Contaminated Water, Contaminated Technologies: Water Quality in formation of Developmental State in Rural Southern Bihar

Abstract

This study revolves around a village in the southernmost part of Bihar state in India. This region is filled with fluoride contamination in groundwater, which causes fluorosis disease among households. Fluorosis incidences affected generations, making people partially or entirely incapable of social and economic reproduction. In response, state, non-state and private enterprises intervened in this village to provide access to ‘safe’ drinking water. These twenty-three years of interventions introduced different technologies and infrastructures which governed the village’s households as a development subject. However, narratives, observations, and government reports express that these policy-based technological interventions failed miserably due to poor operation, maintenance, and acceptance of the introduced infrastructures. Drinking water infrastructures, however, arranged the spatial conditions in this village and (re)formed the sociotechnical relations between community, state, and non-state.

This Paper examines the notion of water quality in a historically geographically produced marginal landscape. Further, this paper elaborates on how fluorosis incidences among households drew the attention of state and non-state institutions to intervene in this village, and how these interventions produce heterogeneity among the spaces within the space of the village. Finally, this paper explains how these negotiations form the public imagination of infrastructures and states in their daily lives. Through a mix-method approach (data collection, ethnographic accounts, key-respondent and in-depth interviews), this paper understands the ground reality and argue that space, time and material conditions create unequal sociotechnical relations within the village.