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Paper short abstract

On India's Himalayan frontier, roads built for border security and development become sites of landslide risk. This paper examines how earthmovers deployed for road-repairs also mediate risk perceptions. Their presence/absence leads users to experience state attention and thus citizenship unequally.

Paper long abstract

Bordering China, Bhutan and Nepal, the Indian Himalayan regions of Sikkim, Kalimpong and Darjeeling are seeing a frenzy of road-building. For the state, roads herald security of a strategic border. For citizens, they index development and connectivity to the mainland. Yet, built on unstable, steep mountain slopes and river valleys, these roads frequently collapse due to landslides, disrupting life and the supply of goods and services to the frontier – thereby becoming sites of risk to life, livelihood and security. How is this risk perceived and negotiated by citizens and state functionaries? Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, this paper draws attention to earthmovers, prominently seen on stand-by along the mountain roads, as tools that repair roads while also mediating the perception of risks. With increasing availability of earthmovers, debris from landslides along roads are often cleared within hours. Normal traffic is restored much quicker than in previous decades. While how roads materialize security and development has been analyzed, objects that maintain and repair roads remain under-examined. Drawing on observations and conversations with citizens, road contractors and state personnel, this paper presents two insights. Firstly, it analyzes how the visibility and deployment of earthmovers influence how citizens and state personnel calibrate risk by experientially estimating how quickly roads can reopen. Secondly, the same highway traverses two Indian states, who unequally deploy earthmovers for road-repairs. The paper examines how both experiences of substantively unequal citizenship and demand for equal state attention congeal around the infrastructural object of the earthmover.