Ways of knowing the wastewaterscape: Urban political ecology and the politics of wastewater in Delhi, India

Habitat International 54 (2016) 150e160

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Ways of knowing the wastewaterscape: Urban political ecology and the politics of wastewater in Delhi, India Timothy Karpouzoglou a, *, Anna Zimmer b a b

Public Administration and Policy group, Wageningen University, Hollandseweg 1, 6706, KN Wageningen, The Netherlands ^timent Geopolis, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Department of Geography and Sustainability, University of Lausanne, Quartier Mouline, Ba

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 24 December 2015 Accepted 29 December 2015 Available online 19 January 2016

The notion of waterscape has been proposed by urban political ecology (UPE) scholars as a conceptual lens for understanding urban hydro-social flows. So far, however, there has been little attention by UPE scholars to the importance of wastewater in urban waterscapes. This study demonstrates how wastewater is embedded in an arena of social relations of power, defined in this article as the wastewaterscape. Drawing on research conducted in Delhi, the aim of the study is to examine re-occurring problems of wastewater disposal and mismanagement through the lens of knowledge; and the different ways of knowing about wastewater which exist amongst inhabitants of an informal settlement, scientific experts and municipal workers in Delhi. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that the systemic exposure of poorer urban citizens to untreated wastewater cannot be attributed to the shortcomings of service delivery alone, but is more fundamentally associated with how legitimacy is awarded to competing systems of knowledge about wastewater in the urban sphere. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Wastewaterscape Knowledge Urban political ecology Delhi India

1. Introduction In the field of urban political ecology (UPE hereafter) the role of knowledge is recognised as central in the re-production of the urban environment, including the urban waterscape (Bakker, 2003; Castro, 2004; Kaika, 2003; Swyngedouw, Kaika, & Castro, 2002). This article investigates the different forms of knowledge about wastewater in Delhi to highlight how such knowledge is deeply embedded in and re-produces social relations of power that underpin larger processes of marginalisation currently observed in €rkman, 2014; Chaplin, 2011; urban India (Baviskar, 2003; Bjo Fernandes, 2004). The notion of the ‘waterscape’ (Swyngedouw, 1999) has been used in UPE to designate the urban hydro-social cycle: the quantity and direction of water flow through cities which hinges upon economic and political processes, cultural imaginaries and social relations. The term therefore also allows analysing the intertwined dialectics of the material and non-material, which shape access to and distribution of water (Bakker, 2003; Swyngedouw, 1999, 2004).

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (T. Karpouzoglou), anna. [email protected] (A. Zimmer). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2015.12.024 0197-3975/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

So far however, the analysis of the waterscapes has not included more systematic analysis of questions around wastewater flows in cities and their politicisation. We examine questions of wastewater politicisation through the lens of knowledge, and the different ways of knowing about wastewater which exist amongst inhabitants of an informal settlement, scientific experts and municipal workers in Delhi. The role of knowledge for the creation and maintenance of power relations is centrally placed in the work of UPE scholars. Ernstson (2013) identifies for example an important field of investigation in the ‘politics of who can claim to be in the know of urban nature’ as a conceptual lens for understanding how knowledge is used to establish or contest legitimacy. Thus by focussing on different ways of knowing, we draw insights from UPE1 to understand the problematic of wastewater. We characterise in more detail three different arenas of knowledge production and sense making: the informal residential area; the

1 We recognise that the boundaries between UPE and other political ecology studies may not always be that clear or indeed static (cf. Lawhon, Ernstson, & Silver, 2014), but drawing on the UPE category in this study has been useful for identifying a specific area of debate where we find that the analysis of the wastewaterscape becomes more relevant.

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local state; and the regulatory body of the central state, the Central Pollution Control Board (in short, the Board). The first two choices are explained by the fact that residents of informal settlements face disproportionate exposure to wastewater in their daily lives. It is in such areas that both arenas, knowledge production in the neighbourhood and in the local state, intersect and interact on a daily basis as residents and scavengers struggle to maintain wastewater drainage through their labour. The negotiations that surround this struggle allow observing how the relations of power at play legitimise or de-legitimise different ways of 'knowing wastewater', i.e. of defining and explaining the recurrent wastewater problems. The third choice is justified by the fact that scientific expertise such as the one produced by the Board is hugely influential in directing state action on wastewater at a national level. The Board is representative of a type of knowledge arena where expert knowledge based on the measurement of standardised parameters plays an important role; decision making is highly technocratic and appears to be driven almost exclusively by a model of negotiation based on rationalisation and bureaucratisation. This is a knowledge arena, normally existing at a national policy level and where scientific advisors have contributed to the formation of a certain kind of expert discourse around the management of wastewater. We are therefore interested in showing that despite the seemingly distant position of the Board from the wastewaterscape in question, it has an important relationship to it because of the way it contributes to knowledge and action about wastewater management in the city. Overall, this approach to tracing knowledge and sense-making around wastewater, has allowed us to show where different ways of knowing the wastewaterscape become contested. In the following sections, we discuss first the theoretical approaches that have informed our own analysis drawing insights from UPE and post-structuralist geography, studies on power and knowledge (particularly drawing on Foucault's work (cf. Foucault, 1980) as well as citizen science studies that engage with the relationship between expert and citizen knowledge. We then briefly describe the methodology informing the analysis of our case studies. Thereafter, we discuss how the interplay between different types of knowledge has emerged in the context of Delhi. The discussion and conclusion provides some reflections on how to rethink problems of wastewater disposal as part of debates on urban citizenship and exclusion in cities of the global South. 2. Power, knowledge and place in the wastewaterscape 2.1. Situating wastewater as part of the waterscape Urban political ecologists draw upon the waterscape concept to understand the production of socio-natures (Heynen, Kaika & Swyngedouw, 2006). A waterscape is perceived as a politicised space whose unequal production involves contradictions, inequalities, and conflicts between actors (Budds, 2009; Mehta & Karpouzoglou, 2015), leading to environmental injustices and rights violations (Mehta, Allouche, Nicol, & Walnycki, 2014). Research on the waterscape further shows the power asymmetries associated with different symbolic and cultural meanings attached to water (Baviskar, 2007; Sultana, 2011; Truelove, 2011). Situating wastewater as part of the waterscape incorporates a full understanding of the socio-natural transformation of water as it occurs not only through production, consumption, but specifically in this case, also through the disposal of wastewater (Gandy, 2008; Jewitt, 2011; McFarlane, 2012). Everyday practices of Delhi citizens and state actors e such as the use of water and its discharge as wastewater, the cleaning of drains, complaints and negotiations e play a role, as do larger undertakings at the municipal or state level like the construction of sewer lines or the formulation of Sewerage

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Master Plans (Zimmer, 2012b). 2.2. Knowledge as analytical lens for understanding urban wastewater flows The question of how knowledge of the environment is “produced, contested, legitimated, and hybridised” (Birkenholtz, 2008:468) is central to political ecological concerns and is extended to more recent analyses of UPE as well (Forsyth, 2003; Robbins, 2012; Swyngedouw, Kaika & Castro, 2002; Veron, 2006; Zimmer, 2015b). Drawing on this work that uses knowledge as an analytical concept, we focus in this paper on the knowledge of those who work and live in wastewaterscapes. Doing so illustrates how these spaces are perspectival in character (Appadurai, 1990) and socially constructed. The emphasis on ‘ways of knowing’ as discrete phenomena reflects power asymmetries in specific territorial contexts. This aspect has been formulated in Foucault's work on knowledge where he states “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Foucault, 1991: 27). It is this knowledgepower nexus that builds a system of acceptable knowledge. This system, also termed the ‘regime of truth’, confers on specific information the tag of being ‘true’ e while other information is considered erroneous (Foucault, 1977, 1991). Bouleau (2014) drawing on UPE of water and social studies of science, highlights that expert ways of knowing the waterscape are historically situated in how prestige and authority are granted to established scientific disciplines. Therefore “scientists need to categorise the waterscape into the abstract entities their paradigm requires” constructing “different ways of separating or grouping elements of the waterscape” (Bouleau, 2014:249). Technical rationalities can become further supported by shifts in discursive formations to produce “new kinds of knowledge, along with new objects to know and new modalities of power” (Foucault, 1980: 22). The production of wastewaterscapes can then be understood as underpinned by not only questions of knowledge production but also by questions of knowledge legitimacy, raising the questions: Whose knowledge on wastewater counts? Who has the power to talk about wastewater and its disposal? Which language is accepted to describe the wastewaterscape? And what problems surrounding wastewater are deemed important? Bringing together the concept of the waterscape with knowledge (as object of analytic enquiry) allows us to ask questions like these within a theoretical frame of analysis. Another strand of UPE research on knowledge which supports our conceptualisation of the wastewaterscapes highlights processes of knowledge generation and contestation not only as ideas or assemblages of discursive formations, but also by means of embodied knowledge in specific places. Loftus (2007) drawing on feminist standpoint theories, especially Haraway (1991), elucidates for example that knowledge is always ‘situated’ and deeply embedded within actors' various perspectives about the environment in which they live and work. This analytical emphasis on the placement of practices re-directs attention not only to the discursive construction of particular ‘ways of knowing’ a la Foucault (1996, 1997), but also to the varied ways in which knowledge can be part of a place, and how people in these places experience different forms of inequality in relation to their knowledge (Thrift, 1999). 2.3. Locating arenas of knowledge and sense-making in Delhi As we noted earlier, we characterise in more detail three different arenas of knowledge production and sense making: the

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informal residential area; the local state; and the regulatory body of the central state, the Board. In the informal residential areas, knowledge can be characterised largely as embodied, as it is built through labour to resolve practical difficulties presented by wastewater overflow and stagnation, and everyday sensory interaction with wastewater. While we try to avoid reifying categories such as ‘local’, ‘traditional’ or ‘lay’ when referring to citizens' knowledge (Agrawal, 1995; Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993; Leach, Scoones, & Wynne, 2005), and caution has to be applied not to homogenise internal differences, we also perceive how residents' forms of knowledge can also be described using the notion of citizen knowledge in contrast to knowledge and sense making that rests upon technical or scientific expertise. Citizen knowledge often relies on “common sense, casual empiricism, or thoughtful speculation and analysis” (Lindblom & Cohen, 1979: 12), personal values and belief systems (Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein, 1980), or actual sights, smells and tastes experienced in everyday life (Corburn, 2004). Doreen Massey (2005: 9) refers to this knowledge as the knowledge of the everyday space, always under construction, “never finished; never closed … constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny”. At the local state level of knowledge production, municipal workers such as scavengers and higher-ranking sanitary staff have hybrid knowledge of wastewater, as their knowledge is produced through labour, sensory interaction, as well as some degree of technical expertise. Lipsky's (1983) work on street-level bureaucracy, is relevant for understanding municipal workers' knowledge about the beneficiaries of service delivery. For example, when some Delhi residents are perceived as illiterate and uneducated, this has an impact on the delivery of important wastewater management services. Municipal workers are therefore important agents with the power to exercise various labelling strategies, and as a consequence can often respond in highly prejudiced ways to the particular needs of citizens (Coelho, 2004). An arena of knowledge production about wastewater which is to this date largely unexplored concerns that which follows rules of scientific and technical procedure. For this knowledge arena, which falls within the discussion of the Board's approach to wastewater management, risks from wastewater, are scientifically perceived as being in principle easy to parameterise and quantify (i.e. through the formulation of water pollution standards for toxic substances found in wastewater) (Karpouzoglou, 2012). Furthermore, because scientists are institutionally committed to the scientific knowledge that is being produced, sources of uncertainty or ambiguity about wastewater-related risks are often masked by a picture of misplaced concreteness i.e. a false perception that the risks are either being accounted for or that they do not exist at all (Stirling, 2011: 84). These different knowledge arenas do not exist in isolation but intersect and in many cases interact directly. However, in our study distinguishing between competing interpretations of the wastewaterscape has allowed us to illustrate the way in which residents', experts' and municipal workers' knowledge is always to some degree partial and incomplete. 3. Methodology This study uses a meta-synthesis of two case studies, both located in Delhi but researched separately (Hoon, 2013). The case study which informs our analysis of citizen and governmental knowledge at the municipal level is based on fieldwork carried out

2 Unauthorised colonies are defined as areas ‘where no permission of (the) concerned agency has been obtained for approval of layout plan and/or building plan’ (The Gazette of India, 2008).

by the second author during 11 months between February 2008 and December 2009 in an approximately 30 years old unauthorised colony2 (henceforth UAC) in East Delhi. The area is part of a ward which in its totality is made up of UACs,3 and inhabited mainly by working class Muslims, who mostly migrated from smaller towns or villages of Uttar Pradesh. In total, 70 qualitative, open-ended interviews were held with residents on everyday wastewater governance in their area.4 This interview sample largely informs our analysis of those actors who we refer to as citizens and their knowledge as citizen knowledge. Interview partners were selected to reflect the different infrastructural situations within the colony, as well as to achieve a gender balance. These interviews often involved loose groups of neighbours or relatives; in other cases they were individual conversations. Fieldwork in this colony also included interaction with municipal workers, based on two focus group discussions with the scavengers and sweepers, as well as three individual interviews with higher ranking staff. Discussing, here as well, the everyday governance of wastewater in the colony, we followed the hierarchy of actors up from the scavengers and sweepers in the ward to the Sanitary Superintendant of the zone. All interviews with residents and municipal workers were conducted by the second author with a research assistant that translated questions as well as answers orally from Hindi into English. The interview notes, including direct quotes, were then analysed with the help of ATLAS.ti, a software for qualitative data analysis using thematic coding. Apart from interviews, observations, maps and participative methods were used to study the wastewater situation. Our analysis of expert knowledge is based on interviews with scientists,5,6 working within the Board which is a national environmental regulatory body. Fieldwork was conducted during a 6month visit in New Delhi, between January 2009 and April 2010 by the first author. Interviews with Board members were focused on developing a better understanding of how scientists influenced ‘official’ perceptions of wastewater management at the level of policy formulation and regulatory design. The Board was selected for more detailed fieldwork in part because of the centrality of ‘science’ in the execution of its various roles and furthermore because of the links of the Board with the management of the city, particularly through its ‘offspring’ institutional branches.7 Approximately 20 Board scientists were invited to contribute to the original research for this case study. Interviews were ‘semistructured’ and conducted in English. As anonymity was offered to all interview partners in both case studies, their real names are not disclosed here. In addition to the interviews, fieldwork notes were taken to record observations in real time. These notes focused on aspects of daily organisational functioning, informal discussions with members, and observations of technical work such as laboratory experiments.

3 The colony has since been included in the regularisation drive by the Delhi Government (Zimmer, 2012a). 4 This study has been undertaken in the context of the doctoral thesis project of the second author (Zimmer, 2012b; Zimmer & Sakdapolrak, 2012). 5 According to the Board norms, expertise and scientific background are almost synonymous. It is mandatory for scientists to have expertise in engineering, technology or the physical sciences. 6 The study of expertise at the Board has been part of a critical study of knowledges surrounding water quality with particular reference to urban and peri-urban areas of Delhi (Karpouzoglou, 2012; Mehta & Karpouzoglou, 2015; Randhawa & Marshall, 2014) and is part of research undertaken within the project “Peri-urban interface and sustainability in South Asian cities”. 7 These are otherwise known as the State Pollution Control Boards at the level of the State, or Pollution Control Committees at the city level. These organisations work together with the Board in environmental regulation.

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4. Contested ways of knowing the Delhi wastewaterscape

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4.2. Wastewater flows at local level: the situation in the unauthorised colony

4.1. Delhi's unequal wastewaterscape In Delhi, water pollution associated with wastewater stagnation and overflow is very prominent. The city of Delhi alone has 42 percent of the total sewerage treatment infrastructure of India, yet less than 50 percent of the city's sewerage generated is treated (CSE., 2012). Around 50% of the population are currently not connected to the sewer system.8 Consequently, the scope of inequality as it relates to wastewater services and treatment provision is very broad. A large section of Delhi's middle classes have successfully claimed access to wastewater collection infrastructures (Alankar, 2013; Chaplin, 2011). In contrast, in low-income settlements, especially in informal areas, sewerage coverage drops drastically, and a hybrid mix of solutions is often self-produced by residents. Fig. 1 presents the location of UACs and jhuggi-jhompri- or JJ Clusters9 in relation to the Delhi sewer network. It is shown that UACs are concentrated at the periphery of the urbanised area while JJ Clusters are distributed over the urban area, with high concentrations along railway lines. The location of UACs corresponds to a striking degree to the ‘blanks’ on the sewer map. The apparent lack of infrastructure to manage wastewater is blamed on three factors; first, lack of adequate financing (Deb, 2004; McGranahan, 2006; Prasad, 2002); second, lack of proper planning (Zerah, 2005); and third, Delhi's exponential population growth (Chandra & Aneja, 2004; Singh, 2009). All three factors align with a vision where with time and investment, universal coverage of the sewer system will be achieved. Economic liberalisation projects since the mid-1980s, and the more recent mobilisation to turn Delhi into a ‘world-class’ city have meant that both middle-class and state interests in infrastructure and service delivery mechanisms e and in a beautiful, clean river Yamuna e have become more pronounced (Baviskar, 2003; Follmann, 2015). Delhi's Master Plan for 2021 has solidified further aspirations for creating a modern, rationalised city space (MoUD., 2007). A logic of ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ (Baviskar, 2002), mobilised in court cases to remove from the city the aesthetically unpleasant sight of slums, has led to justifying the demolition of squatter settlements for the sake of cleaning the city's spaces and creating a more aesthetic ideal (Ghertner, 2010a). This more recent middle class bias in planning Indian cities has become enmeshed with a history of persistently unequal infrastructure provision (Mann, 2007). It has also meant that the link between poor sanitation and water-borne diseases, which is crucial for India's urban poor but not for its urban middle classes, has not as yet become a campaign issue (Chaplin, 2011). In the context of these developments, then, the notion of € rkman, 2014; citizenship has changed to one based on property (Bjo Ghertner, 2010b). This has enhanced the conceptualisation of the poor as outside the sphere of citizenship, and further eroded citizenship-based rights such as provision of water, sanitation and health infrastructure (McFarlane, 2008; Mehta, Allouche, Nicol & Walnycki, 2014; Truelove, 2011). Partha Chatterjee relates this phenomenon to social divergence between ‘civil society’ (comprised of a class of citizens with legitimate rights to urban services) and ‘political society’ (comprising of citizens that are treated as having no legitimate right to the same services) (Chatterjee, 2006), a distinction to which we shall return to in the Discussion.

8 The Delhi Jal Board (2014: 4), the water authority for Delhi, state that “only about 50% of the population of Delhi is having access to sewerage system. Remaining 50% area of NCT Delhi is unsewered”, leaving it unclear whether population or area has been used to arrive at this estimate. However, this estimate alludes to the continued prevalence of problems of wastewater overflow in the city. 9 JJ Clusters are informal settlements on private or public land, and correspond most closely to what is commonly referred to as ‘slums’.

The aforementioned urban processes have contributed to the creation of an unequal wastewaterscape. One example of the under-privileged areas within this wastewaterscape is presented in the following. At the time of research, sewer lines did not exist in the UAC described in this study. Household wastewater was discharged by open drains, meant for storm water evacuation. This included black water as colony households had pit latrines built in such a manner that they were connected to open drains on both sides of the streets. As the pits were filled with water while constructing them, every flush caused a little overflow of black water into the open drains. The drains connected the colony to another unauthorised area upstream as well as to a larger open drain that eventually joins the Shahdara drain downstream and finally the Yamuna river. Administrative responsibility for the wastewater infrastructure in Delhi is shared between (at least eight) different municipal and state agencies. Within the colony, drains were in principle cleaned by scavengers of the Municipal Department of Environment Management Services (DEMS). The staff component of this department in each ward consists of one Senior Sanitary Inspector with one or two Assistant Sanitary Inspectors, as well as a number of Sanitary Guides and a team of scavengers and sweepers; while one to two Sanitary Superintendents, and a Chief Sanitary Inspector represent DEMS at the zonal level.10 In the studied ward, however, several posts, including the one of Senior Sanitary Inspector, were vacant. As can be seen in the map of the colony, Fig. 2, a large open plot is featured to the east of the area. Because an effective solid waste collection system was lacking at the time of research, the plot developed gradually into a large illegal dumping ground. Wastewater from six streets in the colony, including discharge from household septic tanks, that were not connected to the storm water drain of the main road, also accumulated there. 4.3. Situated knowledge of citizens: the practical, health, and social dimensions For residents of the UAC, wastewater is firmly embedded in their everyday lived experience. As, according to inhabitants, scavengers do not come often enough to clean the open drains, especially women spend time almost everyday to clean the stretch of the open drain in front of their house with a hard broom. When drains are blocked, young men are sent by their mothers to remove silt and garbage from the drain along the street with a bamboo stick. Housewives and shop keepers also reported having to stand and control the scavengers' work to make sure cleaning was properly done. The experiences of the residents interviewed and the researcher show that during the monsoon months, the road to the colony becomes frequently deluged in up to two feet of rainwater and wastewater, as the storm water drainage system is already swamped before the downpour by wastewater discharged from the surrounding colonies. As a result, transportation and daily commuting is a serious problem, especially for the majority of residents without own vehicles. Especially men and children going out of the house for work or school11 were affected by overflow in the streets and got physically exposed to wastewater (see also Fig. 3).

10

The National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi is divided into 15 zones. As inhabitants in the UAC were Muslim, and rather traditional in their lifestyles, only one of the interviewed women was working outside the house, and ‘roaming around’ was considered inappropriate for women and girls (cf. Nallari, 2015). 11

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NH

8

5 km

Fig. 1. Location of unauthorised colonies (UAC) and JJ Clusters (smaller size unauthorised settlements) in Delhi in relation to the sewer network.

Interviews with residents as well as personal observations revealed that inside the colony, problems existed throughout the year. Unpaved streets were muddy and uneven, and wastewater partly flowed down the middle of the street, or stagnated in pools. The dirt from wastewater stagnation was regularly described as so prevalent that even in the dry season people could not go outside barefoot. Water pools in the street made walking difficult, and several residents reported falling in the slippery streets. This was especially the case for children passing the open ground in which wastewater accumulates on their way to school. Spoiling school uniforms on the way was a repeated complaint of mothers e a seemingly trivial fact that however meant that women's work load increased considerably, while children might be labelled as ‘dirty’ by classmates, or become clearly recognisable as residents of an unauthorised colony. Where streets had been paved and raised, many houses were below street level (see also Fig. 2). In these paved streets problems had shifted over time. One woman whose house was entered from what was originally the first floor, felt that upgrading streets had been “good for the road, but bad for the house” (Interview, December 2008). The positive side was that overflow in the streets now only happened in the rainy

season, and was not very prominent any more. The negative side was that overflow in low-lying houses had increased substantially in recent years, leading to damages in the foundations of many houses and posing significant difficulties for daily life. A senior woman renting a house in the colony for the previous three years reported how her family was obliged to live on the first floor in the monsoon months, “but to get out of the house we have to go down and get wet” (Interview, December 2008). Where septic tanks were now below street level, latrines were disused, or inhabitants had to empty the septic tanks by hand or by motor pump. If the difference in level was small, latrines were disused in times of heavy rain as water then started flowing into the septic tanks. Disuse of household latrines meant that people had to rely on neighbours to use the toilet. Emptying of septic tanks exposed residents to faecal matter in the worst case, or caused additional expenses for diesel pumps. In both cases residents needed to invest extra time in dealing with the problem. From the interviews it was also discerned that residents experienced health problems, related to an overall lack of cleanliness, and especially the dirtiness of the open space at the eastern side of the colony. Residents recognised stagnating wastewater as both a

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N

School

Mosque

0

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Waste Water-related Problems

Street Surface

Mud Street (kaccha)

Built-up Area

Brick Street

Open Space Surrounding Built-up Area Waste Land

Concrete/Cement Street (pakka)

Waste Water Infrastructure

Waste Water Stagnation Solid Waste Disposal Waste Water Swamp Ground Floor below Street Level

Drain Cess Pool Source: Existing Lay-out Plan (no date); Google Earth (2011), Own Field Mapping (2010)

Draft: Anna Zimmer (2011) Cartography: Department of Geography, University of Bonn

Fig. 2. Map of the unauthorised colony in East Delhi.

nuisance and a severe health risk as it allowed mosquitoes to breed. Discussions also focused on the potability of water; many water taps located in front of houses became submerged when wastewater stagnated. As a consequence, contamination of the drinking water source was an inevitable residential hazard. Wastewater problems are strongly linked to how residents of this UAC perceive their social position within the larger social configuration of urban Delhi. Many of the residents in the UAC complained that the streets were not looking good, and frequently complained about the bad smells emanating from the drains. People interviewed felt disgust living in these conditions and they felt dirty. A housewife in an unpaved street related: “I can clean as much as I want inside; as soon as I go outside I feel dirty” (Interview, December 2008). Moreover, some inhabitants felt

embarrassed in front of guests. A carpenter whose son we met while he was trying to de-block the open drain with a stick told us that: “Outsiders from approved colonies say ‘it stinks so much, how can you live like this’ ” (Interview, October 2009). The dirtiness exposed them to ridicule. A woman who shifted to the colony after her marriage conveyed that: “When our relatives come from UP [Uttar Pradesh] they mock us because it's so dirty” (Interview, December 2008). These statements reflect that the place in the city where people can afford to live in terms of services and infrastructure mirrors the social status of the residents. This explains why residents compare their colony with other areas which they perceive to be in a better position to mobilise state resources and to take ‘extra care’ of their surroundings. As one resident who is a school teacher explained,

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Fig. 3. Road to the investigated colony after heavy rainfall, September 2010 (Source: Zimmer, A).

“This is a 3rd class area, I would prefer to call it 4th class, ( … ) [the neighbouring authorised colony] is 2nd class” (Interview, November 2009). Residents of this colony therefore relate the wastewater situation to the regard others have for them e be it their own extended family or the wider society. In this way, whose wastewater knowledge counts is deeply intertwined with the everyday experience of dealing with wastewater which is in turn embedded in how residents perceive their social position in the city. 4.4. Municipal workers' knowledge: lack of infrastructure or residents' mistakes? There are two themes to the knowledge of municipal workers, the knowledge of the scavengers and that of the sanitary inspectors. Scavengers in particular, even though often socially ostracised due to their caste and perceived dirtiness of their work, have gained significant ‘situated knowledge’ of the wastewaterscape (Loftus, 2007). Interviews first revealed how the topography of East Delhi generally, and more specifically of the investigated area, was not conducive to wastewater evacuation, because the colony's land had been used for brick-making before being sold off and built up. This made the area lower than surrounding streets and prevented easy outflow. Moreover, the open drains, several of which were simply made of compacted soil at the time of the research, created problems for drainage. Their walls would collapse, and solid waste would accumulate in them, frequently causing wastewater stagnation. During interviews the lack of dustbins and solid waste collection points [dalaos] were pointed out. In the absence of a proper solid waste disposal system, residents deposited household garbage in the drains, and on the streets or open plots, from where it easily fell into the drains. This is indicative of how solid and liquid waste flows at a very local level are fundamentally intertwined. According to information received by interviews with municipal workers, infrastructural deficiencies were compounded by lengthy tender procedures for road and drain construction. Tenders had also lapsed in the past because of bad synchronisation with election cycles e when the newly elected political representative took up the issue, the tender had already lapsed. Until December 2012, moreover, it was legally stipulated that the local area development

funds allocated to municipal councillors, members of legislative assembly and members of parliament, were not to be employed for works in UACs, inhibiting further timely and local decision-making on infrastructural needs. The number of sanitary workers allocated to the area was far too small. The official yardstick, which provided for one scavenger per 2500 running feet of drains had not been followed. One reason that was provided for this was the ‘unauthorised’ status of the colonies in the ward. Another reason known to those working here for several years, was that during the delimitation of new municipal wards, the former municipal councillor, who had won elections in the new neighbouring ward, had managed to take the majority of the former staff to his new area. This left the case study ward with a much smaller number of scavengers and sweepers. Therefore, the beat system, where each scavenger is allocated a specific ‘beat’, or number of streets and drains, could not be maintained. Also, corruption in the DEMS was described as rampant. It was claimed that this led, among other things, to a situation where not all the appointed workers would turn up for work, bribing those in charge of the attendance sheet instead. Working conditions were described as unpleasant and internal promotion to the sought after permanent posts was almost impossible and subject to heavy corruption, significantly reducing work motivation. One scavenger complained that “the workers are treated very badly here by our officers. We work here since fourteen years and still are temporary” (Interview, January 2009). Interviewed scavengers repeatedly complained that residents did not cooperate, and the Sanitary Inspector felt residents were “not afraid of the law” (Interview, January 2009). Residents were portrayed as too uneducated to understand their own responsibilities. Official portrayals of residents also related to the way certain households disposed of household garbage in the drains, defying logic and creating problems for themselves. They moreover criticised certain practices, such as unlicensed slaughtering and cattle rearing, as the waste of these activities was blocking the drains. The sanitary inspector characterised residents as backward and uneducated, and often questioned their civic sense. He was unhappy about the work environment in the unauthorised colony: “… whenever I reach here from my house I feel tense ( … ) in the authorised colonies there are facilities so there is no tension” (Interview, January 2009). This sentiment was shared by

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The colony of east Delhi presented a complex social organisation around problems of wastewater overflow. In this section, it is argued that part of this complexity is reduced in the Board's domain of policy and regulatory practice. The reasons underlying this are partly related to the rationale for the Board's inception and ascendance into an expert authority on matters of pollution. The Board was originally founded under the Water Prevention and Control of Pollution Act, 1974 (Gazette of India, 1974), designed to coordinate water quality management and restoration throughout India. Under the 1974 Water Act, the main mechanism for pollution monitoring and abatement was the inception of the Board (Reich & Bowonder, 1992). Over the years, the Board has accumulated significant claims to expertise, as an exclusive body for coordinating water quality restoration programmes throughout India including the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) and Yamuna Action Plan (YAP) (CPCB, 2007; CSE, 2007). Furthermore, it has played a central role in the design and enforcement of water quality standards, and in providing technical assistance to city and district authorities on how to implement related policies (CPCB, 2008). The Board's Pollution Assessment, Monitoring and Survey (PAMS) division takes up those functions more closely related to wastewater assessment. PAMS coordinates India's national water quality monitoring programme. It was originally set up in Delhi in 1976 with 18 stations for collecting water quality samples along the river Yamuna that crosses Delhi. The programme has been gradually extended; in 1989, there were 324 monitoring stations; by 2001, 784 stations (CPCB, 2009). Water quality monitoring therefore constitutes an important arena of knowledge associated with the Board's advisory role on the management of untreated wastewater in cities. The monitoring process provides insights into scientists' ways of categorising the wastewaterscape, constructing different ways of separating and grouping elements of wastewater planning and control (Bouleau, 2014). One entry point for exploring how expert visibilities around wastewater are constructed is the Board's Designated Best Use (DBU) framework for planning water quality restoration programmes, which organises water quality restoration on the basis of achieving a range of desired human uses. This concept was envisaged as a tool to help prioritise pollution control activities. Given the very large number of water bodies in India, it is supposed to be cost effective and provide concrete guidelines for regulators and

policy makers. A direct outcome of this process has been a nationwide water quality monitoring network for classifying water bodies according to their designated best uses. The information is regularly collected, analysed and published in official reports that inform interventions. River action plans (e.g. the Yamuna Action Plan) are partly designed based on this approach. Despite the DBU purpose to simplify the work of decision makers, it needs to be examined for the particular rhetorical13 functions that it serves. The first is deciding what is regarded as ‘credible’ sources of information for assessing wastewater. The prominence ascribed to physico-chemical criteria such as ‘biological oxygen demand’ and ‘dissolved oxygen’ helps to define wastewater almost entirely as a technical issue. Secondly, the socially constructed technicality of wastewater becomes affirmed through the emphasis of the Board's scientists on measuring the criteria numerically. A senior scientist leading the Board's monitoring programmes said “our power is that we have the data, people come to us for information” (Interview, November 2009). The rhetorical function that numbers serve requires a more cautious examination of their use in expert advisory systems (Porter, 1995). The objective quantitative methods do not simply reflect the technical requirements of researching complex subjects; they also have an important role to play in protecting experts against charges of ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘subjectivity’. More so in the case of the Board with its regulatory functions that necessitate the production of an image of authority and of control over the evidence used to inform decision-making. Quantification in this context further offers a framework which is both rigid enough (i.e. in that it refers only to numerical information) and highly standardised (presenting monitoring criteria as a legitimate tool for decision-making), and which is used to cultivate trust in the organisation. However, what is at stake here is the disclosure of a number of uncertainties and inherent subjectivities associated with the monitoring process by claiming the support of science while it becomes impossible to reconcile alternative assessments of wastewater (i.e. such as those described at the level of the UAC). Water quality testing points are designed to capture water quality trends at the level of the ‘river basin’, and as a result do not capture the locations where people have direct contact with wastewater. Part of the reason why the focus on the river basin remains dominant is because it is validated through science. However, at the same time the emphasis on the river basin reflects critical omissions of information necessary for wastewater management. The view that “our role is to monitor rivers, and slums are not our responsibility” (Interview, November 2009) held by the Board's water quality monitoring scientist partly confirms the prominence of river basin concerns, while disregarding problems of wastewater manifested in specific locales. Although the Board does not operate independently, but as part of a combination of various city and national level institutions, we find that political, legal and policy reforms such as the Water Act, 1974, have shaped in important ways how water quality restoration programmes are administered. As a consequence, the Board's expert advisory roles have become effectively narrowed down to monitoring only certain regions, and only those issues that are more closely related to the scientific mandate of the organisation, while municipal bodies, and private firms merely play the role of supervising and implementing bodies of water quality restoration programmes.

12 Valmiki is the traditional scavenger caste, one of the scheduled castes, and considered especially low in the Hindu social stratification.

13 We use this term here to refer to the type of discourses used to inform, persuade, or motivate particular actions with regards to wastewater management.

scavengers, who also disliked the work environment. Yet, their reasons were different, as they complained about experiencing social ostracism. One scavenger who belonged, like the vast majority of scavengers, to the Valmiki caste12 related: “[Residents here] don't even give us water to drink, they treat us as untouchables. If they give us water, they pour it from very high” (Interview, January 2009). The situation resulting from wastewater overflow in the colony is part of a discourse of “seeing the slum, seeing pollution” (Ghertner, 2010b:145). This discourse emphasises the way the slum is ‘seen’, i.e. the state and outside knowledge of the slum. UAC residents are viewed as an uncooperative class of citizens and this is intertwined with a discourse that sees individuals and groups in the colony as less clean, less educated or less hygienic (a point that we further elaborate in the discussion). 4.5. Expert knowledge and the wastewaterscape: the river and its designated best use

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5. Discussion In this article we have focused on analysing the wastewaterscape in order to capture issues of wastewater disposal in a metropolis of the global South. The waterscape notion has been a useful conceptual lens from which to start, since it allowed us to position wastewater disposal firmly within material and discursive processes. Our case study insights support that the waterscape concept can benefit from incorporating broader questions of wastewater and its disposal. This study also aligns with recent strands of research that draw attention to the politicisation of waste in a global South context (cf. Myers, 2014; Zimmer, 2015a) by showing how wastewater disposal is intertwined with its own contextual specificities. We have used knowledge as an analytical lens for showing both the material and the discursive dimensions of urban wastewater flows. This focus has brought to the fore different accounts of wastewater as well as issues pertaining to its disposal, particularly at the local level. An important result is that the systemic exposure of poorer urban citizens to untreated wastewater cannot be attributed to the shortcomings of service delivery alone, but is partly produced by the difference in legitimacy of contrasting accounts of wastewater e and thus the power relations in which these accounts are embedded. The distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society suggested by Chatterjee (2006) is important for understanding this difference since it brings attention to the way the modern state shapes the production of different categories of citizens. The residents of the unauthorised colony can otherwise be described as falling within Chatterjee's notion of a political society14 and were often portrayed as ‘uncooperative’, ‘uneducated’ or ‘dirty’ by municipal workers. There is a politics of preference in managing wastewater in the city which is tied to the issue of knowledge representation. The lack of appropriate interventions to the problems of wastewater overflow do not persist only because of the contests of knowledge described in this article. However, as we have shown, the discursive environment created by local state representatives in the UAC plays an important role in de-legitimising people's experience-based perceptions, practices and local needs. At the national level as well, the current system does not provide sufficient scope for nontechnical descriptions of wastewater impacts to have the same level of legitimacy as those that are validated through expert scientific institutions such as the Board. The scientific experts' view of wastewater remains influential, and frequently finds its way into policy documents, directing substantial flows of public expenditure to address the pollution of major river systems. Citizens' knowledge as well as the knowledge of municipal workers is rarely valued by governments, and not used to formulate interventions. In our view, effectively putting exposure of residents to wastewater on the political agenda in such a context thus appears to be impossible without recognising that the wastewaterscape is an arena of intense struggle and politics. In the Delhi context, these struggles are also related to larger class divides (Chatterjee, 2006; Fernandes, 2006). In this sense, the experiences of wastewater at the level of the UAC are illustrative of how inequalities in the wastewaterscape have been amplified “within the place and those connections that stretch beyond it” (Massey, 1999: 22), and particularly by relations of gender and class (Truelove, 2011). Finally, it was observed that partly because of the pre-occupation of

14 While we find that this distinction is relevant here, recent work has also brought attention to the fact that Chatterjee's distinction between civil and political society may in fact be more blurred than originally suggested (Baviskar & Sundar, 2008; Mehta, Allouche, Nicol & Walnycki, 2014).

the modern state with wealthier middle class segments of society and their aspiration to inhabit sanitised urban spaces (Fernandes, 2004, 2006:2044), poorer urban citizens are increasingly forced to fend for themselves while due to their sense of lack of representation in urban political life there remains little hope for the amelioration of their grievances. 6. Conclusion To conclude, the presented findings add to a growing body of work on waterscapes by showing how questions of wastewater production and disposal can be better integrated in such research (Baviskar, 2007; McFarlane, 2012; Mehta & Karpouzoglou, 2015; Myers, 2014; Swyngedouw, 1999, 2004; Swyngedouw, Kaika & Castro, 2002). Moreover, links can be drawn to studies on urban water specifically as well as UPE debates more broadly through this study's more substantive articulation of knowledge interplay in the €rkman, 2014; Castro, 2004; Lawhon, Ernstson wastewaterscape (Bjo & Silver, 2014; Zimmer, 2012b). This study has gone some way towards understanding issues of wastewater politicisation and knowledge contestation in a systematic way through a meta-synthesis of two different empirical case studies, one UAC and the Central Pollution Control Board, investigated in Delhi. The meta-synthesis supports that while UAC residents have developed a detailed situated knowledge about wastewater-related problems in their living environment, this knowledge is on the one hand delegitimised by local municipal staff on the grounds of inhabitants' supposed lack of education and problematic livelihoods and solid waste practices. Improvements are portrayed as impossible to reach due to lack of cooperation by the residents. The study thus provides evidence to the pervasive belief that poorer residents of the city are more responsible for their exposure to environmental problems than the middle classes (Njeru, 2006). On the other hand, citizens' knowledge e and the realities it translates e disappear from the agenda of scientific experts, and hence policy-makers at the national level, as the wastewater problematic is gauged through technical parameters of pollution of fresh water through wastewater at the level of the river alone. This shifts the focus of political interventions away from the daily exposure to wastewater that presents major risks to the health, well-being and dignity of urban residents. Finally, the approach chosen in this paper, combining an analysis of the waterscape with insights on the ways knowledge and power are interwoven, has provided evidence that the production of uneven urban environments hinges on the knowledge politics involved. Very importantly, the particular relationship between social status, urban space and knowledge which we have illustrated is hardly ever made explicit in the formulation of seemingly technical policies to address untreated wastewater. It must be explicitly recognised, therefore that in this context, re-configuring the positioning of science, as one of several important knowledge systems, is fundamentally a political enterprise (Allen, 2003:146). This relates most obviously to recognising the underlying power relationships that prevent poorer citizens from having a greater voice in the management of wastewater in the city. Acknowledgements The original research for this article was supported by a Doctoral research grant from the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) (for Timothy Karpouzoglou) linked to the project “Peri-urban interface and sustainability in South Asian cities” at the STEPS Centre, the University of Sussex, and a Doctoral scholarship from the € ll-Foundation (for Anna Zimmer). The ideas expressed Heinrich-Bo in this article draw from an Institute of Development Studies

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