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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates tubewells as urban water infrastructure at the junction of two concerns: access to safe water and public health concerns which centred groundwater as an ideal ‘contamination-free’ water source, and cheap dissemination of pumping technology through state interventions.

Paper long abstract:

Groundwater, as a sustained source of water for daily uses in urban areas, has received scant attention. As has been established by a rich body of scholarship, piped networks have fallen short of the ‘modern infrastructural ideal’ in the global South and the uncertainty associated with piped water is mitigated by unacknowledged dependence on groundwater (Birkinshaw, 2022; Dey Sarkar and Choudhary, 2020; Truelove, 2019). However, comprehensive analysis of the emergence and consolidation of tubewells as urban infrastructure has been missing. This paper aims to write a brief history of the emergence of tubewells as urban infrastructure at the intersection of critical urban studies and STS (transition studies).

This paper intends to investigate the emergence of tubewells as urban water infrastructure as a moment created at the junction of two concerns: access to safe water and public health concerns which centred groundwater as an ideal ‘contamination-free’ water source, and wide dissemination of pumping technology which rapidly diffused throughout landscapes. While concerns about ‘the bacteriological city’ can be traced to colonial State’s obsession with public health, modern infrastructural ideals, and ordering of spaces and bodies of ‘contaminated’ natives, these concerns figured prominently in the discourses of post-colonial states and transnational developmental institutions. Furthermore, this paper would like to investigate the assemblages in which urban tubewells are entangled (storage containers, water-level devices, water filtering devices) and the relationships which are nurtured by tubewells as urban infrastructure.