Consuming Citizenship: Prepaid Meters and the Politics of Technology in Mumbai

In November 2007, the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai announced Sujal Mumbai-a new program to upgrade the city's water infrastructure. Amongst several initiatives was a proposal to connect new settlements to water lines regulated by prepaid meters. In this paper I focus on the surprising and unexpected appearance of the prepaid water meter in Mumbai to make two arguments. First, I argue that based on the particular technopolitical history of Mumbai's water infrastructure, the neoliberal technology that was the prepaid meter represented not a withdrawal, but an extension of state services in the city. Second, I argue for an attention to the accreted and relational politics produced by infrastructural assemblages. The politics of technical devices or infrastructure are not discrete and singular, nor are these contained by the meter. Instead, the political effects of the meter are plural, and emerge from the relations between the meter and the accreted materials, histories, and rationalities already embedded and at work in infrastructural systems.