Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Social Life of Water: The Limits of the Commodity and its Neoliberal State

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Graduate student Nikhil Anand, under the supervision of Dr. James Ferguson, will undertake research on the difficulties of privatizing water distribution in Mumbai, India. Through ethnographic research in two water poor communities in and around Mumbai, he will investigate the question of why public water projects proliferate in India even as state agencies profess a commitment to pro-market policy. When operationalized in postcolonial states that do not have histories of substantive citizen rights, the effects of pro-market policies are as yet unknown. Primary research suggests that the ways in which the poor access water in Mumbai complicates the distinction of the public and private, long central to political economy. This research project seeks to understand the shifting boundaries of citizenship and markets in the contemporary state through participant observation among the urban poor, and institutional ethnography of state agencies. By following how the poor access water, this research shall show how formal citizenship articulates with other kinds of political claims by the urban poor. The research is important because it will investigate why in some social and political contexts water is difficult to commoditize when other basic needs (like food) are distributed through market mechanisms. As such, the social life of water in Mumbai might reveal new insights about the arrangements necessary for the functioning of states and markets. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.