Governing Water in India

"Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and expose the failures of state governance to regulate use. State policies and institutions influenced by global models of reform produce and magnify socio-economic injustice in this "water bureaucracy." Drawing on historical records, an analysis of post-liberalization developments, and fieldwork in the city of Chennai, Leela Fernandes traces the configuration of colonial historical legacies, developmental-state policies, and economic reforms that strain water resources and intensify inequality. While reforms of water governance promote privatization and decentralization, they strengthen the state centralized control over water through city-based development models. Understanding the political economy of water thus illuminates the consequent failures of the state within countries of the Global South"--

Leela Fernandes is Director and Stanley D. Golub Endowed Chair at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Power and Ethics (New York University Press, 2013), India's New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and Producing Workers: The Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).