Priya Sangameswaran - Neoliberalism and Water: Complicating the Story of Reforms in Maharashtra

Neoliberalism and Water

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Neoliberalism and Water

Complicating the Story of
Reforms in Maharashtra

Priya Sangameswaran

Neoliberalism and Water

Orient Blackswan Private Limited

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Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. 2014
First published by Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. 2014

eISBN 978-81-250-6381-0

e-edition:First Published 2016

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Abbreviations

Preface

In 2005, having finished my doctoral research on the question of equity in community-based water projects in western India, I was working on a desktop review of the concept of right to water in the course of a visiting fellowship. A random question during a job interview about the new kinds of decentralised rural drinking water projects first alerted me to the changes being introduced in the domain of water. But even when the research (on which this book is based) started with a visit to the Thane Municipal Corporation in November 2006, I did not appreciate the widespread nature and depth of some of the transformations being brought about, or the complex ways in which discourses of neoliberalism play into them. This changed over the course of the research and one of the major motivations for this book is to bring together the variety of changes in progress and the ways in which one might usefully think about them.

Needless to say, neither the evolution of my own understanding nor the undertaking of this research would have been possible without the insights and information that were generously shared by many of the people I interacted with in the course of field work. In most cases, I have chosen not to divulge the names of specific individuals and mentioned only their broad institutional affiliation. This makes acknowledging everyone individually impossible. However, there were a number of crucial points in the field work which were critical in framing the trajectory of the research project as well as the concepts that the book works with: discussions with Chhaya Datar, then at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, which provided an understanding of the history of rural drinking water in Maharashtra and the complexities of the current reforms; a government official who pointed out the large extent of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) already in place (by 2007) in the O&M of urban drinking water; a meeting with a former member of the Nashik Jalswarajya unit which highlighted the dynamics of interaction between older and newer actors associated with rural drinking water; and the visits to the villages under the Jalswarajya scheme facilitated by the members of the support organisations working there.