Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 99

Indian Politics & Policy
power social relations. Included in these
social meanings and uses of water are
the perceptions of the microbiology of
water and of the impact different kinds
of water have on the body and health.
These cases indicate that the
hydrosocial cycle is shifting and calibrating
to new flows of water and governance
over time. Water flows are being
altered in three ways. One way is in
water provisioning for public sector or
public–private partnerships; the second
way is in the governance of wastewater
treatment and the operation and maintenance
of facilities. The third way is in
water availability wherein polluted water
is converted into usable water and
added to rather than thrown off from
the water supply chain.
Recently, Starkl et al. (2018) have
argued for a perspective called “flexibat”
which denotes the best possible and
workable technology for a given wastewater
situation. They showed the need
to understand variability in the success
and failure of these sewage treatment
plants (STPs). Their analysis compared
costs and benefits of a number of
small-scale systems, such as membrane
systems, soil biotechnology, phytorid,
vortex, and sequential batch reactor. It
found that some technologies such as
vortex are more costly than the others.
Their data show that the membrane or
MBR technology is best for removal of
pathogens.
This paper expands the approach
to flexibat by identifying the key institutional,
cultural, and economic parameters
that are producing the best
examples of decentralized systems. This
includes attention to behavior, economy,
regulation, policy, and leadership
as different but co-existing systems and
structures. We will show that the key
parameters of leadership, water pricing,
water scarcity, regulations, and closedloop
business savings are weighted
differently in each case but that all are
present to some degree in each case.
They are therefore significant for India
and stand to become best scenarios
over time.
Wastewater providers and recyclers
are not like water mafias (Ranganathan
2014) and valve or key men
(Anand 2017; Dasgupta 2015) who
hold power as water brokers, tanker
owners, and operators. Rather they
operate as “experiments” and “pilots”
and often struggle with financing and
repairs. There has been a general disinterest
among government and citizen
groups to engage in improvements with
wastewater treatment; therefore, the
projects we highlight are a welcome advancement.
Methodology and Verification
For this paper, we chose four cases
that best represent the range of
activities taking place across 40
sites we visited over a three-year period.
To choose these cases, we surveyed
40 projects that we located through the
advice of key NGO members, industry
actors and companies, and the information
provided in the databases of the
Centre for Science and Environment,
the Central Pollution Control Board
(CPCB), the National Mission Clean
Ganga (NMCG), and other engaged
agencies. Snowball sampling techniques
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