Watering the slums : how a utility and its street-level bureaucrats connected the poor in Bangalore

This dissertation is about how urban water utilities behave and what makes them interested in serving the poor. The infrastructure literature tends to treat public service agencies as monolithic entities and to ignore the great diversity of tasks and behavior patterns within them. As a consequence, common explanations for why utilities fail poor people tend to focus on attributes of the external environment in which utilities sit and not on the potential to elicit interest from within. This research corrects for this bias by applying a "street-level bureaucracy" approach to a study of a large urban water utility. The aim is to quash the notion so common in the water literature of a unified agency operating on the supply side and to rekindle an interest in the actions of workers. To do this, I examine the case of the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) and its contrasting outcomes within the same case. Over a five year period from 2000 to 2005, the utility revised its operational policies to accommodate the legal and financial realities of slums and connected 5,000 households or five percent of the slum population to the water network. Although the BWSSB demonstrated an unusual commitment to the poor, its efforts were not an unmitigated success. Progress was slow and staff failed to connect households to the network in many of the slums targeted. This dissertation digs deep inside the utility to explain these contrasting outcomes holding the city, the agency, and the sector efficiency constant. I find that while external pressures were necessary to prompt a business-as-usual utility to take action in slums, variation in outcome can be explained by the different facets of engineering life in BWSSB service stations and the different kinds of relationships forged between frontline staff and slum dwellers.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Connors, Genevieve

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bishwapriya Sanyal.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/42262

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/42262