Māṇḍavlī: negotiating with digital governance in Mumbai

ABSTRACT

Mumbai’s municipal bureaucracy introduced an online complaints platform in 2016, promising increased transparency and improved public service. This article argues that this “smart” urban technology, which records grievances against land encroachments and violations of building codes, strengthens existing class and caste inequalities in who can access and manipulate state land administration. Through an ethnographic exploration of Mumbai’s bureaucracy, it makes visible a complex system of negotiation—locally known as “māṇḍavlī”—that structures a range of tacit practices of exchange and mediation between politicians, bureaucrats, and brokers. Although these arrangements remain intact, the online complaints platform has reduced the discretionary power of low-level bureaucrats by centralising and rendering opaque the functioning of ethically ambiguous local brokers. By re-focusing attention on the everyday operation of smart urban technologies within the municipal body in the megacity of Mumbai, this article furthers the agenda of alternative smart urbanisms from the Global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Southern urbanism
• brokerage
• informality
• bureaucracy
• smart cities
• governance

Acknowledgments

Though they go here unnamed, I wish to thank many officials of the BMC and my respondents within the informal settlements of Mumbai. The anonymous reviewers of this paper were crucial in making this paper much more coherent to a broader audience, for which I am very grateful. Additionally, this article has received generous critique and developmental feedback from Asher Ghertner and Thomas Crowley. I would also like to thank Ketaki Jayawant for introducing me to the notion of māṇḍavlī for helping make sense of an incredibly complex digitalizing field within the urban bureaucracy in Mumbai.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project received financial support from the Wenner Gren dissertation fieldwork grant [grant number 9517] and the Excellence fellowship from the Graduate School New Brunswick of the Rutgers University.