An initial research project that I conducted was to grasp the emerging politics of water supply regimes in India in the context of policy reform efforts undertaken nationally and locally. The study was conducted in a comparative fashion across three different cities in India. This research was conducted as part of my doctoral research and was supported by National Science Foundation (USA)’s Dissertation Improvement Grant and later on after coming to Concordia by FQRSC, Quebec’s provincial funding agency for research in social sciences and humanities.
The key thrust of this research stems from an intimate examination of the process of change in water supply infrastructures accomplished by notable public private partnership efforts in Indian cities as a means to reveal the complexity of state-society relations in India at multiple levels – at the state, city and neighborhood levels. Water supply infrastructures, as the essential machinery of modern urban life, afford a remarkable view of the wheeling and dealing that animates state-society relations. This is especially so because the sheer necessity of water infrastructures for modern existence combined with the fact that enormous disparities in its access in countries like India have ignited numerous polarized contentions.
A second research project in this area was to conduct an empirically grounded research project of urban waste water and sanitation with the aim of investigating the multifaceted challenges of technology and governance. A key motivation was the inability of city governments to re-imagine alternate technological pathways instead of conventional means of treating wastewater and sanitation. What finds is that city governments across India are still opting for centralized management and conventional technology options: a clear sign of path dependence. Government agencies lack the confidence to adopt new technologies alternatives and practices. This project sought to understand the scope of technological alternatives and associated management and business models in the waste water and sanitation sector. This research was supported by IC-IMPACTS with funding from the Government of Canada and the Government of India.
Related Publications
- Transforming Urban Water Supplies in India: The Role of Reform and Partnerships in Globalization. Routledge, UK, 2012.
- NC Narayanan, Isha Ray, Govind Gopakumar, Poonam Argade. Towards sustainable urban sanitation: A capacity-building approach to wastewater mapping for small towns in India. Journal of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene for Development, 8(2): 227-37, 2018.
- Experiments and Counter-Experiments in the Laboratory of Water Supply Partnerships in Bengaluru, India, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, 2: 393-412, 2014.
- Policy Transmission: The emerging policy dynamic of water supply infrastructure development in India. Water Policy 13, 3: 375-92, 2011.
- Transforming Water Supply Regimes in India: Do Public Private Partnerships play a role? Water Alternatives 3, 3: 492-511, 2010.
- Sustainability & the indispensability of politics: A study of sanitation partnerships in urban India. International Journal of Sustainable Society 2, 4: 376-392, 2010.
- Investigating Degenerated Peripheralization in urban India: The Case of Water Supply Infrastructure and Urban Governance in Chennai. Publics Works Management and Policy, 14, 2: 109-29, 2009.
Associates
This project was conducted in association with Prof. NC Narayanan at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India.
Funding
