Beneficiary?Stakeholder? Consumer? Citizen-state dynamics in Bangalore's urban reforms

As neoliberal reforms aiming to enhance cost recovery and efficiency transform urban service delivery in India, the relationship between citizens and the state is also being reconfigured—although in ways not always intended by reform proponents. In fact, the imposition of market-driven, rational, and technologized strategies for providing services and “simplifying transactions” opens up new opportunities for political influence, resistance by different groups, exclusion and differentiation, and intra-governmental tension, all of which have implications for urban citizenship. Based on ethnographic research in Bangalore and its peripheral zones, this paper traces the rationale for reforms involving municipal services such as water and sanitation. It shows how such strategies have the intention of transforming a political relationship between the governing and governed into a non-political one between a business and its customers. This is chiefly to achieve certain benchmarks of “good” urban governance, such as accountability and transparency. The paper reveals, however, that when this is attempted, not only are those benchmarks seldom achieved, but the relationship between citizens and state develops a different set of tensions—those that were likely unforeseen by reform trustees. The paper asks two main questions: 1. How do reforms intend on changing the relationship between citizens, service providers, and the state, and why? 2. How do reforms actually change this relationship, and what new conceptions of urban citizenship are being constructed as a result? This paper examines these questions in the context of Bangalore and its newly added periphery. Already facing stiff software competition from other cities in India due to crumbling infrastructure, increasingly prone to fickle coalition politics, and formally tripling in geographic area in early 2007, the “IT City” romance of Bangalore is fast giving way to sobering realities. International organizations, state agencies, and NGOs are focusing attention on the newly incorporated urban periphery of Bangalore—including 110 villages and 8 towns—where adequate water and sanitation continue to elude most of its 1.2 million residents. Two strategies are examined in detail: a) computerized grievance redressal implemented through statewide municipal reforms and b) beneficiary capital contributions in the Greater Bangalore Water and Sanitation Project. Both approaches are representative of current rationalities and technologies of governing embedded in the India’s new national urban reform program—the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. Drawing on Foucauldian critiques of governmentality, the paper first lays out theoretical frameworks for interpreting why the urban citizen has come to the fore in today’s good governance agenda. Next, the paper uses recent ethnographic fieldwork in Greater Bangalore to describe the modalities of beneficiary fees and complaint redressal. The workings of these approaches are compared with ways in which citizens have historically interacted with elected councilors, frontline water engineers, and bureaucrats in order to trace transformations in citizen-state relations. Finally, the paper explores emerging notions of urban citizenship, and suggests that belying de-politicized categories like “beneficiary”, “client”, and “stakeholder”—prone to use by reform proponents—are a set of relationships that are politically negotiated and rife with tension. 2