Pipe Dreams? The Governance of Urban Water Supply in Informal Settlements, New Delhi

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.