schemes while alsobuying into others to advance their property-related interests; and they recognize theirsubjection to cost recovery even while making bargains with it as I show below.Understanding the complexity of subaltern agency is crucial because it serves as anavenue through which to analyze the dynamics of rule itself, a subject to which I turnnext.

The rationalities of water-pricing reforms in peripheral BangaloreOver the last 30 years, areas like Bommanahalli have witnessed profoundtransformation from scattered villages, farms and pastureland to traffic-jammed roadsand densely populated informal settlements overshadowed by glimmering technologyoffices. The ‘unauthorized’ status of Bommanahalli’s residential settlements and the factthat it did not formally fall within Bangalore’s jurisdictional orbit until recently havemeant that the area was not connected to the BWSSB’s piped water and seweragenetwork. Within the core city, the public utility services around half a million householdconnections by treating, pumping and distributing around 1,000 million liters per day(MLD) from the Cauvery River, located approximately 100 km away from the city.Most households in the core still have to supplement utility-provided water withgroundwater derived from a variety of sources. In places like Bommanahalli, however,its bourgeoning population is still wholly dependent on groundwater sourced throughwater tankers, private borewells, and municipal borewells — all of which areunregulated and erratically supplied (Ranganathan et al., 2009). By the early 2000s, agrowing concentration of technology industries, real estate ventures and jobopportunities, combined with limited water supply, had all contributed to fears of animminent water crisis at the periphery.

To address this crisis and the bevy of infrastructure shortcomings that werethreatening the city’s ‘world class’ aspirations,13 in the early 2000s urban bureaucrats in

12 As Alex Loftus (2012: 81) recently pointed out, ‘coherent’ for Gramsci did not signify ‘logical’ or‘rational’, but rather a fusion of theory and practice.

13 In the early 2000s, articles such as Indian Express (2004) were lamenting the ‘crumbling’ ofBangalore’s infrastructure and the tarnishing of its image as a ‘world class’ city.

596 Malini Ranganathan

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

Bangalore began to initiate a series of infrastructure and governance reforms throughexternal loans. One of these reform-driven projects was the Greater Bangalore waterproject,14 a project to extend piped, treated Cauvery water to the peripheries via amarket-based financing framework. Instead of relying on the government of Karnataka tofund this project as was the precedent, decision makers — influential bureaucrats andtechnocrats — experimented with financing 29% of the project’s capital costs (roughlyUS $90 million at the time) through municipal bonds and 35% through peripheral‘beneficiaries’. In other words, it was expected that over $30 million would be raisedfrom the residents who were to benefit. The main financial architect of the project was theUnited States Agency for International Development (USAID), already active in creatinga municipal bond market in India, even in less credit-worthy municipalities. Meanwhilethe World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program financed the ‘willingness to pay’ studythat supported the project’s cost recovery policy (World Bank, 2005).

To understand the emergence of this water project and its constellation of domesticand international actors, let us briefly consider the political-economic context in whichthe project was born. This is not simply to read off transformations in water policythrough macroeconomic change, but to locate water relations within a wider historicalgeography (Heynen et al., 2006). By the turn of the millennium, the state of Karnatakawas emerging from a financial crisis. While the state’s financial health had been indecline for several decades, policy changes in the late 1990s mandating higher salariesfor civil servants across India catalyzed a sharp deterioration in its fiscal deficit(Toshniwal and Vyasulu, 2008). Karnataka was certainly not the worst hit. Yet, owing toits political leadership and longtime familiarity with international lenders, Karnataka’scrisis provided a window of opportunity for external agencies to step in with reform-tied structural adjustment loans. Given this atmosphere — and the broader shifts atthe federal level realigning infrastructure policy along commercial principles — theGreater Bangalore water project adopted a model that was strongly market based andfundamentally pro cost recovery.

The main vehicle through which cost recovery was to be achieved was the ‘beneficiarycapital contribution’ policy. Known in some countries as an ‘infrastructure charge’,capital contributions are designed to partially offset the cost of a public works project bycharging future users a lump-sum fee. Frequently justified via participatory rhetoric, a‘beneficiary’ capital contribution is levied over and above income or property tax, and isin addition to the cost of a service hook-up and meter costs, not to mention recurringwater consumption bills.

Bangalore was not the first developing city that experimented with such a policy. InBuenos Aires in the late 1990s, for instance, an infrastructure charge ranging from $43to $600 for water and up to $1,000 for sanitation was levied by the private concessionaireon unserviced lower-income urban households. Given average incomes at the time,residents were hard pressed to contribute such amounts, even when payments werestaggered over several months (Loftus and McDonald, 2001; Estache et al., 2002). Thedevolution of costs from the state to citizens, regardless of whether privatization hasoccurred, is what Smith (2004) refers to as a ‘second wave’ of neoliberalism in the 2000s— the ‘first wave’ being a more dogmatic emphasis in the 1990s by internationalagencies on privatization. In India, first- and second-wave water reform approacheshave proceeded simultaneously. However, by far the most common approach in the lastdecade has been to institute cost recovery and a host of institutional and regulatory

14 Officially, the project is known as the Greater Bangalore Water and Sanitation Project or GBWASP.The sanitation component of the project, financed through a loan from the World Bank, wasexecuted separately from the water component. Since I do not address the sanitation componenthere and to minimize acronyms, I use ‘Greater Bangalore water project’ throughout the article torefer to the project.

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 597

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

reforms without necessarily privatizing the water sector (Coelho, 2005; Gandy, 2008;Sangameswaran, 2009).

Although privatization was pursued initially in Bangalore, it was strongly opposed bythe water board and activist groups, and ultimately the capital contribution policy wentahead without privatization. Under the new policy, peripheral residents were required topay between $60 and $375 towards the capital costs of network expansion (mainly forfeeder lines and distribution pipes) based on the dimensions of their properties.15

Property dimensions were divided into four categories: less than 600 ft2, between 600and 1,200 ft2, between 1,201 and 2,400 ft2 and greater than 2,400 ft2. Each category wascharged progressively higher amounts which had to be paid years before the anticipateddelivery of water. To ‘enforce compliance’ (GoK, 2004), if payment was not made bythe deadline of 31 July 2005, each category accumulated a penalty ranging from $1 to$8 per month. This coercive dimension of the policy was complemented by an attemptto cultivate consent: a non-governmental organization was recruited to promoteparticipation in the peripheries and generate awareness about the importance of payingon time. In other words, both coercive and consensual aspects of rule — to be executedvia what Gramsci called the ‘integral state’, or an amalgamation of the state and civilsociety — were written into the very design of the project.

How did the project justify devolving costs historically borne by the state oncertain marginalized users? What were its political rationalities? Foucault’s (1991: 82)methodological preoccupation with grasping the logics that underlie particulargovernmental technologies or ‘programmings of behavior’ and constructions of thesubject can be put to use here. Under a heading titled ‘Why should we pay?’ in a‘Frequently asked questions’ pamphlet circulated about the water project by theGovernment of Karnataka, the logic was stated as follows:

The project has a very large capital expenditure with the primary benefits of this expenditureflowing to the households that take the connections. The burden has to be, therefore, shared bythe beneficiary citizens to some extent. In this process, the status of citizens is elevated to thatof stakeholders which will facilitate their participation in the management of the assets createdunder the project. Further, by these improved facilities the value of properties will improve andthis will be a direct benefit to citizens. There is therefore a good case for citizens paying forcapital costs as envisaged in the project (GoK, 2005: 9).

The language embedded in this justification says much about the multiple politicalrationalities that animated this water project. First, the suggestion that the ‘burden’ of thecapital expenditure has to be ‘shared’ by beneficiaries invokes the neoliberal propositionthat citizens must take responsibility for services, since the state can no longer be reliedupon for its welfarist role. The promise that ‘the status of citizens’ will thereby be‘elevated to that of stakeholders’ is reminiscent of ‘Third Way’ discourses under Britain’sNew Labour that called for an active and self-reliant stakeholder society to replacewelfare dependence on the state (Rose, 1999). Second, in saying that the benefit ofpaying is that ‘the value of properties will improve’, the payment policy plays ondecidedly liberal and bourgeois ideals of property ownership and the enhancement ofvalue through individual effort. In effect, the logics of cost recovery interwove neoliberalrationalities of self-reliance with a much more deeply rooted liberal political ethoscelebrating private property. It is thus that programs of rule are never singularlyneoliberal, but exhibit unplanned outcomes from the intersection of one governmentaltechnology with another (Rose and Miller, 1992). Just as Gramsci understood thecharacter of hegemony as ‘multi-dimensional and multi-arena’ (Hall, 1986: 15), so toowas Foucault alert to the ‘multiple, intertwining’ nature of rationalities within any given

15 The beneficiary capital contribution policy underwent multiple downward revisions. These amountsreflect the final revision announced in 2005.

598 Malini Ranganathan

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

regime of rule (Donzelot, 1979: 77).16 We will see how the co-presence of pluralrationalities in this project, in turn, ignited struggles along multiple axes at the grassroots.

In sum, this section situated the emergence of the market-oriented Greater Bangalorewater project in a particular political-economic moment and discussed the project’s costrecovery logics. The cost recovery policy sought to offload part of the financial burden ofbuilding a new piped water network onto peripheral ‘beneficiaries’ well before theanticipated arrival of water. While the project’s rationalities displayed overtones of asecond wave of neoliberal water reforms, it also tied payment to liberal principles ofproperty ownership — a marriage that, in turn, shaped the terrain of political struggle forhomeowners in Greater Bangalore. Having discussed the nature of agency at theperiphery as well as the rationalities of rule that targeted peripheral dwellers, thefollowing section addresses how these aspects became articulated together at a keyconjunctural moment.

Bargaining with hegemony: payingfor pipes as insurgent struggleAs I argued above, resistance does not describe the insurgent agency of peripheralizedmiddle-class groups because it does not account for the heterogeneous and oftencontradictory nature of their political practices. Moreover, it does not anticipate how orwhy people ‘(sometimes) act as neoliberal subjects’ (Larner, 2003: 511) or ‘routinelymake bargains with hegemony even as they might realize their own subjection to it, or thecontradictions within it’ (Rankin, 2010: 187). In this section, I return to the questionof political agency by assessing the payments collected from peripheral dwellers forthe water project both quantitatively and ethnographically. I show how historicallyembedded fiscal relations between citizens and the state in ‘unauthorized’ revenuelayouts shaped meanings attached to paying for the water project.

Between 2007 and 2009, I made routine visits to the municipal headquarters ofBommanahalli because this local office maintained careful records of how much moneyhad been collected under the water project’s capital contribution policy. Residents wererequired to pay their contributions in cash at the branches of two banks in the area; thesebanks, in turn, forwarded copies of all receipts to the municipal headquarters forrecordkeeping. Every receipt from 2003 onwards stacked neatly and tallied manually ina spreadsheet was kept under lock and key in a heavy stainless steel cabinet. As I builttrust with local officials, this cabinet became my archive. I surveyed the receipts andspreadsheets for cumulative amounts collected per month, per ward, and per category ofproperty in individual wards. I compared this with secondary data on average householdincome for each category. This archive provided an aggregate profile of payment, whileethnographic research was needed to historicize payment and uncover its meanings.

By 2008, $60 million — double the amount originally anticipated by USAID andgovernment experts — had been collected from ‘beneficiaries’ throughout theperipheries, well in advance of the actual date of water delivery. In Bommanahalli alone,my calculations showed that approximately $12 million had been collected largely from

16 Although I bring Foucault and Gramsci into conversation in this article, I also recognize the tensionsbetween them as flagged by Barnett (2005), Ekers and Loftus (2008) and others. In particular, Ekersand Loftus (2008) point out that while Gramsci affords a prominent role to struggle among thesubordinated classes, Foucault questions the inevitability of struggle. Instead, Foucault (1994: 143)is interested in the ‘perpetual linking’ and ‘perpetual reversal’ between ‘a relationship of power’ and‘a strategy of struggle’. I have tried to bring this more cautious view of struggle to bear on my largelyGramscian reading of the political agency of the peripheralized middle classes by showing that theirinsurgent strategies are volatile and always constitutive of a new ‘frontier of the relationship ofpower’ (ibid.: 143).

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 599

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

revenue layout residents and new apartment buildings. That said, not all peripheralhouseholds contributed; some could not afford to pay and others preferred to wait untilthe water arrived. Part of this larger-than-expected collection can be explained by the factthat developers could not get their plans approved without contributing to the project.Nevertheless, a significant sum came from ‘unauthorized’ revenue layout residents.Surveying 1,864 receipts from one ward in Bommanahalli, I found that on average,residents contributed a one-time amount of over $260 per household (see Table 1). Onaverage, this translated into roughly one full month’s household income and at times ashigh as one and a half times one month’s income. Such costly payments were madedespite the fact that other groundwater supply options existed. In many neighborhoods,associations kept careful rosters of who paid how much and were able to furnish these ondemand. In brief, not only were significant payments made for water pipes relative toincomes; these payments were also diligently recorded and monitored by grassrootsorganizations.

How should we understand this outcome? Instrumentalist views espoused bydevelopment agencies might claim that marginalized groups were ‘willing to pay’ forimproved services, especially when their current levels were so inadequate andexpensive. According to this prevailing perspective, this is precisely why the poor shouldbe charged more to connect to formal networks (e.g. World Bank, 2004). Along similarlines, USAID’s best practice rhetoric insisted that people in Greater Bangalore paid forthe project because of their sense of ‘ownership’ in upgraded water infrastructure, areasoning that echoed the original ‘stakeholder’ justification in the information pamphletquoted above. Foucaultian theorists on the other hand might examine the numbersin Table 1 and suggest that the conduct of peripheral dwellers was successfullyprogrammed or ‘responsibilized’ via the neoliberal governmental technology ofcost recovery (e.g. Rose, 1999; Lemke, 2001; Ong, 2006). As Aihwa Ong (2006: 172)comments, the rules set by neoliberalism ‘enforces the internalization of ideals of“self-responsibilization” ’ in realms that were previously subsidized by the state. Thisclaim would not be out of the question in Bangalore’s case: after all, the rationaleaccompanying the cash contribution policy explicitly advocated that citizens ‘share’ thefinancial responsibility of the state’s ‘very large capital expenditure’.

While tempting, I argue that both these positions neglect the micro-politics of theperiphery and, in particular, the meanings ascribed by peripheral dwellers to the act ofpaying. Readings of neoliberal moral responsibilization do not always account for thefact that human agency was not Foucault’s prime preoccupation. As Bevir (1999: 357)points out, Foucault was interested in ‘the ways in which the social world makes thesubject, not the ways in which the subject makes the social world’. By contrast, Gramsci

Table 1 One-time cash contributions for water pipes by households in Greater Bangalore,2005–7

Property dimensions (ft2)

Average Payment perHousehold including

Penalty ($)(n = 1,864)

Average MonthlyHousehold

Income* ($)(n = 8,000)

Payment as aProportionof Monthly

Income (%)

Less than 600 (n = 104) 120 150 80

601–1,200 (n = 193) 140 200 70

1,201–2,400 (n = 381) 270 220 120

More than 2,400 (n = 68) 440 280 160

Low-rise apartments (n = 1,118) 330 430 80

Average 260 260 100

*Reported in World Bank (2005).Source: Calculated from author’s survey and World Bank (2005).

600 Malini Ranganathan

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

was primarily interested in the ‘common material and meaningful framework’ subjectsconstruct for ‘living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterizedby domination’ (Roseberry, 1994: 361). To get at the material and meaningful frameworkattached to payment, then, I asked a series of questions about the fiscal and monetarytransactions peripheral residents have historically engaged in with the state. I discoveredthat payment of various kinds, including property taxes and betterment charges (feeslevied by the local state for local public works), confer a certain degree of legitimacy andrespectability on residents — both in terms of their land tenure and their social standingvis à vis the state. Holston (2008) finds in Sao Paulo that it is precisely because the landtitles of peripheral dwellers are in doubt that they want to pay property taxes as proof ofgood citizenship. This propertied vision of rights, wherein residents advance claims ‘onthe basis of their contributions to the city itself’ (ibid.: 260), is the crux of what marksinsurgent citizenship.

Similarly, for the peripheralized middle class living under informal tenure inBangalore, a paying citizen is a good citizen. Historically, once residents moved to‘unauthorized’ revenue layouts, they began to pay property taxes and other fees to thelocal municipality because ‘once you start paying taxes, you can start demanding things’.That is, for informal residents, tax payments provided a means through which to garnersymbolic recognition and material benefits from the state: ‘Don’t we pay taxes, aren’t weimportant?’ one peripheral resident demanded in a 2005 newspaper article (The Times ofIndia, 2005).

Conversely, peripheral cash-strapped municipalities were only too happy to collecttaxes, despite the fact that the taxpayers’ properties were not ‘authorized’. In exchange,municipalities installed some basic amenities (for instance, a community borewell) andissued a temporary document proving property ownership [khata in Kannada] whichhomeowners needed for obtaining bank loans. As several other studies have shown,lower-level state functionaries play crucial roles in brokering services for informalurban residents, often in return for various types of small payments (e.g. Benjamin,2004; Chatterjee, 2004; Anand, 2011; Anjaria, 2011). These state actors constitute the‘ordinary spaces of negotiation’ through which substantive citizenship arrangements aremade in practice for most people (Anjaria, 2011: 58). Payment in this case not onlyallowed residents to form a paper trail of good citizenship practices, but also to forgebonds with lower-level functionaries. Once payments are made, proof of payment isoften presented to officials as proof of residence, which can also be mobilized in timesof crisis as I show below. It is important to keep in mind, however, that such insurgentforms of citizenship are fragile: with each spatial expansion in Bangalore in which fringemunicipalities and villages get swallowed by the city (as in 2007), forms of recognitionissued by local entities are invalidated overnight. Payment thus comprises an unstable,volatile terrain of struggle at the heart of which lies the stakes of citizenship.

This historical set of state–society relations helps us to understand the culturalinflections and situated meanings of payment in the context of the Greater Bangalorewater project. Contrary to USAID’s ‘best practice’ assertion, people paid not becausethey were won over by the ‘stakeholder’ rhetoric. In fact, when the ‘beneficiary’ capitalcontribution policy was first announced, most were highly skeptical of the project’s useof the term. One member of an RWA (a retired advocate) had paid the capital contributionfor the project when it was first announced. But rather than internalizing his subjectivityas a ‘stakeholder’ in the project, he contended adamantly:

There’s no meaning in the word stakeholder in this Greater Bangalore water project . . . Wecannot pay for the service and be a stakeholder! Simply they are putting a levy on afundamental right of the citizen which is the duty of the government to provide and for thatcalling you as a stakeholder [sic]?!17

17 Interview, 9 July 2008.

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 601

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

Nor did people agree with the project’s internal logics. For instance, I was repeatedlyasked: ‘Why only those in Greater Bangalore have to pay capital contributions and whywith penalty?’.18 To make matters worse, the actual delivery of water to the peripherieswas severely delayed on account of engineering hurdles, resulting in the grosslyinequitable situation of ‘beneficiaries’ having paid for a service that they did not, in fact,‘benefit’ from (water was delivered to some areas in 2009, but most are still waiting fornew bulk supplies to come on line). Despite realizing their subjection to rule and thecontradictions within it, however, many paid up rather than resisting all together. Liketaxes and other fees, payment for water pipes provided an insurgent means to claimcitizenship and fight for respectability: ‘We paid because we are law-abiding people’explained a resident, rather ironically, in an ‘unauthorized’ layout when I asked him whyhe paid for the water project.

Crucially, the collection of payments is a practice that neighborhood RWAs organizeand take great pride in. ‘We are the best tax payers in this CMC!’ an association presidentproudly declared to me after explaining how he personally knocks on people’s doorsevery year to encourage them to pay. Much like taxes and miscellaneous fees,associations were involved in organizing payment for water pipes and in creating ameaningful framework for interpreting payment, thereby building legitimacy for theproject. A quantitative regression analysis of factors influencing willingness to pay forpiped water for 8,000 households in Bangalore reported that the presence of RWAs wasstrongly positively correlated with higher willingness to pay and was statisticallysignificant (World Bank, 2005). Ethnographic findings support this result. Associationsdistributed pamphlets and collected contributions for water pipes through door-to-doorvisits. One association member described her role as follows: ‘We were involved inraising awareness and in educating the members about the Cauvery water scheme. Wetold everyone they must pay. See, if we all pay we can raise our voice in a bettermanner!’19 Further, as a result of lobbying and petitions filed by associations, the waterboard waived the requirement of showing formal, permanent proof of tenure for a waterconnection and meter; proof of payment for the water pipes alone was consideredsufficient to demonstrate residence. In other words, as a result of RWAs’ politicalmaneuverings, formal tenure was successfully removed as an eligibility requirement foractual service delivery.

My findings thus show that in reconfiguring the relationship between payment forinfrastructure and land tenure, consent for cost recovery was produced in the process.The role of an ‘ensemble of organisms commonly called private’ — that is, ‘civil society’(Gramsci, 2000: 306) — was pivotal in the creation of consent. Greater Bangalore’sRWAs served the intellectual function of organizing, educating and persuading membersabout the symbolic and material importance of paying, not because they were submissiveto an externally imposed neoliberal calculus, but to ‘raise their voice’ and be regarded as‘law abiding’. If, as Gramsci (2000: 211) put it, ‘hegemony presupposes that account betaken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to beexercised’, then RWAs recognized that a strategic positioning within the rubrics ofhegemonic power allowed them to further their interests. As Donald Moore (2005: 11)reminds us, hegemony implies that subaltern subjects are enlisted into projects of theirown rule not because they are duped, but because ‘emergent interests’ are produced‘through compromises, consent, and coercion’. In this case, hegemony works byenlisting ‘unauthorized’ residents to shoulder the financial burden of new waterinfrastructure, while also enabling them to bargain for citizenship, belonging andrecognition in the process.

These bargains assumed high stakes when peripheral dwellers found their propertiesthreatened by punitive policies seeking to clamp down on unauthorized development

18 Interview, 30 July 2008.19 Interview, 15 July 2008.

602 Malini Ranganathan

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

between 2005 and 2007. In 2005, in a bid to prevent illegal settlement, the stategovernment banned the registration of residential sites on agricultural land, targeting allrevenue layouts at Bangalore’s peripheries. It also banned local government entitiesfrom issuing property titles to revenue layout dwellers. A newspaper dubbed the moveas one that ‘badly hit many middle income families who have bought plots to constructtheir dream house’ (Deccan Herald, 2005) and quoted one peripheral resident asprotesting:

I have paid development charges . . . for my property, paying property tax regularly, have akhata issued by the CMC and paid beneficiary contribution for Cauvery water connection[sic]. But how fair is it to say that the property is illegal?’ questions Mr Puttaswamy, who ownsa house on a revenue plot here (ibid., emphasis added).

Here, Mr Puttaswamy is making an insurgent claim to citizenship by leveraging hispayment of various fees, including the capital contribution under the water project,to further his property-related interests. This quote vividly portrays that Bangalore’s‘unauthorized’ property-owning peripheralized middle-class residents have situatedunderstandings of what payment for water pipes carries: in this case, payment carries theright to not being considered illegal.

My own interviews in 2007–09 mirrored this situated cultural interpretation. Again, in2007, shortly after the Greater Bangalore City Corporation was formed, an even morepunitive policy known as Akrama Sakrama [‘Make Right what is Wrong’ in Kannada]mandated that revenue layout dwellers — the prime targets of the scheme — payexorbitantly high penalties to get their properties regularized. Without paying a one-timepenalty that amounted to as much as one year’s annual income on average, residentsrisked eviction and demolition. A flurry of debate and critique erupted in citywidemeetings and the media over this policy. This became a key conjunctural moment marked‘by the simultaneity of symbolic and material struggles’ (Moore, 1999: 674) in whichbattles over the right to water and tenure legality were articulated together. Just asmultiple rationalities were cobbled together in the project’s payment policy, so too werestruggles surrounding governmental policies waged along the ‘multiple axes’ (Ekerset al., 2009: 289) of access to services, land tenure, and urban citizenship. One of myinformants captured this entanglement when she, much like Mr Puttaswamy, argued withrespect to Akrama Sakrama:

We are always fined; we are always taxed. Property tax we pay. Betterment charges we pay . . .all the connections are being paid — e.g. BESCOM [electricity] and Cauvery water charges —so what’s so illegal about it? If you’re calling us illegal, how do you collect all these charges?20

As in the quote above, my informant reinterpreted the logic of state policies through herown insurgent citizenship practices. It was clear that, to her, payment of various kindsby residents — including for water pipes — should nullify the so-called illegality oftheir settlements. At citywide meetings organized by a federation of peripheral RWAsknown as the Citizens Action Forum (CAF), citizens similarly demanded: ‘what aboutthe money that the government collects under various heads like water, electricity,registration, etc? The state government has no right to declare layouts which are payingthese fees as “unauthorized” ’ (Citizen Matters, 2007). Moreover, at a time when the cityof Bangalore was attempting to maintain its grasp on footloose global capital, thispunitive regularization drive was seen as disproportionately harsh on the small violatorwhile it ‘catered to the needs of big businesses that have violated building laws byconstructing and occupying immense structures in residential areas’ (CAF, 2007: 6). Inan information booklet published by the CAF, the regularization drive was denounced as

20 Interview, 21 August 2009.

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 603

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

egregious, particularly since small violators ‘have waited for over three years afterpaying “beneficiary contribution” to BWSSB for water supply and have been given noindication as to when they would get the supply’ (ibid.: 7, emphasis added). The bookletgoes on to complain:

It is indeed sad that governments . . . link the citizen’s right to the supply of a basic life-givingnecessity as water to adherence to . . . such devices [as the beneficiary contribution policy].Don’t they understand that denying water is like passing a death sentence? Such callousnesscoupled with the justification for Sakrama is rubbing salt into the citizen’s wounds (ibid.).

As a result of these and other intertwined criticisms and a public interest litigationlaunched against the Akrama Sakrama policy, the harsh penalization of peripheralproperties was stayed in the High Court of Karnataka in late 2007 on the grounds that thepolicy was fraught with inconsistencies and constitutionally untenable (Citizen Matters,2007). Although still controversial, today Akrama Sakrama has been revised by statelegislators to decrease the financial burden on lower-income residents living inunauthorized layouts. One of the main reasons cited for its revision was to ‘fill thegovernment’s coffers without causing much hardship to owners of illegal properties’(Deccan Herald, 2009). It is thus that the more punitive, ‘eviscerating’ forms of urbanismin India (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011) can sometimes be stalled through citizenship battles,even if only partially and temporarily. Although citizen groups registered this temporaryvictory, capital contributions for the Greater Bangalore water project have proceededunabated with no guarantee as to the delivery of water for the majority of peripheraldwellers. Hence, while the insurgent discourses and practices of the peripheralizedmiddle classes cannot be thought of as counter-hegemonic in that they did notsuccessfully overturn cost recovery (nor did they primarily seek to), their agencynevertheless opened up spaces of political possibility for advancing their interests withina regime of rule to which they were subordinated.

To summarize, the analysis here shows that consent to cost recovery in the urbanwaterscape was achieved by harnessing the interests of the peripheralized middle class,particularly with respect to property. The failure of the hegemonic state to ultimatelydeliver water in time, however, catalyzed a series of critical challenges and a reworkingof state policies. The central insight for Gramscian debates is that key to the creationof consent and compromise were the situated meanings subaltern groups ascribed topaying for water pipes. Insurgence is a relevant concept for understanding the nature ofmeaning making and grassroots maneuverings within hegemony. Insurgent bargainswith hegemony allowed subaltern groups to make the best of a constraining situation —in this case, to appropriate payment for pipes to fend off threats to their legality. Forthose who are not winners in the new global economy and who inhabit unstableperipheral spaces, consent to cost recovery in the water sector in an era of increasinglyexclusionary spatial policies might be one of the few ways left to fight for a footholdin the city.

Conclusion: towards a philosophy of urban water praxisReality looks quite a bit different from the visions portrayed in the glossy briefsproclaiming the Greater Bangalore water project as a ‘best practice’. It was a ‘bestpractice’ only to the extent that it managed to successfully raise the cost of capital for awater network on the backs of subaltern groups. Yet, several years after the collectionof cash contributions first begun, a majority of Bangalore’s outskirts (80%) still donot have access to piped water via this project (The Times of India, 2010). Given howpopular cost-sharing participatory models have become for financing infrastructure,it is imperative that we interrogate why such models win legitimacy despite theircontradictions.

604 Malini Ranganathan

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

To do this, this article questioned the agency of marginalized groups recruited in andsubordinated by cost recovery regimes. It argued against a narrow view of politicalagency as circumscribed by the project’s rationalities and micro-governing techniques —those that ostensibly constituted a responsible, paying neoliberal ‘stakeholder’ subject.Instead, it studied through a Gramscian framework the situated practices of peripheralagents, including their forms of collective action, historical fiscal relations with the state,and cultural interpretations of payment. Insurgence was found to be a useful grammarhere for characterizing a kind of subaltern agency that is at once collective, derivesfrom land relations, and is not always a politics of resistance. The article contendedthat payment for pipes by insurgent, ‘unauthorized’ property-owning agents and theirassociations — much like other types of fiscal transactions with the state — provided anavenue to demand recognition and respectability. With the current spate of regularizationpolicies penalizing illegal dwellings at the periphery, the situated meanings ascribed topaying for water pipes were leveraged as a means to bargain for tenure legality andcitizenship.

The analysis here supports the thesis that neoliberalism does not stand separate fromother political projects (e.g. Leitner et al., 2007; Peck et al., 2010). There is no simplebinary between neoliberalism and its ‘others’, between power and resistance. The casestudy demonstrated how neoliberal and liberal rationalities were entangled in thewater-pricing agenda, and consequently, how struggles at the peripheries unfolded alongmultiple axes: the demand for water and the right to legitimate property. Market-orientedlogics thus always operate ‘in environments of multiplex, heterogeneous andcontradictory governance’ (Peck et al., 2010: 104). At the same time, the particularhistorical geography of Bangalore’s frontier — with its prevalence of ‘unauthorized’,economically marginalized, property-owning agents — and the concrete realities of itslived environment shaped the articulations of hegemony in specific ways.

To close, to what extent does a discussion of political agency help us to think througha more viable ‘philosophy of praxis’ in urban water — what Gramsci (2000: 334) saw asa tighter ‘unity between theory and practice’, a critical consciousness of socio-ecologicalrelations? It is difficult to envisage radical critique emanating from peripheral groupsin Bangalore given their localized and narrow interests. Still, there are a few seeds ofsuch a critical consciousness that stem from the everyday, lived experiences of nature andsociety that are worth pointing out. First, even over the timeframe of this research, theregrew to be greater realization of the limits of a paradigm of centralized water pumpedfrom as far as the Cauvery River. Documentary filmmaker Swati Dandekar whom Iworked with while she was making Water and a city (2009), a film about Bangalore’swater challenges, captures residents’ understandings of the troubling ecologicaldimensions of the city’s hydrological cycle, as well as their more politicized views ondistributional justice, pricing and governance. The inherent contradictions of the GreaterBangalore water project have triggered critiques by the peripheralized middle classabout the uneven geographies of money, power and water in the city — critiques thatwere not possible even 5 years ago. Such critiques, as Gramsci reminds us, are immanentwithin the materiality of practices and the very project of hegemony (Thomas, 2010;Loftus, 2012). Second, while still embryonic, there is growing recognition about theintersections between water and land tenure. Citizens and frontline bureaucrats areacknowledging that a historically formed patchwork of land tenures in the city dictate ‘ifwater, when water and why no water’ (Citizen Matters, 2008). While such observationshave not amounted to an explicit challenge of hegemonic policies, they nonethelessexpose that rulemaking surrounding water and land can never be solely about marketprocesses, and that water, in particular, is as much a symbol of citizenship, identity andpower as it is an economic resource.

Malini Ranganathan ([email protected]), Global Environmental Politics Program,School of International Service, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, American University,Washington, DC 20016, USA.

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 605

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

ReferencesALF (2003) Of master plans and illegalities

in an era of transition. Alternative LawForum, Bangalore.

Anand, N. (2011) Ignoring power: knowingleakage in Mumbai’s water supply. In J.Anjaria and C. McFarlane (eds.), Urbannavigations: politics, space, and the city inSouth Asia. Routledge, New Delhi andLondon.

Anjaria, J.S. (2011) Ordinary states: everydaycorruption and the politics of space inMumbai. American Ethnologist 38.1,58–72.

Bakker, K. (2011) Commons versuscommodities: political ecologies of waterprivatization. In R. Peet, P. Robbins andM. Watts (eds.), Global political ecology,Routledge, Abingdon and New York.

Barnett, C. (2005) The consolations ofneoliberalism. Geoforum 36.1, 7–12.

Bayat, A. (2000) From ‘dangerous classes’ to‘quiet rebels’: politics of the urbansubaltern in the global South. InternationalSociology 15.3, 533–57.

Benjamin, S. (2004) Urban landtransformation for pro-poor economies.Geoforum 35.2, 177–87.

Benjamin, S. (2008) Occupancy urbanism:radicalizing politics and economy beyondpolicy and programs. International Journalof Urban and Regional Research 32.3,719–29.

Bevir, M. (1999) Foucault, power, andinstitutions. Political Studies 47.2, 345–59.

CAF (2007) Sakrama booklet for a new,equitable law. Citizens Action Forum,Bangalore.

Chatterjee, P. (2004) The politics of thegoverned: reflections on popular politics inmost of the world. Columbia UniversityPress, New York.

Citizen Matters (Bangalore) (2007) Sakramathrows up more questions than answers. 10April [WWW document]. URL http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/view/48-Sakrama-throws-up-more-questions-than-answers (accessed 25 March 2012).

Citizen Matters (Bangalore) (2008) Brokenprocesses, blocked pipes 14 May[WWW document]. URL http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/view/174-water-new-layouts (accessed 26 March2012).

Coelho, K. (2005) Unstating the public: anethnography of reform in an urban waterutility in South India. In D. Mosse and D.

Lewis (eds.), The aid effect: giving andgoverning in international development,Pluto Press, London and Ann Arbor, MI.

Crehan, K. (2002) Gramsci, culture andanthropology. Pluto Press, London.

Deccan Herald (Bangalore) (2005) Housingdreams shatter, revenue hit. 9 May [WWWdocument]. URL http://archive.deccanherald.com/Deccanherald/may92005/city204419200558.asp(accessed 22 March 2012).

Deccan Herald (Bangalore) (2009) CheaperSakrama on cards. 23 September [WWWdocument]. URL http://www.deccanherald.com/content/26821/cheaper-sakrama-cards.html

Donzelot, J. (1979) The poverty of politicalculture. Ideology and Consciousness 5(Spring), 73–86.

Ekers, M. and A. Loftus (2008) The power ofwater: developing dialogues betweenFoucault and Gramsci. Environment andPlanning D: Society and Space, 26.4,698–718.

Ekers, M., A. Loftus and G. Mann (2009)Gramsci lives! Geoforum 40.3, 287–91.

Estache, A., V. Foster and Q. Wodon. (2002)Making infrastructure reform in LatinAmerica work for the poor. EconomicCommission for Latin America, WorldBank, Washington, DC.

Fernandes, L. (2006) India’s new middleclass: democratic politics in an era ofeconomic reforms. University ofMinnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Foucault, M. (1991) Questions of method. InG. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller(eds.), Studies in governmentality: withtwo lectures by and an interview withMichel Foucault, University of ChicagoPress, Chicago.

Foucault, M. (1994) The subject and power.In P. Rabinow and N. Rose (eds.), Theessential Foucault, The New Press,New York.

Gandy, M. (2008) Landscapes of disaster:water, modernity, and urban fragmentationin Mumbai. Environment and Planning A40.1, 108–30.

Ghertner, D.A. (2011) Gentrifying the state,gentrifying participation: elite governanceprograms in Delhi. International Journalof Urban and Regional Research 35.3,504–32.

Gidwani, V. and R.N. Reddy (2011) Theafterlives of ‘waste’: notes from India for a

606 Malini Ranganathan

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

minor history of capitalist surplus.Antipode 43.5, 1625–58.

GoK (2004) Proceedings of the First Meetingof the Project Steering Committee onGBWASP, 28 January 2004, Office of theCMC, Bommanahalli.

GoK (2005) Greater Bangalore Water andSanitation Project: frequently askedquestions. 5 May 2005. UrbanDevelopment Department, Government ofKarnataka, Bangalore.

Goldman, M. (2011) Speculative urbanismand the making of the next world city.International Journal of Urban andRegional Research 35.3, 555–81.

Gramsci, A. (1989) Letters from prisonNoonday, New York.

Gramsci, A. (2000) The Antonio Gramscireader: selected writings 1916–1935.New York University Press, New York.

Hall, S. (1986) Gramsci’s relevance for thestudy of race and ethnicity. Journalof Communication Inquiry 10.5,5–27.

Hart, G. (2002) Disabling globalization:places of power in post-apartheid SouthAfrica. University of California Press,Berkeley.

Heynen, N., M. Kaika and E. Swyngedouw(2006) Urban political ecology:politicizing the production of urbannatures. In N. Heynen, M. Kaika and E.Swyngedouw (eds.), In the nature ofcities: urban political ecology and thepolitics of urban metabolism, Routledge,New York.

Holston, J. (1999) Spaces of insurgentcitizenship. In J. Holston (ed.), Cities andcitizenship, Duke University Press,Durham.

Holston, J. (2008) Insurgent citizenship:disjunctions of democracy and modernityin Brazil. Princeton University Press,Princeton, NJ.

Holston, J. and T. Caldeira (2008) Urbanperipheries and the invention ofcitizenship. Harvard Design Review 28,17–23.

Indian Express (Bangalore) (2004) Bangalorecrumbling, part I: a series on the rot:what, why, how and who. 5 December[WWW document]. URL http://www.indianexpress.com/oldStory/60231/(accessed 24 March 2012).

Larner, W. (2003) Neoliberalism? Guesteditorial. Environment and Planning D:Society and Space 21.5, 509–12.

Leitner, H., E.S. Sheppard, K. Sziarto and A.Maringanti (2007) Contesting urbanfutures: decentering neoliberalism. In H.Leitner, J. Peck and E.S. Sheppard (eds.),Contesting neoliberalism: urban frontiers,The Guilford Press, New York.

Lemke, T. (2001) The birth of ‘bio-politics’:Michel Foucault’s lecture at the College deFrance on neo-liberal governmentality.Economy & Society 30.2, 190–207.

Li, T.M. (1999) Compromising power:development, culture, and rule inIndonesia. Cultural Anthropology 14.3,295–322.

Li, T.M. (2007) The will to improve:governmentality, development, and thepractice of politics. Duke University Press,Durham.

Loftus, A. (2012) Everydayenvironmentalism: creating an urbanpolitical ecology. University of MinnesotaPress, Minneapolis.

Loftus, A. and F. Lumsden (2008) Reworkinghegemony in the urban waterscape.Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers 33.1, 109–26.

Loftus, A. and D. McDonald (2001) Of liquiddreams: a political ecology of waterprivatization in Buenos Aires. Environment& Urbanization 13.2, 179–99.

Miraftab, F. (2009) Insurgent planning:situating radical planning in the globalSouth. Planning Theory 8.1, 32–50.

Moore, D. (1999) The crucible of culturalpolitics: reworking ‘development’ inZimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. AmericanEthnologist 26.3, 654–89.

Moore, D. (2005) Suffering for territory:race, place, and power in Zimbabwe.Duke University Press, Durham andLondon.

Nair, J. (2005) The promise of the Metropolis:Bangalore’s 20th century. OxfordUniversity Press, New Delhi.

Ong, A. (2006) Neoliberalism as exception:mutations in citizenship and sovereignty.Duke University Press, Durham.

Peck, J., N. Theodore and N. Brenner (2010)Postneoliberalism and its mal-contents.Antipode 41.S1, 94–116.

Perkins, H. (2013) Consent to neoliberalhegemony through coercive urbanenvironmental governance. InternationalJournal of Urban and Regional Research37.1, 311–27.

Ranganathan, M. (2011) The embeddednessof cost recovery: water reforms and

Political agency and water reforms in Bangalore 607

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

associationism at Bangalore’s fringes. In J.Anjaria and C. McFarlane (eds.), Urbannavigations: politics, space, and the city inSouth Asia, Routledge, New Delhi andLondon.

Ranganathan, M., L. Kamath and V. Baindur(2009) Piped water supply to greaterBangalore: putting the cart before thehorse? Economic and Political Weekly44.33, 53–62.

Rankin, K. (2010) Reflexivity andpost-colonial critique: toward an ethics ofaccountability in planning praxis. PlanningTheory 9.3, 181–99.

Rose, N. (1999) Powers of freedom:reframing political thought. CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge.

Rose, N. and P. Miller (1992) Political powerbeyond the state: problematics ofgovernment. The British Journal ofSociology 43.2, 173–205.

Roseberry, W. (1994) Hegemony and thelanguage of contention. In G.M. Josephand D. Nugent (eds.), Everyday forms ofstate formation: revolution and thenegotiation of rule in Mexico, DukeUniversity Press, Durham and London.

Roy, A. (2003) City requiem, Calcutta:gender and the politics of poverty.University of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis.

Roy, A. (2011) Slumdog cities: rethinkingsubaltern urbanism. International Journalof Urban and Regional Research 35.2,223–38.

Sangameswaran, P. (2009) Neoliberalismand water reforms in western India:commercialization, self-sufficiency,and regulatory bodies. Geoforum 40.2,228–38.

Simone, A. (2007) At the frontier of the urbanperiphery [WWW document]. SaraiReader (Frontiers) 7, 462–69. URLhttp://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/07-frontiers/resolveUid/cc309dff2959ec879ab4727537e4fe66(accessed 24 March 2012).

Simone, A. (2010) City life from Jakarta toDakar: movements at the crossroads.Routledge, New York and Abingdon.

Skocpol, T. (2000) The missing middle:working families and the future of

American social policy. CenturyFoundation, New York.

Smith, L. (2004) The murky waters of thesecond wave of neoliberalism:corporatization as a service delivery modelin Cape Town. Geoforum 35.3, 375–93.

Srinivas, S. (2001) Landscapes of urbanmemory: the sacred and the civic inIndia’s high-tech city. University ofMinnesota Press, Minneapolis.

The Hindu (Bangalore) (2007) Residentsblock Hosur Road demanding watersupply. 12 April [WWW document]. URLhttp://www.hindu.com/2007/04/12/stories/2007041217610500.htm (accessed 22March 2012).

The Times of India (Bangalore) (2005)Resident groups, a force to reckon with.30 December.

The Times of India (Bangalore) (2010) Moretears than water: core areas get aplenty,while residents on outskirts demanduniform supply. 15 March.

Thomas, P. (2010) The Gramscian moment:philosophy, hegemony and Marxism.Haymarket Books, Chicago.

Toshniwal, K. and V. Vyasulu (2008)Karnataka: fiscal correction for humandevelopment? A study of state budgets2000–2008. Center for Budget and PolicyStudies, Bangalore

UN Habitat (2008) Best practices database inimproving the living environment: fundinginfrastructure reform and expansion —debt financing. Indo-USAID (FIRE-D)Project [WWW document]. URL http://www.unhabitat.org/bestpractices/2008/mainview.asp?BPID=1932 (accessed 25March 2012).

Upadhya, C. (2009) India’s ‘new middleclass’ and the globalising city: softwareprofessionals in Bangalore, India. In H.Lange and L. Meier (eds.), The newmiddle classes: globalizing lifestyles,consumerism and environmental concern,Springer, London and New York.

World Bank (2004) World developmentreport. World Bank, Washington DC.

World Bank (2005) Demand for improvedwater supply and sewerage services ineight urban local bodies of GreaterBangalore. World Bank, New Delhi.

608 Malini Ranganathan

14682427, 2014, 2, Dow

nloaded from https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.12028 by D

artmouth C

ollege Library, W

iley Online L

ibrary on [14/01/2023]. See the Term

s and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.w

iley.com/term

s-and-conditions) on Wiley O

nline Library for rules of use; O

A articles are governed by the applicable C

reative Com

mons L

icense

Get Your Paper Before the Deadline. Our Services are 100% private and Confidential

Useful Links That Will Help You Around

Link to new order https://studentsolutionsusa.com/orders/stud/new

link to login page https://studentsolutionsusa.com/orders/login

New user registration link https://studentsolutionsusa.com/orders/register

Forgot Password https://studentsolutionsusa.com/orders/forgot/password

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Question: How does this work?

Answer: Good Question. We are a group of a freelance board of students and professional essay writers. At our website, you may get help with any type of academic assignments: essay, coursework, term paper, business plan, case study, article review, research paper, presentation, and speech. Top writers can help with complex assignments such as dissertations, thesis papers, etc. All of them are professionals possessing excellent knowledge in their field of expertise, perfect writing skills, quality, and speed. When you place an order on our website, we assign it to the best writer. Once the writer finishes the work, the paper is submitted to our quality assurance desk who go through it and ensure it is unique and plagiarism free and that the instructions were followed to the detail. After this step we upload the paper in your account, we also send a copy to the email that you used to register the account with. we can guarantee you that the paper will be 100% plagiarism free. Besides, our services are 100% private and confidential

Question: How do I place an Order after getting to the order page

Answer: There are three major steps in the ordering process

Step 1 ....................................................paper details In this step, you will fill in the instructions of your paper; you can upload any materials that you feel will make your assignment a success. Besides, you can also email us at [email protected] Remember to specify the correct academic level. Please note that sources mean the number of references.

Step 2...................................................... Price calculation Kindly specify the number of pages, type of spacing and the correct deadline. This step will give you the estimated cost minus discount -- you may add the extra features if you wish.

Step 3 ....................................................discount and payment Use the discount code HAPPY2018 to enjoy up to 30% discount of your total cost After this step, proceed to safe payment; you can checkout using your card or PayPal Please note we will send the complete paper to the email you will provide while registering. A copy will also be uploaded to your account

Question: How will I know when my paper is complete? or How will I get the complete Paper?

Answer: Once we are done with the paper, we will be uploaded to your account. A copy will also be sent to the email you registered with. We can guarantee you the following:- 1. Our service is private and confidential; we don't spam or share your contacts with anyone 2. The final paper will be plagiarism free. We will send a Turnitin Report to the email you registered with 3. At our company, willing to do free unlimited revisions until you are satisfied with your paper

Question:- Am a new client, How can I get the guarantee that the paper will be completed and sent to me before my deadline?

Answer: Thank you for expressing your concerns. We would love to have you as our loyal customer. We are certain if we do good work, you will come back for me. Besides, you will give us referrals to your friends and family. For that reason, we can’t fail to deliver your paper within your specified time frame. We will ensure we submit the paper on time so that you can have enough time to go through it, if you have problems with the paper delivered, you can request a free revision. You are entitled to as many revisions as you would wish until you get a paper that satisfies you

Ranganathan2014PayingforPipesClaimingCitizenshipPoliticalAgencyandWaterReformsattheUrbanPeriphery.pdf

Useful Links That Will Help You Around

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Question: How does this work?

Question: How do I place an Order after getting to the order page

Question: How will I know when my paper is complete? or How will I get the complete Paper?

Question:- Am a new client, How can I get the guarantee that the paper will be completed and sent to me before my deadline?

Useful Links That Will Help You Around

Contact Us