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Paper short abstract

In Bhopal, residues and remnants of chemo-industrial processes interact with structural failures to form a toxic waterscape. Using ethnography and STS, this study explores how residents leverage their everyday infrastructural literacy to actively contest institutional denial to access safe water.

Paper long abstract

The world often views Bhopal as an event temporally rooted in the 1984 gas leak. However, present-day Bhopal is better understood as the culmination of residues and remnants of chemo-industrial processes that began with the establishment of the Union Carbide factory. Structural factors ensured that the lives of residents living adjacent to the factory became entangled with these processes in multiple ways, including through materialities of the factory’s everyday functioning. Routine disposal of waste adjacent to nearby residential settlements meant that residents became an integral part of this toxic landscape. Today, abandoned hazardous waste leaching into groundwater forms a toxic waterscape, where nature is continuously produced through societal, political and ecological conditions. Bhopal’s waterscape operates as a site where structural and institutional failures and enduring toxicity of the environment are absorbed directly into daily routines of survival and quest to access safe water.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across institutional and everyday spaces, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) frameworks, this paper examines the material realities of surviving environmental toxicity. In navigating this precarity, households constantly acquire situated knowledge, mapping the socio-spatial inequalities of the public water distribution network. By forming fluid grassroots collectives, residents leverage their everyday infrastructural literacy to actively contest institutional denial.

Additionally, this paper demonstrates how climate variability interacts with structural failures to constrain access to safe water and amplify contamination pathways. These environmental shifts further intensify gendered labour burdens, as women bear a disproportionate responsibility to manage water portfolios from increasingly constrained resource pools.