118 ESSENTIAL RESOURCES
increased (at least for settlers) but also by constantly helping settlers get
access despite and beyond the practices and rules of city engineers. It is
because the public system is liable to the pressure from councillors and a
range of other urban experts that settlers have opposed projects that seek
to make private companies responsible for water distribution in the city.
Nevertheless, like the water networks of many urban agglomerations,
Mumbai’s water system is not sustainable. This is not as much because
of growing urban populations (which have stabilized, as per the last cen-
sus), as it is because of the leakages that permeate Mumbai’s pipe network
(Anand 2015). Part of this leakage is in fact not wastage at all. Denied
access to legal connections, many settlers make illegal connections. Yet
the aging infrastructure also periodically ruptures, and engineers deal with
tens of thousands of leakage reports every year. City engineers in Mum-
bai, like hydraulic engineers in other cities in the world, are constantly
troubled by the materiality and epistemology of leakages; leakages that
threaten the viability and sustainability of the city’s water system. (see
Anand 2015).
F U L L H O U S E
As a hydraulic regime saturated with public, communal, and private inter-
ests, the water network in Mumbai is full of difficult relations between
the politics of technologies and the technologies of politics (Anand 2011).
Diverse authorities, materialities, and political claims govern its working
in everyday life. As engineers design connections and manage its flows on
a daily basis, they are constantly challenged in their ability to rule the sys-
tem by the obduracy not only of politicians and the shouting public but
also by the materiality of the city’s water network. Settlers, meanwhile,
work hard not just to get a reliable supply of water through the recogni-
tion of councillors and social workers, they also struggle to get counted
as deserving biopolitical citizens on their own terms, without the help
of patrons in the settlements. Finally, people living in agrarian homes
beyond the city often find their lives made harder by the ever growing
water demands of the city, the increased consumption patterns of urban
residents, and the desires of city and federal officials to improve urban
infrastructure by expanding and extending its reach.
In such a world of compromised relations, of diverging and differen-
tiated interests, how is it possible to balance the competing governance
values of voice and reflexivity in the city? The accreted histories, materials,