Flowing against the current: The socio-technical mediation of water (in)security in periurban Gurgaon,India

This research is located at the intersection of three canals in periurban Gurugram. Two of these canals were built to provide water for the growing city of Gurugram and one of them carries the wastewater of the city back to the villages. These canals cut through periurban villages that are excluded in principle from taking benefit of these canals. They are meant to be at their receiving end, as recipients of these waters. The paper, using a socio-technical lens, explores the mixed impacts of these canals on the villages through which they traverse. The paper further describes the strategies that periurban communities devise to circumvent the situation of exclusion. Using a qualitative, ethnographic research design, the paper describes the socio-technical mediation of periurban water insecurity, focusing on the mix of technologies and institutions that spring up around these canals that shape the periurban water users’ access to water. The paper concludes that approaches for promoting community resilience and periurban water security need to start from an understanding of the strategies devised by periurban communities to improve their access to water. In the larger discourse on building community resilience in the face of urbanization and climate change it is important to pay attention to local norms of cooperation that enable periurban communities to access water, rather than start from a premise that water insecurity caused by urbanization and climate change will lead to conflicts or necessitate capacity-building to promote avoid conflict and promote cooperation.