‘Designed to Fail’

By taking the case of sewage infrastructure in the city of Gurgaon, the paper makes two observations. First, it argues that the dismal state of infrastructure in most parts of Gurgaon is linked to a culture of uncertainty around the roles and responsibilities of different governmental bodies and around the administrative designation of urban, rural, and transitional areas.

The author is grateful to the organisers and participants of “The Global Suburban Infrastructure” workshop held in the School of Planning, University of Waterloo, Ontario in June 2015, where an earlier version of this paper was presented. She wants to thank the SSHRC–MCRI project on “Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land, and Infrastructure in the 21st Century” for partially funding this research. She is also grateful to Pierre Filion, Kajri Jain, and Sukrit Nagpal for their comments and suggestions, and to Prasad Khanolkar for research assistance.

By taking the case of sewage infrastructure in the city of Gurgaon, the paper makes two observations. First, it argues that the dismal state of infrastructure in most parts of Gurgaon is linked to a culture of uncertainty around the roles and responsibilities of different governmental bodies and around the administrative designation of urban, rural, and transitional areas. It suggests that such pervasive uncertainty is generative, creating a policy vacuum that not only allows private service providers to have a free run but also produces “a system that is designed to fail” for some and not others. Second, the paper argues that sewage networks, or their absence do the techno-political work of routinely overlooking and disavowing spaces that house local villagers, migrant subaltern classes, and the urban poor.