Paper short abstract:

Environmentally displaced people along the banks of the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India navigate extreme precarity to access energy. The politics and impacts of navigating technological services from NGOs is analysed in this paper through the lens of gendered labour by “human infrastructures”.

Paper long abstract:

Precarity and material dispossession is a part of everyday life for people displaced by floods and riverbank erosion by the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. As state and non-state agencies address challenges of natural disasters, emphasis is placed by these agencies on electricity access for internally displaced people. This raises questions about the politics and impacts of such efforts. What does it mean for environmental refugees to have access to infrastructure when they are cyclically displaced? How does electricity access mediate legitimacy in the eyes of the state that continuously questions the citizenship of certain people? In this temporality of crisis, how do community members situate themselves as “human infrastructure” to re-introduce electricity in their locality? And more importantly, what does it mean to perform illegible gendered labour by women to uphold generational aspirations and maintain social mobility?

In Tengaguri village, by the Brahmaputra, where seventy percent of the village has been lost to erosion, displaced people – Muslims with a colonial history of migration to Assam from present-day Bangladesh – narrate stories of dispossession and repossession in a dynamic flux. Dispossession transitions from earlier legitimate grid connections to improvised illegitimate hooking of new electric poles at present. Repossession entails negotiating with NGO representatives to build decentralised energy systems and maintaining those to “time trick” (Bear, 2016) the immediate future. Analyzing ethnographic material, gathered during a year-long fieldwork in Tengaguri, this paper discusses people’s interactions with electric materials at home and in communal spaces at the margins of the state.