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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:

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 agencies address challenges of natural disasters, emphasis is placed on electricity access for internally displaced people. This raises questions about distributive and procedural energy justice. What does it mean for environmental refugees to have infrastructural access when they have to migrate frequently? How does electricity access mediate legitimacy in the eyes of the state that continuously questions the citizenship of certain people? How do cultural identities shape interactions in bureaucratic spaces? And more importantly, what does it mean to perform illegible labour by community members at local power offices, in the time of digital technology, for the governance of infrastructure?

In Tengaguri village, by the Brahmaputra, 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 and new grid connections are rift with tensions over the calculability of electrical materiality such as the electric meter and consumption bills. Further, the introduction of digital technology to the bureaucratic processes of grid governance add to the complexity of interacting with the state.

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.