“Universal” is a tricky
word. It has an enormous(large,विशाल) appeal,
an unquestioned romance of taking everyone along. Universal human rights,
universal access to basic services, housing for all. It is the barometer of
inclusion done right. The dark side of the romance is that it’s one of the
hardest things to achieve. Often the “universal” is a vanishing(disappear,गायब) horizon and, like all
horizons, the mirage is what makes you lose sight of the very real trade-offs
and constraints in your way.
This week the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) announced a new horizon
towards the idea of universal access to a basic urban service and human need:
water. The “Jal Adhikar Connection” (a Right to Water Connection) promises to
let households within slums in Delhi apply for legal, metered water connections
“irrespective of the status of their residence.” This move — following the
Government of Delhi’s already given pledge(promise,वादा) to extend water and sanitation services to unauthorised
colonies — implies that legal, public and metered water could (like electricity)
actually cover the city as it exists rather than as it is imagined in plans and
laws.
The city is what it is
It is critical to emphasise how important this is. In Indian cities, one of the biggest blocks to any imagination of “universal” or “inclusive” development is not lack of money, land or technology as is so often imagined. It is that a large number of our fellow urban residents are not considered urban residents at all — they are not part of the “universe” to be reached. The grounds of their exclusion are particular to the way our cities have been built. For multiple reasons, Indian cities are largely auto-constructed. Put simply: they have been built not by the intentions of planners or architects but by people themselves. From the slum to the unauthorised colony, the historical urban village trying to change its identity to the new peri-urban development, each neighbourhood has some kind of tension with law and planning. In Delhi’s last reliable statistic on this in 2000, only 24 per cent of the city lived in a “planned colony.” Everyone else, nearly three-fourths of the city, lived or lives some distance from this legal and planned norm. It is now well argued that this “illegality” is not one most of these residents perform to seek personal gains; it is simply the only way in the context of state and market failures to find a way to make life in the city. As activists have long argued: when three-fourths of a people find themselves violating law, it is the law itself that is broken.
It is critical to emphasise how important this is. In Indian cities, one of the biggest blocks to any imagination of “universal” or “inclusive” development is not lack of money, land or technology as is so often imagined. It is that a large number of our fellow urban residents are not considered urban residents at all — they are not part of the “universe” to be reached. The grounds of their exclusion are particular to the way our cities have been built. For multiple reasons, Indian cities are largely auto-constructed. Put simply: they have been built not by the intentions of planners or architects but by people themselves. From the slum to the unauthorised colony, the historical urban village trying to change its identity to the new peri-urban development, each neighbourhood has some kind of tension with law and planning. In Delhi’s last reliable statistic on this in 2000, only 24 per cent of the city lived in a “planned colony.” Everyone else, nearly three-fourths of the city, lived or lives some distance from this legal and planned norm. It is now well argued that this “illegality” is not one most of these residents perform to seek personal gains; it is simply the only way in the context of state and market failures to find a way to make life in the city. As activists have long argued: when three-fourths of a people find themselves violating law, it is the law itself that is broken.
“Spatial illegality” has been a critical — and deeply
under-recognised — part of what has broken the possibility of universal access
to basic services in our cities. As the rules have changed over time, utilities
like the DJB have been, at worst, prohibited from giving legal water
connections in “illegal” slums and “unauthorised” colonies, or, at best, such
provision has been left to discretion(sense,विवेक), the dreaded(fearful,भयानक) “may” rather than “shall” of public policy. In multiple legal
challenges, courts have refused to acknowledge the urban right to water citing
spatial illegality even if this leaves the basic needs of thousands unmet,
their dignity denied.
The irony is that even those who defend such exclusions do not
fully realise the cost they themselves pay for them. Partly as a result of
spatial illegality, our city’s infrastructure is not a network or a system. It
is a set of fragmented(break,खंडित)
splinters. It struggles to move to its horizon, reaching one colony but
bypassing the other, reaching one now and making the other wait, trying to navigate
a geography not of demand and supply but of varied degrees of legality and
legitimacy. Who gets infrastructure and when thus become matters of power and
patronage, reproducing social inequalities in the space of the city.
Not only does this mean that rights and entitlements are
conditioned on where you live in the city, it also means that DJB chief Kapil
Mishra is absolutely right when he says that without expanding access more
“universally,” the DJB can build neither a scientific system nor an efficient
one. Infrastructure systems are just that: systems. They need scale and
connectivity to be economically viable and technically sound. The DJB’s
financial health and self-sufficiency will gain enormously when thousands of
new households give revenue to the public utility instead of to tankers and
private suppliers. Its pipelines will map, connect and function — their
geographies seeking to reach rather than bypass, connect rather than fragment.
Wastage will reduce, efficiencies will rise. There are good models to learn
from here. When the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board introduced a
category of “shared taps” to precisely(clearly,स्पस्थ्तया) open up water connections into slums, it saw
its financial health improve alongside the improvements in the city’s overall
indicators of health, work, housing quality and poverty. When Ahmedabad gave
networked infrastructure to its slums, overall indicators of access slowly rose
for the city as a whole.
Yet herein lies the first danger of taking an important move and
losing ourselves in a mirage well before the horizon is near. Technical and
economic efficiency are necessary and pivotal(crucial,निर्णायक) reasons to want to make access to water
universal but are not, they must not be, sufficient ones. In an
auto-constructed city where spatial illegality breaks access to basic rights,
expanding the right to water must be a part of a larger effort to expand the
right to the city itself.
The city planner’s public
Ambedkar once said that a Hindu’s public is just his caste. An Indian city’s public is too often just the legal, planned colony. The graded inequalities that follow between this imagined ideal and all other ways of inhabiting the city are real. The exclusions are simultaneously socially performed, legally enshrined, and economically reproduced. Recognising the right to water — it is a jal adhikar connection — must be the first step in taking on the spatial illegality that urban residents have been forced into and then held accountable for. It must begin to return to the Indian city its actual universal, its actual publics, to all of its residents. For this, we must begin at the most fundamental of all claims: to be recognised as being in the city, to be acknowledged, and to be valued as workers, citizens and bearers of rights rather than just the “poor,” “slum dwellers” or “encroachers.” What Delhi must do now is to stand by its Jal Board that has taken a first and important step to live up to being and becoming a truly public utility.
Ambedkar once said that a Hindu’s public is just his caste. An Indian city’s public is too often just the legal, planned colony. The graded inequalities that follow between this imagined ideal and all other ways of inhabiting the city are real. The exclusions are simultaneously socially performed, legally enshrined, and economically reproduced. Recognising the right to water — it is a jal adhikar connection — must be the first step in taking on the spatial illegality that urban residents have been forced into and then held accountable for. It must begin to return to the Indian city its actual universal, its actual publics, to all of its residents. For this, we must begin at the most fundamental of all claims: to be recognised as being in the city, to be acknowledged, and to be valued as workers, citizens and bearers of rights rather than just the “poor,” “slum dwellers” or “encroachers.” What Delhi must do now is to stand by its Jal Board that has taken a first and important step to live up to being and becoming a truly public utility.
courtesy:the hindu
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