435417 SSS42410.

1177/0306312711435417BOOK REVIEW Social Studies of Science

Book review

Social Studies of Science

Book review
42(4) 628­–631
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0306312711435417
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Nicholas J. Rowland
Department of Sociology, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona, PA, USA

Govind Gopakumar, Transforming Urban Water Supply in India:The Role of Reform

and Partnerships in Globalization (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), 192 pp.,
£85.00/€105.44/$140.00. ISBN 978-0-415-67067-8.

This is a book about infrastructure. Govind Gopakumar’s new book Transforming Urban
Water Supplies in India is a welcome addition to the Routledge Contemporary South
Asia Series. Gopakumar also is co-author of Water Resources (Raju et al., 2004). His
new book is especially valuable for science and technology studies because of its empiri-
cal and analytical emphasis on what I will call here the ‘state–infrastructure’ relationship.
In introducing the core topic of the book, infrastructure, Gopakumar (2012: 1) invites
nearly every discipline to the table, ranging from ‘engineers and technologists’, ‘histori-
ans, geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists’ to ‘urban technological historians’,
‘sociologists of utility networks’, urban geographers’, and ‘technology studies scholars’.
And rightly so: infrastructure studies are complex and complicated precisely because
they defy straightforward explanation in any particular disciplinary jurisdiction.
Infrastructure is often remote from our conscious view as citizens. Building on
Graham and Marvin’s (2001: 181) work, Gopakumar shows that, while infrastructures
may be ‘banal constructions’ that we often take for granted, they also tell us a lot about
the formation and consequence of their governance. With special emphasis on public and
private partnerships to enhance or expand infrastructural development, Gopakumar
draws our attention to transformations of social and material relations within the contem-
porary Indian nation-state and its subnational states. Overall, the book takes an historical-
comparative approach, with the unit of analysis being the city. Gopakumar expertly
selects three cities to compare, focusing on differing relationships between the subna-
tional state, within which the city is embedded, and the broader Indian (federal) state. His
comparisons especially attend to variations in how each city, responding to global and
federal pressures, establishes public–private partnerships, thus forming urban water sup-
ply regimes. The book is delightfully dense. The author shows surprising restraint on the

Corresponding author:
Nicholas J. Rowland, Department of Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, 128H E. Raymond Smith
Building, Altoona, PA 16601, USA.
Email: njr12@psu.edu

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Book review 629

seemingly endless time and space that could be devoted to the study of water infrastruc-
ture in India’s long history. While the conscientious editing is appreciated, occasionally
this reader would have been happy to read more, as in the case of the analysis of the lit-
erature invoked in the book, which could have been deeped.
The book’s case selection is smart. During the post-independence era, there has been
a legacy of democratic social involvement in public matters in India. This legacy, how-
ever, is threatened by global opportunities for economic growth and supra-state pressures
for change. Infrastructure, fittingly, is stuck in the middle, and India becomes an out-
standing site for testing insights gathered by geographers and other scholars interested in
the expansion of neoliberal forms of governance. The conceptual contribution of this
book is to recognize that we can scrutinize the extent to which global regimes of neolib-
eral policy restructure infrastructure in highly localized episodes, episodes in which
infrastructural development is depoliticized and the state’s responsibility to govern water
supply is shared with non-governmental organizations and/or private market vendors
(see especially Gopakumar, 2012: 4, 35, 82). I was convinced, after reading the first few
chapters, that India is a near perfect setting for studying how water infrastructure matters
for states, both federal and sub-national. In a post-colonial period, deep democratic roots
were fashioned from a doctrine of sub-national state autonomy and a federal polity;
water, thus, became both a state and federal issue, as sub-national states were mainly left
the task of organizing, implementing, and maintaining water supplies, water cleanliness,
and so on, with modest federal oversight. India’s uniqueness and complexity notwith-
standing, urban infrastructure reform in that nation also is beset by relatively low levels
of urbanization, diffuse global pressures, and economic opportunities. Using a multi-
method and multi-site approach, Gopakumar takes us to three metropolitan areas in three
sub-national states: the city of Bengaluru in Karnataka, the city of Chennai in Tamil
Nadu, and the city of Kochi in Kerala. Each city is carefully selected for the respective
state’s differing response to reforms arising from the federal state.
India is a good case for state theory, and Gopakumar covers a lot of this territory in his
review of the literature. Scholars in political science, sociology, and international rela-
tions have developed state theory to tackle ontological issues such as how to conceptual-
ize the state, and empirical matters such as the role and relevance of states in global and
domestic events. India is presented as both a strong and weak state; strong enough to
maintain its borders and avoid decay, but weak enough that it failed to promote massive
economic and social development. Even as India began fortifying its infrastructure,
social interests co-opted state efforts to do so, thus, making the state increasingly
‘embedded’: too soft to enforce regulation, and overly accommodating to its many and
diverse stakeholders. In this way, India was overloaded by engaging in too many endeav-
ors and failing to delegate enough of its responsibilities to local, subnational states. As
Sinha (2005) argued, the developmental state not only suffers practically, but also con-
ceptually, and Gopakumar (2012:18) suggests that we must transcend ‘inherited schol-
arly barriers and mental containers that have prevented disaggregation of the state in
critical analysis’. The problem he identifies, echoing Sinha, is that scholars studying
state action overwhelmingly adopted a state-as-an-actor metaphor, as either a benevo-
lent state aiding in the development of the country or a malevolent state preying on its
people and resources. Gopakumar’s book is a reminder that states and their governance

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630 Social Studies of Science 42(4)

practices must be carefully conceptualized in infrastructure studies because of the long

history of state entanglement in infrastructural development.
The empirical chapters strike a balance between historical description and comparative
analysis. For example, in chapter 4, Gopakumar describes the historical and political con-
texts of transformation in water supply systems in the three cities he compares – Bengaluru,
Kochi, and Chennai – while keeping a sharp eye fixed on infrastructure–state relation-
ships. From these comparisons he concludes that ‘water supply regimes’ in these cities
‘vary considerably’ (p. 80). The differences are particularistic, owing to ‘a host of factors
related to the particular histories of politics, institution, technology, and water resource
extraction in these cities’ (p. 80). Bengaluru has a relatively provincial regime governing
water supply, with relatively limited political and economic resources devoted to water
supply. Chennai has a relatively autonomous regime, granting high significance to water
resources, and Kochi is in between, granting water resources neither high nor low political
significance. Gopakumar does not use the word ‘regime’ casually; he draws upon a par-
ticular definition for the term used in urban regime theory to describe the formation of
informal coalitions called ‘regimes’, which are composed of governmental and non-
governmental agents who together govern city spaces (Stone, 1989). The point of empha-
sis in this line of research is building networks and establishing partnerships, which is why
research on infrastructure tends to overlook the various types of infrastructure that differ-
ent regimes produce in favor of documenting and comparing the network structure of the
regimes themselves. Gopakumar begins to attend to this shortcoming in his book.
The second empirical chapter, chapter 5, is perhaps the most novel analysis of this topic.
In that chapter, Gopakumar shows explicitly how forging partnerships transforms water
supply infrastructure. His research considers an important initiative, mainly the United
Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) ‘tenth target’, which sought ‘to cut in half
by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to drinking water and basic
sanitation’ (UN Millennium Project, 2005). Gopakumar argues that the transformation in
Indian cities toward public–private water partnerships ‘certainly emerged in response to
MDG’s call for change’ although, on balance, he reminds us that India was rich with ready-
made fodder for such a change given ‘the country’s wider shift toward state withdrawal
from social service provision and the greater decentralization pressures’ (p. 83).
The book is a great fit with the Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series. Compared
with Gopakumar’s (2010a,b; 2011a) individual research articles on water infrastructure,
Transforming Urban Water Supplies in India is a more cohesive statement on the topic
and is replete with future directions for research. One of the most exciting things about
this book is how it fits with research that is emerging on the state–infrastructure rela-
tionship. Patrick Carroll’s (2012) recent work on water infrastructure in California
pairs nicely with Gopakumar (2011b) recent and future research, in which he more
explicitly conceptualizes states, stateness, and governmentality, unsurprisingly using
some of Carroll’s (2006) previous research as a touch-point, as well as some of my own
work that uses an actor-network model of states (Passoth and Rowland, 2010). Science
and technology studies promises to make contributions to state theory, with insights
about the role of infrastructure in state formation and reformation, and state expansion
and contraction. In closing, Gopakumar’s book is larger than it appears. Although the
book is only 176 pages long, it makes large theoretical and empirical contributions and

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Book review 631

also should hold long-term value for those of us with an interest in state–infrastructure
relations.

References
Carroll P (2006) Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Carroll P (2012) Reclamation, water, and technoscience state formation in California. Social Stud-
ies of Science 42(3).
Graham S and Marvin S (2001) Splintering Urbanism. London: Routledge.
Gopakumar G (2010a) Transforming water supply regimes in India: Do public-private partner-
ships have a role to play? Water Alternatives 3(3): 492–511.
Gopakumar G (2010b) Sustainability and the indispensability of politics: A study of sanitation
partnerships in urban India. International Journal of Sustainable Society 2(4): 376–392.
Gopakumar G (2011a) Policy transmission: The policy dynamic of water supply infrastructure
development in India. Water Policy 13(3): 375–392.
Gopakumar G (2011b) Knotty or naughty? Seeing the Indian state through a technoscientific lens.
Unpublished paper presented at Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Sci-
ence, Cleveland, OH (2–5 November).
Gopakumar G (2012) Transforming Urban Water Supply in India. London and New York: Routledge.
Passoth J-H and Rowland NJ (2010) Actor-network state. International Sociology 25: 818–841.
Raju KV, Narayanamoorthy A, Gopakumar G, and Amarnath HK (2004) State of the Indian
Farmer: A Millennium Study, Vol. 3. Water Resources. New Delhi: Academic Foundation.
Sinha A (2005) The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Stone CN (1989) Regime Politics. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
UN Millennium Project (2005) Health, dignity and development: What will it take? United Nations
Development Project, Task Force on Water and Sanitation. Available at: www.unmillennium-
project.org/documents/WaterComplete-lowres.pdf (accessed 10 December 2011).

Biographical note
Nicholas J. Rowland is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Pennsylvania State
University in Altoona, PA, USA. From the vantage point of STS (science and technology
studies), he writes about the spread of large administrative information systems in higher
education as well as rise of eHealth and its implications for states and state theory. He
also writes for a blog about infrastructure ‘Installing (Social) Order’ (www.installing
order.org/).

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