Water for life, not for profit: Globalization, development, and water struggles in India

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography of environmental/anti-privatization water movements in three sites in India: New Delhi, Delhi; Mumbai, Maharashtra; and Plachimada, Kerala. The social movements are simultaneously environmental movements to ensure people's access to water and anti-privatization movements against the private control of water supplies. The water struggles all began near the beginning of the twenty-first century (between 2002 and 2005) as responses to the World Bank and Indian government's development strategy of foreign investments in public utilities (water) and private industry (the Coca-Cola Corporation). Two of my case studies concentrate on India's largest cities, Delhi and Mumbai, where citizens opposed the government and Bank's attempts to privatize the public water utilities. The other case study in the rural village of Plachimada, Kerala, investigates the people's movement against the Coca-Cola Corporation because of its depletion and pollution of the community's ground water. While the conflict in Delhi ended in 2005, the water movements in Mumbai and Plachimada are on-going. Through an in-depth analysis of these popular water struggles, I analyze the factors that contribute to resource movements, the links between them, and the different sites, actors, discourses, and dimensions of water conflicts.;My research advances scholarship on Third World environmental movements and identifies the need for a new framework which I call the "new environmentalism." This approach encourages researchers to consider the numerous layers of resource struggles such as the different actors, sites, interests, knowledge, values, and meanings within movements. I develop this paradigm using ethnographic evidence from eight months of field work in India and seventy in-depth interviews with: local residents, agricultural laborers, and farmers; anti-privatization activists and their pro-privatization opponents; government officials; employees of transnational corporations; community organizers; scholars; current and former Coca-Cola employees; and members of non-governmental organizations, trade unions, and women's groups. My analysis is supplemented by an examination of movement literature and government and World Bank project documents on each of the proposed water projects. Throughout this dissertation I aim to explain why water conflicts occur and how we can prevent resource exploitation and engender new forms of sustainable water governance.