- Based on fieldwork on urban water supply in New Delhi, this paper shows that while informal providers fill a gap left by the public utility, residents can remain captive consumers with limited ability to influence service quality or price.
- In this case, residents were successfully able to organise themselves to drive improvements to services through a gradual evolution of their relationships between informal providers and politicians.
- Two key factors helped to drive this improvement. The nature of the service – piped water systems are conducive to triggering collective action because the configuration of these systems encourages small groups to form to prevent free-riding. The other major factor was rising political awareness and competition, which helped to enable community groups to break out of clientelistic relationships with local politicians.
- While directly engaging with private service providers and elected politicians led to few improvements, establishing a more direct relationship of entitlement between residents and the water utility by legalising and regulating informal providers and incorporating them into public systems, proved a more promising way of both ensuring sustainability of water provision, and improving the governance of urban water services.