Introduction

Institutional Reforms, Bureaucratic Agency, and Inequality

The governance of water encompasses a vast set of issues that include meeting the basic demands of citizenship by providing safe and accessible drinking water, managing agricultural and industrial needs for water resources, maintaining and expanding water infrastructure, and responding to crises that stem from droughts and floods (Ballabh 2008). In contemporary India, competing demands over water and decades of inadequate governance have transformed water into a site for significant political conflicts within localities, between state governments, among users (for instance rural and urban communities), and between the state and citizens (see Asthana and Shukla 2014; Bandyopadhyay 2016; Baviskar 2005; Cullet 2009; Iyer 2015; Mohan, Routray, and Sashikumar 2010; Shah and Vijayshankar 2016). The challenges for water governance have only intensified as unplanned urbanization and industrial investment, along with the impacts of climate change, produce new strains on water resources.

The governance of water in postliberalization India rests at the conjuncture of two processes. On the one hand, national and local regulatory reforms (in keeping with dominant global norms) have identified privatization and decentralization as the central pillars for the effective management of water resources.³ Institutional and economic reforms produce new forms of centralization that are an integral part of the policies being implemented. An understanding of how this process works requires a broadening of the concept of centralization that moves beyond spatialized conceptions of a center-state framework of governance. Spatialized conceptions tend to associate centralization with an upward devolution of power from the local, state, and central governments. However, in practice, the dynamics of centralization have more to do with the concentration of power, authority, and control over resources. For instance, effective regulatory processes of the central government are necessary for successful processes of decentralization. Regulatory frameworks from the central government are necessary for effective governance and are distinct from centralized modes of state authority. Meanwhile, the concentration of authority over resources by state governments can intensify centralized state authority at the local level by strengthening vertical mechanisms of state power over local communities. Furthermore, such local governance structures can also reproduce the hierarchical relationship between social groups (often based on caste, gender, and religion) within civil society.

Recent scholarship has illustrated the ways in which state governments have sought to limit the autonomy of local governments, thus curtailing decentralization at the local level (Lobo, Sahu, and Shah 2014; Sangita 2014; Sharma and Swenden 2017; Vaddiraju 2014). State governments have increasingly sought to curtail the decentralization of power to local governments and have often either blocked or reoriented reforms in ways that have reinforced the concentration of authority within the institutions of state government. This concentration of state authority is organized around the growing power of state governments and the realm of city-centered modes of urban governance in particular. At one level, state governments are able to exercise political and institutional control over local governments through the control of finances and the appointment of officials (Sangita 2014, 88). At another level, the postliberalization economic model has produced new forms of centralized power within states. Political scientist Anil Kumar Vaddiraju has noted that state governments consolidate their own authority within state capitals and do not decentralize the control over decision-making and resources to the third level of local governance (2014, 101). While the ideational model of economic reforms proposes a reduced role of the state both by restraining state intervention in the economy and by promoting political and economic decentralization, such processes in fact produce new forms of the centralization of power that occurs at various spatial scales. For example, an increase of centralization occurred through the increasing power of chief ministers (Manor 2016). In other words, centralization is not simply about the concentration of power at the largest scale of government (the central government) but about processes of centralization that are reworked across multiple scales of state authority.

State capitals are an example of a central locus of new modes of urban governance in which state authority is located and centralized in the postliberalization period (Sassen 2001). Such sites of urban governance are instances of the new state spaces that are a central technology of state power in the context of contemporary processes of globalization (Brenner 2004). While this book is about urban bureaucratic governance, its implications are of relevance to scholars interested in local programs of decentralization. Its analysis of urban governance is not framed as a territorialized image of a city bureaucracy; rather, it is a systemic analysis of the redistribution and reconsolidation of state power. Its account of city bureaucracy is as much a story about rural India as about the challenges of urbanization and urban governance. Programs and policies of decentralization that can range from formal governmental programs of centralization to grassroots community-based models of governance take root in conjunction with these centralized processes. The languages and programs of decentralization in effect mask this centralization of state power.

Reforms of the governance of water produce a redistribution of state power that is shaped by the ascendancy of a city-based model of development. Water reforms provide a rich case for a systematic analysis of these processes of centralization. Some reforms encode some city-oriented state agencies with new forms of centralized authority, while policies of decentralization target small towns and rural areas in ways that both reflect the political and economic weaknesses of and intensify the control of state governmental authorities of these areas. In this process, regulatory reform is transformed into a process of regulatory extraction that encodes relationships of power both within and between urban and rural communities. While dominant rural groups continue to hold both socioeconomic power and political power in terms of electoral calculations of political parties, the urban-oriented effects of liberalization intensify the divisions and inequalities between urban and rural communities. In this transition, the state does not abandon but restructures its welfarist framework. The regulatory state thus produces a redistributive shift that accentuates long-standing socioeconomic inequalities while deepening new divides between larger urban areas and smaller rural and urban towns. Research on comparative urban localities in India has revealed systematic patterns of urban appropriation of water that was primarily used for agricultural purposes (Celio, Scott, and Giordano 2010; Punjabi and Johnson 2018). Varying institutional arrangements shape such patterns of appropriation. This book provides an in-depth analysis of how such institutional patterns are being shaped by reforms of the governance of water.

Such patterns of institutional change have been shaped by the national dynamics of India’s centralized model of federalism (Sharma and Swenden 2017). This has meant that domestic political processes and institutions have shaped reforms in ways that refashion or compromise idealized norms of the regulatory state (Dubash and Morgan 2013; Jenkins 2004; Manor 2004; Mooij 2005). Analyses of the limits of regulatory reform in India have focused on the ways in which domestic political processes, institutional resistances, and corruption serve as roadblocks to institutional reform.⁴ While building on the insights of such scholarship, this book also questions the presumption that regulatory reform would lead to decentralization if not for the constraints of preexisting political, socioeconomic, and institutional interests and resistances. Academic and public narratives on bureaucratic corruption and politicized institutional dysfunction often inadvertently produce an argument of Indian exceptionalism. In such a conception, it is the specificities of the Indian political and institutional context that hinder an idealized model of reform from being effectively implemented. While domestic political factors and bureaucratic resistance and corruption remain an integral part of an explanation of why regulatory reform falters in India (Bussell 2012), they do not fully account for the ways in which the centralizing policies inherent in the policies of institutional and economic reform produce regulatory failures. In order to move away from such assumptions of Indian exceptionalism, a more complex analysis of bureaucratic agency is needed. Analysis of the ways in which bureaucrats are themselves enmeshed in such broader and differentiated institutional political and socioeconomic fields (Bourdieu 1994) opens up the conceptual space for an understanding of the structural constraints on bureaucrats and the ways in which bureaucrats seek to navigate them. Bureaucrats are complex actors who have often sought to effectively carry out their regulatory responsibilities. However, hierarchies and structures of power within the broader field of state institutions curtail the potential for effective bureaucratic action.

By focusing on the fine-grained texture of how state water institutions work and how institutional reforms produce and reproduce new forms of extractive relationships, this book contributes to an understanding of how inequalities are produced in the postliberalization period. A sizable body of scholarship has illustrated the ways in which access to water resources is shaped by long-standing intersecting inequalities of caste, class, and gender (Ballabh 2008; Mehta 2013). Anthropological scholarship in particular has yielded rich understandings of how state power and inequality intersect in metropolitan cities such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, Calcutta, and Chennai (Anand 2017; Björkman 2015; Coelho 2017; Dasgupta 2015). Such findings are borne out in my research on institutional reform. What such research points to is a need to understand the relationship between institutional reforms, domestic political processes, and the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities such as caste, class, and gender. What is at stake here is not the conclusion that water resources are not distributed in an equitable manner or that inequality is produced or reproduced through water distribution systems. Rather, the point at hand is to understand how institutional reforms are shaped by such inequalities and how inequalities are produced by institutional practices. The reworking of centralized state power through regulatory reforms provides the new institutional nodes for such processes of extraction and the reproduction of the enduring forms of inequality that have characterized contemporary India.

Concerns about water scarcity and phenomena such as the overextraction of groundwater in India have produced major governmental reports and proposed regulatory frameworks at the national level. Mihir Shah’s (2016) report on the restructuring of two key institutions, the Central Water Commission (CWC) and the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), for instance, presents a broad and intensive assessment of the challenges of water governance and a need for a paradigm shift in the state’s approach to water resources. The report provides a comprehensive overview of the need for an institutional framework that can address varied and complex challenges, such as the need to increase irrigation efficiency, address pollution, deepen participatory decentralization, rejuvenate rivers, develop sufficient sewage treatment facilities for cities, broaden the disciplinary training of water bureaucrats, and address the growing effects of climate change.

In the midst of the report’s outline of this vast set of challenges and institutional responses, three points merit foregrounding. First, while the report is tasked with addressing the reform of the two centralized institutions, the CWC and CGWB, the role of state governments in meeting governance challenges remains a cornerstone for the implementation of any proposed reforms. The report points to the need to “incentivise and facilitate” state governments’ reforms (43). Second, the report argues that a paradigm shift in the governance of water requires a break from long-standing bureaucratic frameworks that approach water governance through “techno-centric supply-side interventions implemented top-down by fragmented bureaucracies, involving mostly technology, engineering and public investment in water infrastructure” (21). Finally, while substantial parts of the report are devoted to irrigation, it notes that in the context of expanding processes of urbanization and industrialization, it has become increasingly critical for national institutions such as the CWC to adopt “a holistic view of the often competing and conflicting demands of urban and rural areas, as also agriculture and industry” (16). A focused analysis of the role of state governmental is thus critical for an understanding of the governance of water in twentieth-century India.

Tamil Nadu provides a rich case for an analysis of institutional reforms. The state embodies a key site for an analysis of the historical emergence of both India’s water bureaucracy and the political and economic structures of the colonial and developmental state. Such historical processes have shaped the regional political economy of water in southern India in ways that are illustrative of the strains on the federal governance of water. The historical significance of the state allows for an analysis of the historical continuities that shape and constrain postliberalization reforms. Among Indian states, Tamil Nadu has been a leader in implementing global and national reforms centered on the principles of decentralization and privatization (Harriss and Wyatt 2019). However, the state’s reform agendas have been shaped by a strong water bureaucracy that has incorporated processes of decentralization within its centralized bureaucracy. The Tamil Nadu case is emblematic of national patterns. An analysis of the state’s institutional reforms shows how long-standing bureaucratic structures retain and reconsolidate their authority in the context of reforms that have been changing the governance of water in the postliberalization period.

India’s State in the Postliberalization Era and the Case of Water

A sizable set of scholarly debates now exist on the nature of the Indian state in the postliberalization period. Scholarship on contemporary India has sought to understand and explain the nature of the changes in the political economy of the liberalizing state and to account for the weight of historical continuities that have reproduced older legacies of state power and authority despite the rhetoric of change and reform in recent decades. Such scholarship has been centered on three central theoretical frames and substantive themes that have sought to grasp the nature of state authority, institutions, and power in India. First, a large body of work has focused on understanding and assessing the shift from the developmental to the regulatory state in the postliberalization period. Such work has focused on how reforms have intersected with Indian federalism and on the potential of local state governmental policy action and innovation. A second line of inquiry has focused on the question of state capacity and effectiveness and has addressed the need for adequate institutional mechanisms to address vast socioeconomic and political challenges. The third line of inquiry has demonstrated the ways in which reforms have expanded the space for the capture of the state by private interests in ways that have intensified the inequalities and exclusions of citizenship and civil society.

Each of these frameworks captures a key dimension of the nature of state power in liberalizing India. The governance of water provides the rich terrain that allows for an understanding of each these facets of state authority and power, all of which are critical elements of the institutional framework that governs water and water-related infrastructure in India. However, while these dimensions are necessary for an understanding of water governance, they are not sufficient for a full understanding of the fault lines of the water bureaucracy. Rather, the case of water governance compels us to move a step further in order to consider how the process of reforms contains within it a set of structural contradictions that obstruct the very kinds of changes that such reforms espouse and promise. For instance, from such a perspective, the story of the remaking of the Indian state is not one of an idealized model of reforms that is shortchanged by historical legacies of state control and corruption or the capture of the state by private interests or domestic political constraints. Rather, the political economy of the liberalizing state is founded on a set of contradictions that are contained within the reforms being implemented. In the case of water governance, the effective functioning of regulatory institutions is constrained by economic pressures produced by broader sets of economic policies that are undertaken by the central and state governments and by a set of underlying centralizing imperatives that are built into processes of institutional and economic reform.

Let us consider first how the case of water governance informs an understanding of these facets of the postliberalization state. In the initial period of reforms, scholarly work focused on the positive potential of the shift from India’s command-oriented developmental state to a new regulatory state (L. Rudolph and S. Rudolph 2001). This shift was in fact borne out by an increasingly active role of state governments in pursuing various policies of economic reform and drawing in private investment. In this vein, scholarship on the political economy of liberalizing India has produced in-depth comparative studies of state governments, pointing, for example, to variations between states and the increasingly visible role of some chief ministers in this capacity (Sinha 2005; Jenkins 2004).⁵ In subsequent phases of the reform period, scholarly work began to call attention to the problems with the emerging regulatory state. Writing about the limits of the technocratic model of institutional transplantation that has been shaping new regulatory state structures, social scientists Navroz Dubash and Bronwen Morgan have argued that the external imposition of institutional norms and structures often operate as “shells” that conceal the domestic political and institutional practices that substantively shape policies and regulatory practices (2013, 8). Such work has pointed to the slow pace and challenges of implementing reforms and developing regulatory institutions for key sectors in the economy, such as electricity and telecom (Dubash and Morgan 2013).

The political, socioeconomic, and material nature of water is such that the governance of water illuminates such debates on the state in distinctive ways. Water involves the administration not just of a natural resource but of infrastructure. Water-related infrastructure unsettles the boundaries between the needs of traditional sectors of the economy (e.g., agriculture); sectors in the new economy, given that new industries that rely on water resources have expanded through private investment (both domestic and transnational); and the basic livelihood of citizens. The infrastructural needs of water make it a more representative case for the study of infrastructural politics than sectors that are either fully associated with the new economy (such as telecom) or those that have been more visibly associated with India’s postreform model of accelerated economic growth, such as high-speed rail and highways. Furthermore, the historical weight of water-related infrastructure and institutions distinguishes the case of water from relatively new industries such as telecom, pharmaceuticals, and information technology, which are often central cases of analysis for social science research on postliberalization India. The case of water thus corrects for the methodological bias in social scientific analyses and assessments of reforms and the postliberalization state that rests on analyses of industries that are part of the new economy and that do not illuminate the historical conditions that shape the politics and political economy of state institutions. Finally, while the cross-sectoral nature of water is closer to the case of electricity, it is in many ways more enmeshed in the everyday fabric of life, as it involves a basic resource for human survival in ways that distinctively center conflicts over citizenship rights and questions of inequality within matters of governance.

In addition to its infrastructural dynamics, water cuts across territorial divisions of state administrative structures. In contrast to sectors such as electricity, telecom, or land, which have garnered much attention from political scientists writing about reforms, water unsettles the boundaries between states. The nature of water is such that it also unsettles the conventional methodological approach to the political economy of the liberalizing Indian state that has deployed a comparative analysis of state governments and their policies. In line with dominant methodological norms of political science, such work has adapted comparative methods to the creation of comparisons between states and state governments within India. This approach presumes discrete territorial boundaries of states and a territorialized analytical framework of the authority of state governments. The vast purview of interstate relations, negotiations, and conflicts that play out over the sharing of both water resources and water-related infrastructure exceeds the constraints of this methodological approach. In particular, the methodological terms of this comparative approach have produced significant gaps in understandings of both the nature and effects of reforms on the state and on the nature of federalism in the postreform period.

The dynamics of federalism that play out in the case of governance over water and water-related infrastructure also complicate the conventional narrative regarding the shift from the developmental to the regulatory state. The governance of water in India cuts across the various levels of federal authority in complex ways, as water has been under the purview of local, state governmental, and central governmental authority. Within India’s constitutional framework, water has been under the authority of both central and state governments. While water was listed on the State List so that governance of water and water-related infrastructure was designated as a state subject, water was also simultaneously listed on the Union List of the constitution with a particular designation that both the Parliament and the Supreme Court had authority over interstate disputes.⁶ The effective meaning of this constitutional designation has been that all practical matters regarding water have been under the administrative purview of state governments. The central government and Supreme Court have in practice been primarily focused on attempting to manage disputes between states, once interstate negotiations have broken down and intensified into full-scale conflicts. A decentralized framework of state authority was thus already established as a foundation for the governance of water. The effective practical authority over water supplies, distribution, and infrastructure also rested with state governments.

This did not, of course, mean that the command-oriented nature of the developmental state did not affect the control of water. The command of water resources for irrigation and the focus on agricultural productivity and the use of large-scale water infrastructure projects such as dams were central elements of the twentieth-century state developmental agendas (Frankel 2015; Prakash 1999). The technical, political, and socioeconomic approaches of state governments were shaped in significant ways by national policy frameworks and planning mechanisms of the central government. In recent years, the central government has been focused on ways of deepening national planning and central government regulatory mechanisms that can more effectively manage water resources and water-related infrastructure. For instance, in 2016, the Ministry for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation put forward three major frameworks—the National Water Framework Bill, a model bill for the Conservation, Protection, Regulation and Management of Groundwater, and a report called A 21st Century Institutional Architecture for India’s Water Reforms (Shah 2016). Meanwhile, the central government’s initiation of the massive national interlinking river project embodies a reassertion of a centralized framework of state authority over rivers. Nevertheless, local state governments remain powerful actors in the governance over and control of water. The tensions inherent in this balancing and rebalancing of federal authority provide a rich terrain for an analysis of the dynamics of federalism and the tensions between centralization and decentralization in the postliberalization period.

An analysis of interstate disputes in southern India reveals the ways in which such dynamics turn on a paradox of state capacity. In the case of water, historically produced institutional weaknesses have been deepened by new pressures over water resources that stem from economic growth and the competitive framework of economic reforms that has pushed state governments to rapidly vie for private investment. Decentralization in effect marks a deep-seated form of state incapacity, as the central government has failed to provide adequate regulatory mechanisms for the management of regional and interstate water sharing. The regulatory failures of the central government are symptomatic of institutional incapacities that persist in contemporary India (Corbridge et al. 2005; Ganguly and Thompson 2017). However, such forms of state scarcity should not be conflated with processes of decentralization and privatization. This apparent weakness of the state conceals underlying centralizing processes that shape the ways in which the state commands water resources.⁷ Such forms of centralization range from the assertion of local state governmental power over water and water-related infrastructure to the increasing control of metropolitan city governmental power over water to the assertion of competing centralized institutions such as the Supreme Court when the central government has failed in its regulatory role.

The mechanisms of centralization are also often underanalyzed when state incapacities are conflated with the second key feature of reforms, the project of privatization. Various forms of privatization have often taken root not as a planned policy of reforms but as a consequence of the weakness of state capacity (Kapur and Ramamurti 2002). In this context, state incapacities have meant that the state’s inability to provide adequate access to necessities such as water or electricity has compelled citizens to use privatized strategies to meet their needs. Markets, in this context, are an effect of state shortcomings rather than an effective implementation of principles of economic reform. The question of state capacity is particularly significant for a careful understanding of how the principle of privatization has taken root in the context of water reforms. While the principle of privatization of water has become a key dominant global and national principle of reforms, in practice, privatization and the emergence of water markets have been symptomatic of various forms of state incapacity. In many instances, such incapacities produce illegal shadow state networks such as “water mafias.”⁸ The case of Tamil Nadu illustrates the ways in which private water markets emerge either through new forms of centralized city-based governance or as a substitute for state failures in providing adequate water supplies to citizens.

What is distinctive about the transformation of water governance in the postliberalization period is thus not the extent of the formal privatization of water resources. The water sector has, in fact, received relatively limited private sector investment. Indeed, processes of privatization in the water sector instead exemplify the relationships of state-based patronage, extraction, and rent-seeking that have long been a feature of the Indian state and that have been reconstituted in the postliberalization era (Bardhan 2014; Chandra 2015; Gupta 2012). Long-standing forms of state-based patronage have been reconfigured through new state–private sector relations in the postliberalization period. Such forms of patronage form a set of state practices that stem from new forms of state power that have emerged in the postliberalization period. New regulatory practices and points of state-controlled gatekeeping have replaced the old structures of the state-managed economy (Chandra 2015, 48). Such relations produce a nexus between the state on the one hand and private capital and business interests on the other (Jaffrelot, Kohli, and Murali 2019; Sinha 2005; Gupta and Sivaramakrishnan 2011). The result of this nexus between the state and private capital and the practices and patterns of rent-seeking and extraction subsequently lead to the inequities of citizenship that have been the subject of a wealth of research on the relationship between the state and civil society. Such work has provided significant insights into the ways in which citizens experience the state in a range of everyday realms (Corbridge et al. 2005; Chatterjee 2006). Citizens from less privileged groups shaped by inequities of caste, class, gender, and religion inevitably bear the brunt of a state that is captive to patronage, dominant socioeconomic interests, and graft.

While the governance of water is illustrative of the ways in which the state is embedded in relationships of patronage and private interests, a more complex set of institutional dynamics is at play. The water bureaucracy and the new regulatory institutions that have been established in the postliberalization period exemplify but are not reducible to such relationships of extraction and patronage. India’s water bureaucracy consists of a complex institutional field that necessitates an examination of both variations within the bureaucracy and the complexities of the agency of state organizations and their bureaucrats. The dynamics of the captured state (whether by business or patronage politics) that are key elements of the postliberalization state coexist with state institutional structures that do attempt to engage in the kinds of regulatory practices that are invoked by idealized models of reform. An adequate understanding of how the state is compromised, captured, or incapacitated necessitates an understanding of how public institutions become co-opted by rent-seeking practices and organized interests.

A thick analysis of the complex and variegated institutional field of the water bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu reveals that water reforms that are designed to decentralize and improve state regulatory mechanisms in effect produce a redistribution of institutional power within the bureaucratic field of water institutions. For instance, reforms encode some city-oriented state agencies with new forms of centralized authority. Thus, some state water organizations wield considerably less power than other local state developmental institutions in ways that strain the regulatory capacity of the water bureaucracy. Meanwhile, city-based water bureaucracies gain centralized control while policies of decentralization target small towns and rural areas in ways that both reflect the political and economic weaknesses of and intensify the control of local state governmental authorities of these areas. In this process, regulatory reform is transformed into a process of differential decentralization that conceals the deeper forms of centralized state control that are embedded in frameworks of local governments. This restructuring of institutional power then enables various forms of regulatory extraction that encode relationships of power both within and between urban and rural communities.

Public Works and the Bureaucracy of Water in Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu (formally known as Madras State) emerged out of the British colonial Madras Presidency.⁹ The Madras Presidency was the crucible of the colonial water bureaucracy, and the legacies of this colonial administration provide the context for an understanding of the historical legacies that shape water governance more broadly in contemporary India. In more recent decades, Tamil Nadu has encapsulated the complexities of India’s political and economic trends. Politically, the state has been run by two regional parties: the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) and the AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam).¹⁰ Both parties have been part of ruling coalition governments (with the AIADMK most recently serving as part of the Bharatiya Janata Party–led coalition until the shift in power to the DMK in 2019 elections). This has meant that the state has been both substantively linked to national political trends and an illustrative case of the growing power of regional parties and coalitional politics that have been characteristic of national political trends in India. The state is also representative of major economic trends in the twenty-first century. While agriculture remains a critical part of the state’s economy (with the state’s Agriculture Department estimating that 70 percent of the population depends on agricultural or allied activities for their livelihood), the state is also one of the most urbanized in the country.¹¹ The state has actively and successfully drawn in private and global investment and has been one of the major recipients of World Bank funding in the water sector. The state has also developed a model of drawing in finance capital for infrastructure development that has been held up as a national and global model. In line with such funding and with global norms, Tamil Nadu has engaged in significant institutional restructuring of the water bureaucracy. However, the water bureaucracy has remained a powerful actor in the context of reforms, and its long-standing structures and practices are illustrative both of the older institutional frameworks that continue to shape water governance and of the new modes of centralized authority.

The pressures on water resources and the challenges of water governance in the state have also been shaped by political economic pressures stemming from geophysical attributes. Tamil Nadu is located downstream from all rivers running through it from neighboring states. This, in conjunction with repeated patterns of drought and water scarcity (that appear to be intensifying with climate change) has led to interstate conflicts and negotiations over water resources and water-related infrastructure with all three of its neighbors (Karnataka, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh). This includes India’s longest interstate dispute over the sharing of the Cauvery River between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka that has unfolded over thirty years and broken out into occasional episodes of ethnic conflict. The local dynamics of water politics in Tamil Nadu are intertwined with regional, interstate relationships and national policies and politics. The significance of the state of Tamil Nadu moves far beyond the spatial terrain of its territorial and administrative boundaries in ways that illuminate how institutional and economic reforms belie conventional narratives about federalism and decentralization.

Local water bureaucracies within states are not closed systems, and the local water bureaucracy in the state is deeply enmeshed in bureaucratic interactions with both federal and global institutions as well as within regional political and economic dynamics. Given the growing significance of local and state governments in India, an adequate understanding of the Indian state and the changes it has been undergoing in the postliberalization period necessitates a closer examination of the dynamics of public institutions. Writing about the need for such an approach, political scientists Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and Milan Vaishnav have noted that “although much work has been done on the juridical and normative frameworks in this regard, studies on how institutions actually work (or not work, as is often the case) are few and far between” (2017, 2). Indeed, recent scholarship has sought to correct this significant gap through studies of key institutional arms of the state, ranging from long-standing institutions such as the Supreme Court, Parliament, and Reserve Bank to new regulatory institutions that have been set up in the context of reforms (Kapur and Mehta 2007; Kapur, Mehta, and Vaishnav 2017). The major trend in this scholarly agenda has been to focus on central institutions within India’s federal structure. Consider the case of the bureaucracy. Most institutional analyses of the Indian bureaucracy have tended to focus on the centralized bureaucracy of the Indian Administrative Service (Potter 1996). However, given that economic and institutional reforms in liberalizing India have emphasized the devolution of state authority to state and local governments, there is a critical imperative to examine more closely how institutions work within local state governmental structures.

In this endeavor, I present an in-depth interpretive approach to the study of the nature and dynamics of institutional practice. The study of institutions represents a foundational line of inquiry within political science and sociology and now includes a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches (Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Fioretos, Falleti, and Sheingate 2016). This book draws and reconfigures elements of qualitative sociological and historical approaches that have shaped the field (Schmidt 2008; Steinmo 2008). In particular, its analytical approach focuses on three key dimensions of India’s water bureaucracy: (1) the historical continuities and discontinuities that shape processes of institutional formation, (2) the sociological processes of institutional restructuring and the relationship between state institutions and the sociopolitical dynamics of civil society, and (3) the agency of bureaucrats. Each of these analytical layers illustrates the reworking of state centralization in ways that constrain regulatory bureaucratic practices and intensify and produce socioeconomic inequalities.

I ground this institutionalist approach with a particular emphasis on the state’s Public Works Department (PWD). The PWD represents a historic institution that played a central role in the formation of India’s colonial water bureaucracy and shaped the political, economic, and infrastructural dimensions of water management in enduring ways in postcolonial India. This historical role grew out of the state administration within the Madras Presidency and became the model for the administration of water resources and public water infrastructure for the colonial state. Furthermore, the micro politics of the PWD’s institutional power produced complex legacies that continue to shape postcolonial governance over water resources.

The legacy of this institutional advocacy continues on in the postcolonial context of Tamil Nadu. The colonial specificities that shape the emergence of these bureaucratic structures provide a distinctive dimension to this historical formation, as central institutional and legal structures governing water emerged through the external, extractive nature of the colonial state. Distinctive and overlapping political-economic structures place significant structural constraints on the water bureaucracy that overwhelm the regulatory capacity of bureaucratic organizations tasked with the management of increasing demands on water resources. Both the technocratic approaches of institutional reforms and the intellectual approaches of scholarly work that focuses solely on internal processes of the rule making and norms of institutions are insufficient (North 1990). The political economy of the water bureaucracy unsettles such a closed-system approach to institutions and illustrates the ways in which economic policies of reform may constrain the kinds of institutional reforms that are designed to improve the state’s capacity to govern effectively.

A case study of the PWD thus provides a distinctive lens on the historical legacies that have shaped India’s water bureaucracy. Such a historical institutionalist perspective allows for a delineation of the continuities and discontinuities between the colonial and developmentalist state that are reconfigured again in distinctive ways in the postliberalization period. The choice of the PWD as a core case of analysis for this study also rests on the continued significance of this bureaucratic organization in the postindependence period in Tamil Nadu. In contemporary Tamil Nadu, the Public Works Department has retained control over irrigation as well as over the regulation and storage of water and maintenance of water bodies. In keeping with the historical weight of its institutional authority, it is the only such department in the country with control over irrigation. This preservation of authority has meant that the PWD has remained a leading institutional actor within the water bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu.

The significance of the PWD also rests on the way in which it is emblematic of long-standing state institutions that have shaped developmental policy in contemporary India. While Tamil Nadu’s PWD is unique in retaining water within its purview, it is emblematic of the kind of bureaucratic organizations that oversee both water resources and infrastructure. It is representative of organizations that have governed rural drinking water supplies in India, such as the Public Health and Engineering Departments (S. Singh 2016). It is also representative of the kinds organizations that have governed infrastructure more broadly and that have often been viewed as the face of what is now commonly known as the “engineer-contractor-politician nexus” in India. Consider former Indian Administrative Service officer Gajendra Haldea’s critical discussion of major infrastructural projects such as the redevelopment of the Delhi airport and the Games Village for the Commonwealth Games in India. Extravagant airport complexes and megaevents such as the Commonwealth Games have become some of the iconic spatial-symbolic stages that nation-states in comparative contexts have invested in so as to project a vision of their standing within the era of reform and globalization. Writing about the scams and mismanagement of such infrastructural projects in Delhi, Haldea describes at length an “engineer-contractor-politician nexus,” where, he notes,

in a conventional PWD-style contract, bids are invited for the unit rates payable in respect of each item of work. The government engineer measures each unit of work and makes a running payment for the work done. In this process, the costs of additional quantities and new items are also paid by the government. Moreover, delays on this account are borne by the government and the contractor is compensated for inflation during the construction period. In effect, this is like an open contract which offers enormous opportunities for time and cost overruns as well as for corruption. The engineer and the contractor have little incentive to complete the work in time and within the estimated costs. (2011, 97)

Such dynamics represent a familiar story of infrastructural politics in India and form a well-known component of contemporary media and public discourses on state corruption (Heller, Mukhopadhyay, and Walton 2019). What is of significance is the centrality of this typology of state institutions in various localities (and at both the local and the central levels) that continue to play a critical role in the postliberalization period but remain an understudied arena of the institutional infrastructure of the state.

If the PWD has continued to play a central role in water governance in Tamil Nadu, its institutional monopoly has also been weakened by various phases of institutional reform. While the PWD’s role in managing irrigation and water infrastructure has continued, institutional reform and new forms of urban governance have also increased the power of urban water supply and urban development bureaucracies of the major metropolitan city of Chennai (such as the major water utility, Metrowater). Tamil Nadu’s water bureaucracy exemplifies how global and national principles of institutional reform are implemented at the local level, their effectiveness, and their implications. New processes of centralization are taking shape in the context of liberalizing India through shifts of centralized power within institutional fields rather than through substantive forms of decentralization. The broad dynamics of federalism, decentralization, and state capacity can be adequately addressed only by delving into the very institutions that are meant to be the arenas of the state governments that are now designated as the new crucibles for economic reform, growth, and governance.

Finally, this study of institutional restructuring seeks to deepen an understanding of the structural and institutional constraints on regulatory reforms by incorporating a fuller account of the agency of bureaucrats within the Public Works Department. The Indian bureaucrat is perhaps one of the most heavily typecast figures in contemporary India. Some of the early romanticized characterizations of the Indian bureaucrat as the capable, professional embodiment of the Indian Administrative Service have long since given way to two typologies. The weightiest discourse on the Indian bureaucrat has been centered on a character prone to corruption and abuse. A wide range of discourses across the ideological spectrum within public and media narratives in India, academic work concerned with equality and social justice, and pro-reforms rhetoric on the inefficiencies of the state converge on a narrative of the bureaucrat as the central obstacle to economic development, progress, and equity. A second typology has sought to recover the agency of the bureaucrat as a rational actor that has navigated the structural and cultural constraints of India’s centralized state (Sinha 2011). Both typologies present key components of the nature of bureaucratic complicity and agency that are an important dimension of the agency of water bureaucrats. However, these typologies also present the bureaucrat as a static, homogenized individual driven by self-interest—whether of monetary gain or vested institutional interests in particular outcomes. What is missing in this context is an understanding of the bureaucrat as a complex subject whose motives and agency may move beyond these familiar typologies.

This book develops an approach to institutions that incorporates this sense of complexity by treating the bureaucrat as a subject of history. There is of course a now extensive scholarship that has sought to give subaltern subjects a place in history with the kind of complex subjectivity and agency that was once the preserve of elite-centered histories. Yet, fraught subjects such as bureaucrats, who often occupy contradictory socioeconomic and constrained political positions, do not conform either to ideological visions of the bureaucrat responsible for the implementation of models and practices of development that may further marginalize the poor, on the one hand, or to stereotypes of the bureaucrat as the emblem of the bloated state that needs to wither away in service of economic reforms and growth, on the other. To that end, this study weaves in a more complex sense of the agency and subjectivity of bureaucrats. This includes both the spaces in which bureaucrats attempt to perform their regulatory functions within the constraints of political pressure and structural forces and the moments in which individual bureaucrats develop and put into practice their own sense of ethical agency.

Methodology and Interdisciplinary Framework

This study is based on an interdisciplinary social scientific approach to the study of the state. While framed by an engagement with political scientific and sociological debates on institutional reforms, the methodology draws on interdisciplinary interpretative methods. In particular, it draws on an adaptation of Geertzian methods to provide a “thick description” of the historical, institutional, and political-economic underpinnings of the water bureaucracy. This mode of interpretative methods is in line with political scientific approaches that have reconfigured such methods in order to address structural and systemic explanations (Wedeen 2002). Such social scientific approaches are different from anthropological ethnographies that delve into a detailed description of a single microinstitution.

My focus on the systemic continuities and changes in the institutional dynamics of the water bureaucracy engages with an analysis of changes at the national, state, and local levels of the water bureaucracy. Such an approach is concerned with systemic changes that are shaped by economic and institutional reforms. The empirical research that I draw on in this analysis consists of a wide range of archival research, including historical, local, national, and global policy materials, as well as qualitative interviews and field site visits that I conducted in Chennai between 2016 and 2018. The city of Chennai is a central site of analysis both because it is the site of power for the central water institutions and because it is the locus for understanding the ways in which city-centered urban governance has become the key node for the processes of state centralization that this book is analyzing. As one of India’s major metropolitan cities, it provides a critical and representative site of broader national patterns regarding water governance.

The empirical research on the PWD, the central case of the book, is based on exhaustive archival work that I conducted at the organizational archives of the PWD. These materials included colonial documents, policy studies, and internal PWD documents and reports that ranged from the 1950s to the present. These materials also included the autobiographical writings and professional records of the late A. Mohanakrishnan, one of the central figures in the PWD, whose career spanned the period from 1947 to 2012. This service, in addition to his role as the chairman of Tamil Nadu’s Cauvery Technical Cell (responsible for negotiations with Karnataka), provides a unique window into the complex nature of bureaucratic agency. While the heart of the research draws on these archival materials, the study also utilizes qualitative interviews with PWD employees. Finally, the study also draws on field site visits and interviews at related water bureaucracies and independent agencies, including Metrowater, Chennai’s major water utility (formally known as the Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board), the Tamil Nadu Urban Infrastructure Financial Services Limited, and the Smart Cities Mission agency associated with the Chennai Municipal Corporation (Greater Chennai Corporation).

While this book addresses institutional reforms within India, it also informs broader comparative and global debates on the governance of water. In the water sector, global norms have either directly or indirectly shaped national and local policies, discourses, and bureaucratic practices (Asthana 2009). While a range of transnational actors shapes global norms and practices, comparative scholarship has well documented the central role of the World Bank in shaping ideational frameworks and policies in comparative contexts (Bakker 2010; Morgan 2011). The role of the World Bank in India has been more complex than a presumed imposition of global norms of privatization might suggest. Such global processes impact state authority through Bank policies and projects in India. The Indian state has always been a strong actor, including in its historical engagement with the World Bank. The centrality of the state is evident also in World Bank policy and project frameworks—the role of centralizing state authority is present in subtle ways even in global frameworks that are rhetorically identified with the principles of privatization and decentralization. Given the expansive scholarship on the privatization of water in comparative contexts, this often subtle but sustained significance of the state may appear to make India an exceptional case. However, a closer analysis of global trends indicates that the Indian case in fact points to a deeper and often understudied role of the state in the water sector in comparative contexts.

Inequality, Urban Governance, and the Politics of Water in Comparative Perspective

The case of water reforms in India provides important insights for a comparative and transnational understanding of the governance of water. Given the significance of the global push toward privatization that emerged in the 1990s, comparative and transnational scholarship has often understandably focused on the impact of programs of privatization implemented through various sets of policy reforms (Chng 2008; Hall, Lobina, and de la Motte 2005; Harris and Roa-García 2013; Ioris 2012; Schnitzler 2008). Such scholarship has examined both the effects of privatization and the protest movements that have focused on privatization and, more generally, on “neoliberalism” in a range of cases in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa (Bakker 2010; Morgan 2011; McDonald and Ruiters 2004). Indeed, within India, critics of economic reforms have also focused on the threat of privatization.¹² However, in the post–Washington Consensus era, state accountability has emerged as a vital foundation for global policy frameworks. Furthermore, both intense domestic political opposition to privatization and the complexities and in some cases uncertainty of investment returns have dampened private investment in the water sector. By the late 1990s, this led to a partial retreat of the private sector (Bakker 2010). While this book takes processes of privatization seriously, the Indian case points to a deeper set of implications that are not adequately captured by debates on the advance or retreat of privatization. The Indian case points to the necessity for understanding the role of the state in controlling and distributing water resources, even in a context where privatization is taking place. Tamil Nadu is a significant case in the Indian context precisely because state centralization is taking place in a context where the local state government has embraced global norms of decentralization and privatization and has been a leading actor that has specifically worked with the World Bank.

The Indian case provides a set of policy and political dynamics that at first glance appear to depart from the comparative cases in other late-industrializing countries that have implemented global norms. In contrast to other cases, India’s water sector has been characterized by the relatively late implementation of principles of privatization and state restructuring and the limited extent of private investment. However, these specificities are now representative of comparative trends that have seen a retreat in privatization and the post–Washington Consensus focus on the state. At one level, the centrality of the state provides a counterpoint to the past focus on the centrality of privatization in shaping both changes in the water sector and the creation and intensification of inequality. Despite the extensive rhetoric on privatization (by both proponents and critics), by the early twenty-first century, only about 5 percent of the world’s population was being served by the formal private sector (Budds and McGranahan 2003, 88). Indeed, recent scholarship has begun to point to the need for a more intensive analysis of water governance (Akhmouch 2012) and has called attention to the ways in which comparative cases illustrate that the key principles of privatization and decentralization have not unfolded according to the idealized norms of the global model.

Consider, for instance, the case of Chile, one of the strongest and earliest models of the privatization of water, in which water rights were treated “not merely as private property, but also as a fully marketable commodity” (Bauer 2010, 46). Nevertheless, even in this strong model, the state’s regulatory framework has provided a critical, if contradictory, foundation for privatization. Madeline Baer, for instance, has argued that “Chile’s successful water sector is the result of the creation of an efficient public water sector prior to privatization and of the state’s capacity to govern the sector to mitigate the negative effects of privatization” (2014, 142). This success has concealed underlying problems of governance. The regulatory framework has provided economic benefits by encouraging private investment for agricultural, urban, and industrial uses but has failed to handle complex questions of governance involving competing demands on water resources, questions of equity of access to water, and environmental issues (Bauer 2010, 46). These differing assessments point to the role of the state’s capacity and regulatory framework in understanding the relative successes and failures of the Chilean model.

The Indian case allows us to understand the implications of this trend in which principles of privatization and reform are embedded within state-led endeavors, policies, and processes. Such an approach enables a shift from a static understanding of ideologically driven conceptions of privatization that both critics and proponents of liberalization often deploy. As social scientist Karen Bakker has aptly noted, such ideologically driven policy debates “rely on the assumptions of utilitarian liberalism, in which the distinction between public and private equates with that between governmental and non- governmental” (2010, 29). Instead, processes of institutional reform transform the boundaries and meanings of the categories of “public” and “private” that reinforce state power and rework societal inequalities and exclusions in more complex ways that exceed a more static conception of privatization (Bear and Mathur 2015). Such changing conceptions undergird the kinds of inequalities and exclusions that both constitute and are reconstituted by the remaking of state power in liberalizing India. However, this book is not simply concerned with illustrating that the state still matters. Rather, its focus is on the ways in which water reforms in India provide a case for understanding the distinctive form of centralizing state power that is remade in the postliberalization period.

Consider, for instance, the ways in which policies of decentralization have been implemented in the water sector in comparative contexts. In Cape Town, South Africa, a decentralized policy for water provision was shaped by the power of city-level policy makers and bureaucrats that intensified the top-down approach of the city (Yates and Harris 2018, 78). These subtle centralizing trends are evident in a range of cases where policies of decentralization have produced new forms of concentrated authority over water resources by local elites, bureaucrats, and government officials. In the São Francisco River Basin in Brazil, water reforms reinforced elite control over water resources through an underlying pattern of the elite capture of regional bureaucratic power (de Freitas 2015, 298). Similar patterns of continued state and elite control have been documented in a wide array of national contexts, including Colombia, Peru, Kenya, and Turkey (Guerrero, Furlong, and Arias 2015; Ioris 2012; Islar and Boda 2014; Kemerink et al. 2016; Swyngedouw 2004). In the case of Colombia, “administrative decentralization took place through the devolution of authority to municipalities. This new authority, however, was rapidly withdrawn from smaller localities, semi-‘recentralizing’ it to departments and regional bodies” (Guerrero, Furlong, and Arias 2015, 173). Such fine-grained comparative work underlines the significance of adequately understanding how such processes of centralization play out in the context of water reforms. An argument of Indian exceptionalism that suggests reforms are simply blocked by the particular historical conditions of Indian political and institutional life does not adequately account for the ways in which the dynamics of state centralization are in fact built into the very policy, institutional, and political-economic frameworks of reform that claim to rest on idealized norms of decentralization and privatization.

Such processes of state centralization shape the extraction and distribution of water resources in the context of increasing pressures produced by economic growth, urbanization, and the intensifying effects of climate change. This book analyzes the historically produced institutional practices that create inequalities in the allocation of water resources. What is at stake in this endeavor is an understanding of how effective institutional responses to the challenges of inclusive and accountable governance are constrained and foreclosed. Such an understanding foregrounds the ways in which local governmental agencies and their bureaucratic actors play crucial—and understudied—roles in responding to the macro national and global economic and environmental crises of the contemporary world.