Paper short abstract:

Domestic workers in Delhi cross thresholds between both water scarcity and abundance. By exploring the flows of water—its physical paths as well as its value and meanings—their testimony provides new insight on urban development, disparity, and conservation.

Paper long abstract:

This research explores the disparity of water access in Delhi, India through the perspective of urban domestic workers. These workers, with little remuneration for their work, often live in informal "slum" communities adjacent those of their employers. Like many of the marginalized slum residents who struggle to meet minimum safety standards for drinking water, domestic workers must also make difficult decisions about using water for the most basic household chores. Yet, many of these workers have been exposed to and trained in the aesthetics of modernization, and experience tension over meeting high standards of cleanliness, purity and order with limited resources. Moreover, their active participation as agents of purification in upper-middle class homes distance them from traditional, informal and peer networks of water sourcing and water knowledge—as a result they are excluded from both formal and informal networks of water access. By elucidating the dynamics of water exchange amongst these marginalized residents, theories from economic anthropology, environmental anthropology and anthropology of development can be employed to not only shed light on the water disparity in urban India, but also to help understand modernization processes beyond the context of India. This project examines how structures of development, class privilege and resource management are changing the flows of water in Delhi, and what these local forms of water access can tell us about the growing global socio-political problems of urban water scarcity.

(Research funded by Wenner-Gren, Fulbright and The University of Minnesota)