[Reader-list] Tales of order: schemes and strategies of water supply

[Karen Coelho]

Tales of order: schemes and strategies in water supply

 

I have been exploring the different ways in which our sense of urban order clings to a grid-like frame despite everyday encounters with other kinds of order.   Chennai, even in its physical layout, is anything but grid-like - its streets sweep in curves and send off small meandering street-lets in angular multipliers.  Its spaces are arranged in secretive alleys.  Grids are, among other things, formulae for accessibility, meant to allow the outsider to apprehend the city complex.  But this city is at best a very reluctant grid, I realize as I daily navigate the bus system.  As reformers in many spheres envision a transparent and rational urban geography assisted by signage, schedules and smiling service-people, the city's geist resists.  The insider-outsider relation with its politics of knowledge is casually practiced by street-level publics through economies of information.  Try getting hold of a bus schedule in which timings, routes and stops might be listed for the aspirant to an overview.  At the terminus office they say it is only available at the main office - at the other end of the city.  So the neophyte resorts to guessing, asking, gets wrong information, takes wrong buses and turns, asks again, wonders.  And learns.  It is not, ultimately, meant to be that simple.  Knowledge of how things really work is subtly encoded in idioms of insidership.  Transparency is a slogan of the planners' world, that neither they nor the people on the ground seriously believe is possible -- or even desirable.  

 

More secretive still, harder to plumb, are the geographies of urban water access.  Keeping a close watch, as city water planners do, on indicators of quantum supply and distribution through pipes or through registers of water truck routes and schedules gives at best a sketchy and at worst a very distorted picture of who gets how much and what kind of water, when and where.  

 

Official narratives of order remain supremely grid-like.  Straight lines that intersect, on which you can map functions.  These orders are, however, substantiated and held in place, both ideologically and in practice, by webs of local rationalities, strategies historically and practically developed to deal with the contingency, unreliability and intractability of official orders.  

 

I dropped in to one of local water depots of Metrowater, Chennai's state-run water utility, where I knew the assistant engineer from my earlier research.  She was not happy to be still in the same depot: "In this department, only those who give money will get transferred, if you are straightforward you remain in the slum areas.  That is how this organization works!"  As far as the water situation went, however, she said things were going very well - Krishna water had been coming in, and was being supplied through the newly revamped water distribution system on alternate days.  There was no water problem at the moment, she said.  "How about in the slums?" I asked.  She responded fervently: "Of all the people in this city, these are the people enjoying the most today!! They don't pay taxes or charges, but they get twenty-four hours supply through the public standpipes, they use good treated water for everything - washing vessels, washing clothes, bathing!"  This was, in a nutshell, the view of the slums from the water planners' window - I had heard it repeatedly voiced in different ways throughout my earlier research with the city water utility.

 

The engineer went on:  "We are now trying to stop tank and truck supply as much as possible, because there is enough water now coming through the pipes.  We have been repairing all the public standpipes."  "How long will this situation last?" I asked.  "I don't know - they (the authorities) don't release information on amounts in storage."  In fact information was tighter than ever, according to this engineer. She said the MD had sent around a circular prohibiting any information to be given to the Press or to any outsiders.  

   

A week later, I recalled her image of "24 hours, good treated water" as I talked about water with women in M.R.Thottam, a complex of Tamil Nadu Housing Board tenements ringed by huts and shacks and small semi-thatched houses. The alleys between the blocks teem with activity - men sitting in groups playing cards, tiny shops selling cigarettes, biscuits and small plastic items.  In one of these alleys is a walled temple, sheltering a large shady tree inside its compound.  D lived in one of the TNHB apartments; we sat with her and a group of other women - mostly her sisters, cousins and other family members -- in her mother's thatched house across the road. Along the wall were several brass pots piled up, full of water collected from the tanks.  

 

D's mother, who had moved there 40 years earlier, said water used to be abundant until about 25 years ago -- there were two large wells in the area, and the flats piped water into their homes - it was not fit for drinking, but for everything else.  The wells, however, slowly ran dry and about ten years ago they were closed down.  "We got drinking water from the handpumps on the streets.  In those days we hardly needed to pump at all - water just flowed freely, poured out when you touched the pump!  But the pumps were not everywhere - we had to go and fetch water, sometimes by cycle, from the nearest pump.  We had to go to Sethnagar and ask the people there to let us take water."

 

Now the place was spotted with handpumps, at least a couple along each block.  But many were in disrepair and were draped with clothes or mats.  Many others had their handles removed.  These were still operational but were controlled by individuals who kept the handles locked away. The women laid out for us a dense picture of the multiple modes of water access they strove to maintain as they negotiated complex interlocked criteria of taste, timing and reliability. A collection of local leaders, both formal and informal, define and defend these criteria, mediate local arrangements for water, and control various modes of supply in various ways.  

 

In addition to the handpumps, large syntax tanks were ranged on every corner. These were filled everyday by trucks that hauled the water from surrounding districts.  "But this is not treated water, so we have to boil it. We don't know where this water comes from.  It is not always the same water from the same place - each time it has a different smell, sometimes a bad smell."  

 

The handpumps supplied treated water from the underground municipal network. "But even this water sometimes has a drainage smell. We cannot always trust it. So we often have to use the tank water for drinking, but we always boil and strain it.  Or sometimes we have to buy canned water to drink. Also, the lorries are not regular - we cannot rely on them."  

"Another problem with the pumps is that water gets released at odd times - midnight, 1 a.m. you can never tell when it comes. Then a huge crowd gathers and starts jostling and pushing, because the water will suddenly stop.  Many of the pumps don't work, so everybody crowds around one pump, the whole Housing Board comes to collect from one pump on this side. A lot of fights and conflicts ensue. If you are really tough, you can push through and get some water - people like us cannot do that.  And, for example, water did not come today, so people have to make do with what they collected yesterday.  So we buy water from the tanks - we spend Rs. 5 a day, sometimes Rs.10 a day if we have to buy canned water. .  But with all this switching back and forth between piped water and tank water, our health suffers. We get sick. The piped water in particular is so unreliable in quality that people tend to stick to tank water even if it is untreated.  This is why we are insisting on tank water being continued. Not that we don't want the piped water, but it is so unreliable, and we don't want to keep switching! We need to have both options: tap water and tank water.  This is what we are demanding.  As soon as the summer comes, they will stop supplying through pipes. People get lost and confused, not knowing what to do, fighting and struggling for water.  At least if the tank water comes everyday, they can be sure of at least a few pots.  From the pump we can take any amount, but there is where the problems and fights come."

 

These comments, we realized after a while, had to be seen in light of the fact that D's mother controls one of the tanks - she allocates the water, allowing each family 3 pots, and collects 50 p. per pot.  As in most of these local arrangements, a fixed amount is paid to the lorry driver, and the local controller keeps the rest. In many cases they claim to contribute the funds to the local temple. Also, as in the majority of these cases, local water managers have links to one of the major political parties - this family is related to a DMK partyworker.  

 

D's sister said: "Now that water is coming more freely in the pipes, they are cutting off the lorry supply.  But we are organizing people to demand more lorries, especially as the summer is coming".  Another sister said: "When we go to the JE (Junior Engineer at the Metrowater depot), he says, 'Why do you need that, now that you get water in the handpumps? You are all just lazy, you don't want to pump the water!  Why can't you take a proper house connection and get piped water in your house?'  But we don't have the money for that, and we would have to pay taxes and charges on top of the connection charges, and then, after paying all this, we won't even get water in the pipes!"

 

We asked: "Have you even enquired where this tank water comes from?"  D said: "We have asked.  Sometimes they say Neyveli, or Chembarambakam, or Chengleput. Sometimes we notice differences in the taste.  When we ask: what is this water, we are afraid to drink it, and how are we going to use this water for cooking, the lorry driver tells us: 'this comes from a river source, or is mixed with river water.'  And sometimes we wonder about the lorries too. These days the lorries that come are old and in bad condition, leaving us worried and nervous about the condition of the water: will it have worms?  Once the water was stinking badly, then the driver said that there was a lizard in there.  When we complained to the JE about this, he said: 'how do you know it is the water?  It might be the tank itself!'  And we are hesitant to complain, because the next day they might not send the lorry at all!  

 

When the women developed a clear plan for what they wanted, they usually organized delegations to present their demands to the JE. "Even people who were jealous and resentful of us because we controlled the water eventually came to us because they realized that we could get things done. They would say: let's go complain to the JE, we will come with you, about 10 of us.  Even the (ward) councilor, he tells us how to go about putting pressure on the JE to get tanks: he says, 'because water is now coming in the pipes, you should go to the JE in a group of 10 or so.  I will come and assist.'"   

 

 
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