Liquid borders: reflections from fragmented water infrastructure in Guwahati, Northeast India

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore the fluid nature of formal/informal access to water infrastructure in a micro-urban site in the city of Guwahati, in Northeast India. Guwahati being a rapidly urbanizing city in a frontier region, contains intersection of multiple bordering processes including India’s partition and consequent immigration debate in Assam, which often become manifest in fractured urban infrastructure. The fluid categories of “formal” and “informal” in urban infrastructural networks that are used to reinforce power relations and inequalities in cities, echo the arbitrary drawing of boundaries between nation states and communities to create the “other”. Proposing a dialogue between Urban Political Ecology (UPE) scholarship and critical border studies literature I use the analytic of “liquid borders” to examine the fluid, multi-scalar urban borders that shape uneven access to water infrastructure in Guwahati.

KEYWORDS:

• Liquid borders
• urban water infrastructure
• urban political ecology
• border studies
• urban informality

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Unlike the rest of India, in Assam and other states of Northeast India caste-based exclusions are not a dominant trope of exclusion. Especially in urban areas of contemporary Assam, it is not a very relevant divide. Caste-based exclusion do not play a role in Sipukhuri’s infrastructural politics, which is why it has not been discussed in the paper. While the residents of Gandhibasti Settlement are wage laborers, they face discrimination on the grounds of class, language, religion, and ethnicity, and not caste.

2 Patta is the locally used word in Assam for land titles or land ownership papers.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National University of Singapore’s Graduate Research Support Scheme (GRSS) and the IJURR Foundation writing-up grant.