The fragmented water supply in Shimla, India. Photo Credit: Naomi Hazarika
Assistant Professor
Yaffa Truelove and Professor
Jennifer Fluri have been awarded a Government of India SPARC grant in collaboration with Dr. Anu Sabhlok and Dr. Ritajyoti Bandopadhyay at the Indian Institute of Science, Education, and Research (IISER) Mohali. This grant will fund a two-year research project titled “Assembly the City: Gender and Utility Infrastructures in Northern India.” Unavailable, unaffordable, and unreliable water infrastructure remains a problem across the globe that has become exacerbated and more visible with recent climate events. Such water crises do not simply present moments of infrastructural breakdown, disconnection, and/or water scarcity in the context of a warming climate, but also reveal simultaneous crises of
water inequity and
social inequality. This project will investigate the intersecting gender, caste, and class inequities associated with water infrastructure in medium-sized cities in North India, including Shimla and Chandigarh. In India, more than 100 million people live in primarily medium-sized cities that are predicted to go "waterless" (experiencing periodic episodes of piped water running out) over the next decade. Critically, gender, caste, and class identities are associated with unequal access to water infrastructure. Furthermore, significant populations of the urban poor and marginalized groups on the peripheries of cities have been denied a legal right to piped water, and must piece together insufficient and fragmented water supplies on an everyday basis. As both Shimla and Chandigarh have “smart city” missions in their urban planning aimed to improve the functioning of water and sewerage, this research will investigate the lived experiences of these new modalities of water governance and their associated technologies and infrastructure in the city, examining their uneven impacts on marginalized gender, caste, and class groups. This research builds on Dr. Yaffa Truelove’s and Dr. Sabhlok’s previous research in Shimla India on gendered infrastructural violence and embodied experiences of water inequality, and brings in the expertise of Dr. Jennifer Fluri on gender, international development, and South Asia, as well as Dr. Ritajyoti Bandopadhyay’s expertise on infrastructure, informality and caste inequities.
