BITS of Belonging draws upon perspectives from the IT industry and the water bureaucracies in Bangalore to offer an interesting interpretation of contemporary citizenship in India. In a rolling account that tacks between units and players in industry, government, and the NGO world, Simanti Dasgupta portrays citizens’ understandings of the transformative nature of the IT field alongside descriptions of the contradictory and disjunctive conditions of urban infrastructure and water supply. Data are presented ethnographically as excerpts from discussions, interviews, public relations reports, government documents, and current events. Without being overly theoretical or tedious with institutional and policy details, Dasgupta gives an original perspective on the possibilities and limitations of the software industry to infuse notions of governance into the body politic. The book is enlivened by references to ongoing trends and their relationships to the data and makes useful mention of urban planning milestones and key events. The expanding role of IT professionals in policy making, the global economic downturn, the middle-class capture of the state, and the spread of “Hindutva lite” through BJP rule are discussed in some detail as context for the analysis.
BITS of Belonging is of course a software metaphor but, as Dasgupta explains, it is also a metaphor for citizenship across India. In the midst of the deep structure of corruption, middle-class concerns hinge on expectations of timeliness, accountability, and transparency. The book does an excellent job of bringing the perspectives of IT and NGO leaders alive through accounts of the board and business meetings at Infosys and at the NGO Janaagraha. The ethnography also describes discussions with donor agencies and urban-poor representatives, outreach meetings between Water Board representatives and slum dwellers, and other conversations with residents and IT employees. We learn about citizens’ pride for IT, about the shame and scourge of corruption, and about the potential of a neoliberal logic of governance to offer hope. This is the middle-class capture of the state where citizenship is defined as market participation and consumption. But, Dasgupta argues, this vision of neoliberal governance obfuscates the middle- and upper-class benefits that keep the water supply unequal and leave slum dwellers unable to participate in water reforms.
In the peri-urban zone, a piped water supply is not guaranteed by the state government and infrastructure investment is selective. These contingencies generate uncertainty for citizens living there. Slum dwellers must negotiate with valve men, or infrastructure brokers, for irregular spurts of water. At the same time, corporate enclaves and IT complexes located in these zones enjoy a regular water supply. To rectify this inequality in water provisioning, we learn that leaders of the software company Infosys, the government of Karnataka, the World Bank, and USAID are planning to expand the water supply across Bangalore and the peri-urban zone. The plan is to fund the Greater Bangalore Water and Sewerage Project with citizen contributions, market bonds, mega-city loans, and state government finance. A local NGO, Janaagraha, is included in the project to organize citizens in monitoring and holding the government accountable.
The expressions of IT professionals along with their sense of pride and their ethics of transparency and timeliness are a clear window into this emerging notion of neoliberal governance. They believe that the market will remove opportunities for corruption through digitization, metering, and efficiency. IT leaders want infrastructure that facilitates the flow of global capital, but slum dwellers appear unable to make the large up-front contributions to infrastructure costs. Janaagraha's leaders trust the market as the only tool that can bring about substantive changes in state functioning and allow citizen involvement as stakeholders of the nation. IT and NGO representatives imagine the ideal of a water supply through the constructs of time and labor developed in the workplace, as they aim to “cleanse the nation of the toxin of corruption” (p. 123). Slum dwellers continue to see water possibilities through the operations of valve men, who are political operators. The ethnography shows how troubled a transition to privatized water would be if all citizens were mandated to pay an upfront contribution to the infrastructure costs and higher prices for piped water. This kind of project would be particularly vexed at the peri-urban outskirts—frayed at the city's edges—in the places where urban residents get a modicum of free water and are unable to pay for more.
The focus on water unsettles the otherwise euphoric national narrative of IT, which privileges the middle and upper-middle classes and neglects the urban poor in the market paradigm of change. Becoming a privileged citizen of the nation is a question of who can participate in market ideals and who cannot, and diverts attention from the universal provisioning of basic services. Consequently, residents live through bits of belonging to the nation and to the global economy as they struggle to acquire basic water services and compete in the software industry.
As Dasgupta explains, the market narrative of consumer and provider, and of accountability and transparency, also obscures the actual reality of water sourcing. The Bangalore project proposes to solve the surface water deficit by drawing from the Cauvery river 100 kilometers away. This would incur significant infrastructure costs through transfer pipelines and upgrades.
BITS of Belonging does not venture further into water worlds to discuss water availability in the Cauvery basin or across the country, nor does it point to the volatile politics of water sharing and the contestation over water transfer schemes. Water imagined as surplus, deficit, or transferable could offer another reflection on IT visions of grandeur. IT life viewed from outside-in has its own imaginary quite separate from the problems of water supply, transfer, and treatment. Nonetheless the connections between leaders across industry, government, and the NGO space are well sketched, showing that bureaucracies, industries, and citizen groups cross over at many junctures and share bits of worldview. The reader benefits from this interpretation of the interactive field in which IT visions of governance are refracted through water. The lesson is that a middle-class capture of the state is unlikely to solve water problems in the current context, but the market model may help to temper the state's corrupting and centralizing activities.
