Co-Production or Contested Production? Complex Arrangements of Actors, Infrastructure, and Practices in Everyday Water Provisioning in a Small Town in India

Abstract

This paper critically analyses complex arrangements of actors, infrastructure technologies and practices to argue that co-production of urban service delivery entails a mutual, but contested dependence of state and non-state actors. We present two empirical cases based on in-depth qualitative fieldwork highlighting the role of Councillors regulating formal hydraulics and the fragile, volatile relations of private water provisioning in Baruipur Municipality, a small, peripheral town in the Kolkata Metropolitan Area. Characterised by groundwater arsenic, iron risks and heterogeneous urban waterscape, our analysis shows that powerful socio-political intermediaries shape everyday provisioning and access, ‘re-politicisation’ complicating notions of collaborative alliances, equitable benefits and sustainable, material improvements. While gaps in piped water provisioning in the global South cities do find nascent community-led, collective service delivery efforts, in a socio-political context where water is understood as a public right, a state provision, does the continued reliance on the state allow joint service delivery to manifest?