Policy brief

Theme issue article Nature and Space

Making India’s cleanest city: Sanitation, intersectionality, and infrastructural violence

Yaffa Truelove University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

Kathleen O’Reilly Texas A & M University, College Station, TX, USA

Abstract

Inaugurated in 2014, India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) intends to eradicate open defecation in

urban and rural areas by 2019. In cities, the scheme ranks municipalities for achieving open

defecation-free status and other measures of cleanliness. In 2017, Indore was first nationally

recognized with the national Cleanest City award. In the weeks before the city was evaluated,

it sponsored a number of activities that demolished housing and sanitation infrastructures, singled

out the female body for humiliation, and forced residents to revert back to the very sanitation

practices the city was allegedly trying to eradicate.

This paper traces the differing articulations of power at work between the extension and

demolition of the city’s infrastructure. It focuses particularly on latrines, the metrics, and the

urban vision to make Indore the Cleanest City, but also gives attention to the additional infra-

structures connected to latrine-making and unmaking, including housing. We specifically explore

two dimensions of what we call the “infrastructural intersectionality” of the Clean City Mission,

which discloses differing forms of compounding infrastructural violence that include the dissolu-

tion of both material and social infrastructures. Firstly, the intersectionality of gender/caste/class/

race social identities and power relations that are embedded and reified through infrastructures

and, secondly, the intersectionality of multiple infrastructures that are inter-connected and co-

constituted through each other. We argue that bringing the lens of intersectionality is critical for

recognizing the socially differentiated and gendered dimensions of sanitation infrastructure, the

SBM, and its situated infrastructural violence. By exploring two themes related to infrastructure

and intersectionality, we show the criticality of embodied and gendered approaches to analyzing

the power of infrastructure in the everyday.

Corresponding author:

Yaffa Truelove, Department of Geography, University of Colorado, 260 UCB 110 Guggenheim Boulder, CO 80309, USA.

Email: [email protected]

EPE: Nature and Space

2021, Vol. 4(3) 718–735

! The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/2514848620941521

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Keywords

Gender, infrastructural violence, intersectionality, sanitation, Swachh Bharat Mission

Introduction

During November 2017, officials from the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) traversed

the city in an effort to enumerate every household with a toilet. When they entered

Sukhniwas road, the location of an informal settlement that had only recently been incor-

porated into the city’s expanding municipal territory, the officials found a cluster of 40

dwellings that lacked access to either personal or public toilets. The officials informed

this group of residents that they would need to invest Rs.1360 (approximately US $20)

within one week for an individual household latrine, the balance being subsidized by the

national Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission). Some residents complained that

this was a hefty sum for poor city-dwellers to procure in such a short amount of time, but

families nonetheless found a way to pay the IMC, and were given receipts. Soon after, the

IMC dug individuated pits for each house. However, after this, toilet-building ceased.

Officials never returned to the site, and residents were left to wonder when their latrines

would be installed, if ever. The next time the state entered the settlement, a few months later,

disaster struck. Twenty IMC officials and eight police arrived one early morning and

announced that homes without toilets would be demolished at once (Shantha, 2017).

As reported by one woman, named Nanjubai, whose house was demolished in the area:

They began knocking at our doors at 6am and asked us all to step out immediately. We were

asked to either save our lives or our belongings; we chose our lives. In no time, all our belongings

were crushed. Our houses were razed to the ground and we were made homeless. (quoted in

Shantha, 2017: 3)

Shortly after the demolition, the Swachh Survekshan (SS), an assessor group for the Swachh

Bharat Mission (SBM) sent from the central government, descended upon the city to mea-

sure (among other indicators) the presence of toilets and whether the city could be ranked as

open defecation-free (ODF) (Shantha, 2017). Not only did the SS declare Indore to be ODF,

but the group awarded high points for additional measures of cleanliness. Shortly after, it

announced that Indore was “India’s Cleanest City”—first among 500 Indian cities in achiev-

ing cleanliness (Khanna, 2017). The Sukhniwas slum was not the only neighborhood to experience infrastructural vio-

lence in the days leading up to the SBM’s cleanliness assessment. In an area called Bhuri

Tekri, the IMC had invested 13 million rupees (approximately US $172,000) to build latrines

for the zone that would be visible during the SS assessment. Only two months after 825

individual household latrines were installed in this neighborhood, both the housing and new

latrines of residents were simultaneously destroyed. Bhuri Tekri had been pre-designated for

demolition by municipal officials, after the toilets had served their purpose of being present

during the days of SS survey (DBSS, 2018; Shantha, 2017).Such state practices increased the

precariousness of the urban poor, not only through the destruction of toilets, but also

through the linkage of toilets to the elimination of other infrastructures such as housing,

water, electricity, and connectivity to places of work, compounding infrastructural violence

and multiplying negative effects on particular bodies.

Truelove and O’Reilly 719

This paper traces the differing articulations of power at work between the extension and demolition of the city’s infrastructure. It focuses particularly on latrines and the urban vision to make Indore an ODF and “Clean City,” but also gives attention to the additional infrastructures connected to latrine-making and unmaking. As there have been few studies to date that analyze the social and material impacts of the SBM—particularly in the cities awarded the highest rankings—this research addresses this lacuna by also identifying the visceral and affective embodied experiences perpetrated through the SBM urban vision and its compounding infrastructural violence for particular city-dwellers. By exploring two themes related to what we term “infrastructural intersectionality,” we show how the SBM produces differing forms of compounded infrastructural violence and corporeal suffering. Firstly, by “infrastructural intersectionality” we refer to the intersectionality of gender/ caste/class/race social identities and power relations that are embedded and reified through infrastructures and, secondly, the intersectionality of multiple infrastructures that are inter- connected and co-constituted through each other. Thus, through our analyses of infrastruc- tural intersectionality, we argue that embodied and gendered approaches are critical for analyzing the power of infrastructure in the everyday. We draw on national news sources, detailed documents produced by the IMC, and verbal reports from Deen Bandhu Samaj Sahayog Indore (DBSS, a local activist NGO)1 to show that the Clean India Mission damages socially differentiated and gendered bodies in ways that are revealed not only through an analysis of sanitation infrastructure in various states of decay, maintenance, and repair, but their rippling effects onto additional infrastructures of urban life, specifically housing and social networks of cooperation.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, we introduce the concept of infrastructural inter- sectionality, tying it into recent literature on gender and sanitation and the social, temporal, and material life of infrastructure, including current theorizations of infrastructural vio- lence. Next, we introduce the SBM, and Indore’s interpretation of SBM guidelines as part of its quest to become a “Clean, Green, and Smart” city. We then specifically explore the two dimensions of infrastructural intersectionality as it pertains to the Clean City Mission, analyzing intersecting forms of embodied suffering that emerge from the dissolution of both material and social infrastructures. We argue that bringing the lens of intersectionality is critical for recognizing the socially differentiated and gendered dimensions of sanitation infrastructure, the SBM, and its situated infrastructural violence. Thus, our findings specif- ically show that infrastructural violence is mediated and co-produced by differing forms of intersectionality, which necessitate a situated analysis of infrastructural violence that is attentive to the ways that the decay, maintenance, and repair of infrastructures are tied to embodied and affective harm.

Conceptualizing infrastructural intersectionality

In this paper, we draw from feminist theory and scholarship on gender and sanitation, as well as critical infrastructure studies, to conceptualize two types of “infrastructural inter- sectionality” that emerge from the SBM program in Indore. We argue that bringing the lens of intersectionality is critical for recognizing the socially differentiated and gendered dimen- sions of sanitation infrastructure, the SBM, and its situated infrastructural violence.

Firstly, by infrastructural intersectionality we refer to feminist theorizations of intersec- tionality, dating back to Crenshaw’s work in 1991, that highlight “the complexity of gen- dered experiences in tension with race, ethnicity, class, age, or sexuality,” etc. (Crenshaw, 1991; see also Beebeejaun, 2017). Gender, rather than being either fixed or mutually exclu- sive from other social identities such as race, class, sexuality, or age, is rather shaped

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through other intersecting identities, which produce differing forms of power and oppres- sion. By intersectionality in a sanitation context, we mean how a subject’s multiple identities shape his/her vulnerabilities in relationships of power, e.g. the overlapping of gender, class, and caste discrimination that oppresses poor lower-caste women in different, usually great- er, ways than lower-caste men, or upper-caste women. In the recent past, significant research on gender and urban sanitation in India has engaged intersectionality as a key feature of poor women’s experiences with open defecation and community sanitation. First among this scholarship is the work of Bapat and Agarwal (2003) whose study of community toilet blocks in Mumbai showcases poor women’s successful activism surrounding sanitation, driven by their particular, gendered needs. Research that followed examines poor women’s everyday lives, including the insecurity and vulnerability associated with OD in the city (Truelove, 2011). In response to an urban sanitation provision approach of one-size- fits all, Joshi et al. (2011) illustrate that such a policy could not possibly address the san- itation and hygiene needs of the un- and under-served in Indian cities. Their work drives a much closer look at the ways that intersectionality limits poor urban residents’ access to sanitation. Pavement dwellers, those with physical ailments, and women all require specific sanitation and hygiene facilities, and experiences of inadequate sanitation are intensified through intersectionality, e.g. a disabled woman living on a city street. As increasing atten- tion has been given to urban women’s experiences of OD and toilet building projects across South Asia, a list of intersecting inequalities has emerged: age; marital status; ethnicity; stage in the life course; type of employment; caste; and religion (Doron and Jeffrey, 2014; Kulkarni et al., 2017; Sahoo et al., 2015). Nearly endless positionalities might stymie a search for sanitation solutions attempting to address all women’s experiences, but most importantly, intersectionality illustrates the myth of “women” as a category (see Mohanty, 1988), and recent gender and sanitation scholarship attends to intersectionality (Mohanty and Dwivedi, 2019). We thus draw from this long-standing feminist work on intersectionality and sanitation infrastructure to analyze how making Indore “India’s Cleanest City” through the SBM both operated through, and reproduced, intersecting gender, caste, and class relations in the city, leveling compounded forms of infrastructural violence on poor, lower-caste women’s bodies.

A second and congruent dimension of infrastructural intersectionality that we examine in the paper refers to multiple infrastructures that are inter-connected and co-constituted through each other. For example, rather than seeing sanitation infrastructures such as toilets as being mutually exclusive from other infrastructures like water or housing, we highlight the ways that transformations in one infrastructure intersect with, and have rippling effects pertaining to, other related infrastructures. We propose an analysis that takes into account the interconnections and co-constitutions of multiple infrastructures. Here we seek to draw from, and contribute to, literature on critical infrastructure studies (outlined in more detail below) that examines the socio-material dimensions of infrastructure making and unmaking. We thus analyze intersecting infrastructures related to the SBM to build toilets, placing toilets in the center of our analysis and following their material and socio-political making and unmaking. Our work documents the ways that one set of sanitation infra- structures has rippling effects onto others (housing, social networks, etc.). We thus argue that this second dimension of “infrastructural intersectionality” provides an important lens into viewing the multiplying effect that transformations over time (e.g. installation, decay, maintenance, repair, and demolition) of one infrastructure can have in relation to others (e.g. housing, water, transport, etc.), and the criticality of taking such intersections into account with regard to the unequal affective and visceral experiences of infrastructural change in the everyday.

Truelove and O’Reilly 721

Socio-material infrastructures and situated infrastructural violence

In order to interrogate the connections between the intersectional material dimensions of the SBM’s mandate to clean Indore, and the socio-political and embodied repercussions that resulted, our analysis draws from and contributes to an emerging interdisciplinary literature that examines urban infrastructure as a socio-technical assemblage. By conceptualizing infrastructure as a socio-technical assemblage, a wide array of interdisciplinary scholarship demonstrates the role of both the human and non-human in shaping infrastructural systems and their social and political outcomes (Amin, 2014; Anand, 2017; Larkin, 2013). Attention within this literature to embodiment brings into relation visceral and affective experiences with the materiality and temporality of infrastructure, placing everyday lives at this nexus (Fredericks, 2018; Truelove, 2019; Sultana, 2011; Thompson, 2016).

By viewing infrastructure as both material and cultural, this body of work demonstrates the differing agencies and powers that both animate, and are embedded within, socio- technical systems. We attend to infrastructure as revealing “the political geist of a given moment” (Anand, 2015), not only through its materials and technology, but also through the human and non-human assemblage necessary to extend it, destroy it, and determine its distribution.

Not only are infrastructures technical projects of state-making, disclosing forms of state power and “expert” knowledge, but scholars also demonstrate the role of infrastructure in shaping social experience and subjectivities in ways that go beyond state power. For exam- ple, socio-technical approaches to “vital infrastructures” (Fredericks, 2014) highlight the ways that the very “things” that make up infrastructure tend to have lives of their own in mediating relations between humans and the environment (Bennett, 2009). In particular, a number of critical works (e.g., Amin, 2014; Anand, 2017; Bennett, 2009; Meehan, 2014) have productively revealed the agency of the objects of infrastructure. However, these non- human elements simultaneously shape, and are produced through, a variety of social power relations, ideologies of modernity and progress, and the uneven rights, regulation, and distribution of vital infrastructures. Thus, this new and growing literature on infrastructure not only queries how we might more robustly conceptualize the agency of objects and materials of particular infrastructures, but also their embeddedness in changing power relations and political configurations. For example, processes of decay, maintenance, and repair of infrastructure in an urban context may alter not only the material form of infra- structure, but also change the pre-existing social-political-infrastructure nexus (Graham and Thrift, 2007), a point which we specifically take up in relation to toilets in Indore. Particularly, a lens that incorporates the “temporal fragility” of infrastructure, i.e. the con- tinual repatterning of infrastructural forms, relations, and social worlds over its life phases of decay, maintenance, and repair (Ramakrishnan et al., under review), enables us to map the continuous reworking of these socio-technical assemblages with particular regard for gendered violence and a continuing lack of sanitation for the poor.By following toilets, we draw from other studies on waste and sanitation infrastructures in the global South (Chalfin, 2014; Desai et al., 2015; Fredericks, 2018) that demonstrate how the socio- material dimensions of sanitation and waste practices unequally shape residents’ routines, bodies, life opportunities, and urban experiences of the city itself.

As our research seeks to specifically contribute to this literature by adopting a lens of “infrastructural intersectionality,” we tease out how the material dimensions regarding both the extension and demolition of sanitation infrastructure produce uneven intersectional consequences, including (1) rippling and intersecting effects on additional critical infrastruc- tures (e.g. housing, and networks of social collaboration and support) and (2) compounding

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forms of intersectional infrastructural violence that unequally affects overlapping gender,

caste, and class groups (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012). By infrastructural violence, we refer to

Rogers and O’Neill, who trace how structural, instrumental, and even “passive” forms of

violence can be tied to how infrastructures are implemented, regulated, and unequally expe-

rienced, including “socially harmful effects from infrastructure’s limitations and omissions

rather than its direct consequences” (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012: 406–407). Thus, by fol-

lowing the materiality of toilets in Indore, we examine the complex power relations and

forms of violence that are embedded in, and emerge through, their installation, monitoring,

and accompanying demolition. Congruently, placing toilets in the center of our analysis

enables us to view how changes in sanitation infrastructure, including both the installation

and demolition of latrines, bleeds into additional infrastructures within the city, and ampli-

fies the effects and unequal lived experiences of the SBM in Indore, particularly infrastruc-

tural violence leveled on poor, lower-caste groups and women. We thus contribute an

intersectional gendered, classed, casted approach to the infrastructural violence produced

in the wake of efforts to transform Indore into India’s cleanest city.

India’s Swachh Bharat Mission and the production of

gendered shaming

In 2013, after decades of failed national sanitation interventions, India remained a country

with high rates of households without latrines, about 53% (Times of India, 2013). In 2014,

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the SBM to eliminate open defecation across the

country (Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, 2018). Through the scheme, the

Government of India (GOI) intended to build 12 million latrines across the country by

October 2019—five years after the mission’s launch.2 The urban portion of the project

was estimated to cost approximately USD $9.7 billion. Re-making cities into “clean cities”

through the SBM required transforming existing waste practices, including municipal waste

collection and processing, and especially eradicating OD and ensuring that all urbanites

have access to a toilet. SBM integrated components of previous interventions considered

successful. For example, the Nirmal Gram Puraskar (Clean Village Prize), introduced in

2003, awarded cash for political subdivisions below state governments for becoming ODF.

Its success led to the roll out of the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA), which used subsidies

(like earlier interventions) and added the behavior change approach known as CLTS

(Community Led Total Sanitation). CLTS champions the “shock and shame” approach

of shocking communities into the knowledge that they eat each other’s feces due to OD, and

shaming those who continue to go for OD. SBM was a continuation of the NBA, including its core components of subsidies—known

as “incentives” under the SBM—and shaming, one element of behavior change communi-

cations that was introduced and financed in the new national sanitation policy. Public

shaming is a gendered practice, because of the social norms surrounding open defecation

behaviors. For the urban poor, some of the daily choices influencing where to defecate are

broadly the same across genders: cost of building an individual household latrine; lack of

space for a pit or access to sewer networks; affordability of pay toilets; monsoon flooding;

and water insecurity (Hirve et al., 2015; Kwiringira et al., 2014; Osumanu and Kosoe, 2013).

However, urban research makes clear that gendered social norms of modesty, and threats

(and realities) of violence against women generate physical and psychosocial stress for

women and girls when choosing the best option to relieve themselves (O’Reilly, 2016).

These measures of sanitation-related psychosocial stress experienced by women and girls

Truelove and O’Reilly 723

in particular include trauma, shame, anxiety, guilt, embarrassment, humiliation, and viola- tion (Caruso et al., 2017). Indian women living in informal settlements have taken steps to safeguard themselves and their daughters, by traveling some distance from their residences in groups and carrying weapons like stones or chili powder (Truelove, 2011). Bodily disci- pline can be constant, most notably that women constrain their eating and drinking to avoid going at inopportune times, i.e. in daylight (Chaplin and Kalita, 2017; House et al., 2014). Additionally, intersecting oppressions of gender and caste produce different experiences of safety and stress, as in the case of Kulkarni et al. (2017) in which women of dominant castes within their slum enjoyed a certain amount of prestige, and thus protection from harass- ment, compared to women of subordinate castes. In this paper, we draw from feminist work on intersectionality, psychosocial stress, and inadequate sanitation infrastructure to analyze how making Indore “India’s Cleanest City” through the SBM both operated through, and reproduced, intersecting gender, caste, and class relations in the city. Compounding social oppressions intersected with the ruination of sanitation and housing infrastructure that ran counter to the SBM’s stated latrine-building and gender-sensitive goals, and ultimately increased the suffering of poor, lower-caste women.

Reconfiguring governance and intersectional power through the SBM

In this section, we analyze how the SBM furthers new forms of governance deriving from the fragmented, decentralized state that in turn shape intersectional power relations and hierarchies on the ground. Specifically, we examine how initiatives originating at the center, intending to create a “Clean City of India” via sanitation interventions, redistributes gov- ernmental power in ways that re-structure local gender, caste, and class geometries. To do so, we situate the SBM in relation to additional urban projects (such as Smart City Indore), demonstrating how the SBM utilizes newly developed metrics to measure and “prove” cleanliness to the central government. We show how these new metrics are accomplished through decentralization practices in Indore that uniquely empower the municipality, local officials, and even upper-caste groups in “cleaning” the city, while targeting and shaming the practices and spaces of predominately female, lower-caste bodies. Thus, both these new forms of governance, and concomitant rescaling of governance, profoundly shape not only material infrastructures on the ground, but social power geometries in ways that pro- duced new hardships for particular intersectional gender/class/caste groups in the city.

Towards a “Clean, Green, and Smart” Indore

Although Indore is India’s 9th largest city and home to more than 2 million people, it is nonetheless categorized as a tier-two city. As such, the municipality envisions itself as a “smart” alternative location for businesses and companies that wish to avoid the hassles and competition for space ascribed to India’s mega-cities (DBSS, 2018). Efforts to “Clean and Green” Indore have not only come about through the SBM, but prior initiatives to make Indore attractive to investors and businesses, as well as a heritage site for tourists. Indore, notably, was one of the 20 cities selected in a nation-wide inter-urban competition for “Smart City” funding from the central government in 2016. Coinciding with the SBM, Indore’s Smart City initiative followed the directives of the national government’s larger smart city urban mission to make the smart cities open defecation-free, which states: “a smart city has no open defecation, and a full supply of toilets based on the population” (GOI, n. d.). Furthermore, Indore has received central funds through the “Housing for All” scheme, a federal program for cities to provide affordable and legal housing to the urban

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poor. Although infrastructure and services like housing, sewerage, and water supply are

highly unequal in the city—with significant informal settlements and diverse infrastructural

configurations—the city also has a unique history of more progressive housing policies (on

paper) compared to municipalities in neighboring states, including the Patta Act in Madhya

Pradesh that purportedly ensures greater degrees of tenure security for residents of informal

settlements. As we shall see in the latter sections of the article, the intersection of national

urban schemes and historic and localized legal precedence for settlers’ rights have profound-

ly shaped both the implementation and the unequal lived experiences of SBM.

Rescaling governance and the new metrics of “Cleanliness”

According to the Ministry of Urban Development, the SBM aims to “foster a spirit of

competition among the cities [being evaluated] and offers a comprehensive assessment of

their sanitation status” (Ministry of Urban Development, 2017a: 1, our italics).

Approximately 118 cities were declared open defecation-free in 2017, and thus Indore’s

achievement of the first place ranking that year occurred through criteria that included an

ODF declaration, but went beyond it. In particular, the SBM puts in place a set of highly

specific metrics for calculating a city’s cleanliness. The SBM utilizes a number of criteria and

a points system, developed through the federal level of governance, to evaluate sanitation and

hygiene levels in the 500 cities of its purview, assessing each city through the following three

mechanisms: (1) municipal documentation (given 45% weightage), (2) independent observa-

tion (through the Swachh Survekshan, and given 25% weightage), and (3) citizen feedback

(given 30% weightage). These three assessment mechanisms are then applied to differing

thematic parameters of measuring a “clean” city that include: (i) municipal solid waste man-

agement, (ii) the presence of toilets and open defecation-free status, (iii) capacity building and

e-learning, and (iv) what the mission calls “information, education, communication (IEC)

and behavior change.” The monitoring and ranking body, called the Swachh Survekshan, is

an independent group contracted with the Ministry of Urban Development at the central

level, which both observes measures of cleanliness (mechanism 2) and evaluates municipal

documentation and citizen feedback (mechanisms 1 and 3). This occurs annually in January

and February, when the SS sends officers to observe and evaluate data across 500 cities. The

end result, according to the Ministry of Urban Development, is one in which:

. . . this survekshan would help the centre and state governments mentor and guide cities based

on their performance vis-à-vis other cities and identify other areas of improvement. The findings

will also enable the cities to learn about the best practices being implemented in other cities and

to adopt them, tailored to their own requirements. (Ministry of Urban Development, 2017a: 2)

After Indore was awarded first place in 2017, the IMC produced a 168-page document,

including pictures and slides, to convey its “best practices” regarding becoming the cleanest

Indian city, the majority of which focus on the multiple tactics used to stop open defecation

and address solid waste management (Ministry of Urban Development, 2017b).

Citizen policing and deepening intersectional social power hierarchies

In this section, we show how the development of these key “best practices”—particularly

those implemented at the municipal level of governance to end open defecation, prove the

presence of toilets, and change citizen behaviors—inaugurated new forms of both discursive

and material power at the local level, authorizing new policing roles for particular officials

Truelove and O’Reilly 725

and groups of citizens. First, the IMC formed local “swachhagrahis,” using groups of citizens to “spread awareness” and monitor open defecation. In practice, the swachhagrahi campaign resulted in the much-heralded use of citizen “dibba gangs,” or groups of children and men who policed open defecation in the morning hours across all 84 wards of the city. In most cases, dibba gangs consisted of middle-class or elite upper-caste Hindus. Contrastingly, the individuals practicing ODF were from predominately lower-castes in many instances, with poor women’s bodies being specifically targeted (Srivastav, 2017). Dibba-gang members were deployed to various places between 4:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. to track OD, predominately the hours when women go, i.e. in the dark. This policing entailed beating metal containers (a dibba) like a drum when witnessing open defecation to interrupt and draw attention to the practice. The IMC, along with a number of newspapers, produced photo documentation of such policing, all praising this “innovative” citizen practice in helping the city to change uncouth behaviors and end open defecation in its pursuit of cleanliness (see, for example, PTI, 2016).

Officials from the IMC openly declared that “dibba gangs” should serve to embarrass and humiliate the “offending” (female) body. As recounted by the Additional Commissioner of the IMC:

There is not just the ‘dibba gang’, we have the ‘whistle gang,’ ‘mic gang’ [referring to the use of

temple speakers in broadcasting incidences of open defecation in the area] as well – they work in

the same routine, if they see people defecating in open they shout and embarrass them.

Our motto is to change their behavior. (Bhatia, 2017)

Additional disciplining measures were put in place by the municipality, including “spot fines,” which empowered official IMC “clean marshals” to level Rs. 100 fine on any person caught open defecating, again targeting the female body, this time through its unequal criminalization. A signed agreement not to defecate in the open by school children and urban residents was also used as key “evidence” submitted to the center to demonstrate that ODF had ceased. Pictures of these policing practices were featured in Indore’s “best practices” report on ending OD and becoming India’s cleanest city.

The embodied ramifications of new regimes for monitoring, enumerating, and document- ing sanitation in Indore deepened intersecting class/caste/gender inequities and power rela- tions in the city. Firstly, household members who did not have access to latrines within homes, or within the neighborhood, were the primary targets of the campaign. These bodies became subject to new policing tactics that worsened the negative physical and affective experiences surrounding already inadequate sanitation in predominately poor and informal settlements. However, the experience of such new policing tactics must be further situated within poor communities to account for the already-existing gender and caste dimensions of sanitation practices. For example, urinating in public places is socially acceptable for male bodies, but immodest for females, opening more spaces for men to urinate while spatially constraining women’s options. In addition, public urinals have been put in place across a number of Indore’s districts for men through the SBM, but toilets for women are far more uncommon (Ministry of Urban Development, 2017b). Notably, women already police their bodies, to ensure that the need to urinate and defecate does not occur at the wrong time and place—a source of measurable psychosocial stress (O’Reilly et al., 2018). Because of the regular harassment and threats of violence women face in cities when they open defecate (see Truelove, 2011), women coordinate their open defecation with other women, going in groups in the early morning as a mechanism to increase safety and reduce psychosocial stress. Children and adolescent girls go in the company of their mothers or other relatives,

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and may be even more constrained in their mobility than adult women. Such coping strat-

egies make women’s practice of open defecation more visible (since there are a number of

women congregating together) in urban spaces, and thus additionally vulnerable to harass-

ment and policing gangs. Conversely, men may journey to fields or railway tracks alone, or

on the way to a work site (for example, near construction sites), which is a much more

mobile, flexible, and spontaneous practice than for women, and frees them from the type of

visibility and scrutiny that new policing tactics level of women’s bodies. Furthermore, within

informal settlements, lower-caste groups may be the last to be able to access, or afford,

latrines within their homes and communities, and in general constitute a higher proportion

of the urban poor. As such, open defecation is not only a gendered and classed practice, but

one that is inflected, and re-produced, through existing caste inequalities and violences. Thus, as SBM policing efforts at the municipal level notably operated through the insti-

tutionalization of gendered shaming and new caste and class based patterns of citizen polic-

ing and even criminalization, it furthered the harassment and social obstacles to accessing

secure infrastructure that poor and lower-caste women endure in the city, while empowering

upper-caste male citizens with heightened powers of authority over women’s bodies. Thus,

these new policing regimes made early morning sanitation practices more intolerable and

difficult for poor women, while deepening unequal power geometries that women face and

experience in everyday life. Here, the practices utilized by “dibba gangs,” IMC officials

leveling spot fines, and upper-caste groups narrating open defecation on loud speakers—

all mobilized in service to the city’s (and nation’s) cleanliness—place women as culprits and

offenders, rather than the sufferers, of the city’s inadequate sanitation. Women are meant to

mend and repair their ways, rather than the city adequately servicing and repairing its

absent and decaying infrastructure. NGO activists monitoring the issue reported that such practices constituted an intensifica-

tion of gendered “harassment.” For example, one activist reported that the harassment of the

female body spread beyond targeting the practice of open defecation, but also intersected with

broader patterns of gendered harassment to extend to what women were wearing, for exam-

ple, with men calling out jokes about a woman’s sari falling down while attempting to relieve

herself, while also taking pictures to submit to the municipality as evidence of the gang’s good

work (DBSS, 2018). While heightening visibility onto women’s open defecation, such practices

also serve to further render invisible the amplified inequities women living in informal settle-

ments face in a city in which housing and latrines exist in states of disrepair, decay, or are

widely absent altogether. In this way, infrastructures’ absence, decay, and temporal fragility

are deeply entwined with embodied, affective experiences of inadequate sanitation since these

infrastructures are neither provisioned nor maintained in a safe, reliable, or secure manner.

Yet, despite these substantial material hardships and exclusions from key urban resources, the

poor (often lower-caste) female body is marked as responsible for dirtying and polluting the

city through “backward” and “uneducated” practices by which she may have little choice to

alter.3 Her body is policed, laughed at, and ridiculed, rather than being represented as caught

in a nexus in which every sanitation option (if there are options indeed) produces negative

psychosocial, bodily, material, and socio-economic consequences.

The making and unmaking of latrines and its rippling

infrastructural effects

In this section, we elaborate a second conceptualization of what we term infrastructural

intersectionality, or the ways that the practices of making infrastructure (in this case,

Truelove and O’Reilly 727

latrines) simultaneously work to both shape and unmake other infrastructures (e.g. housing, and networks of social collaboration and support). Thus, we point to the multiplying effect that changes (e.g. installation, repair, decay, breakdown) of one infrastructure can have in relation to other infrastructures, and argue that such intersections are critical in shaping the unequal lived experiences, and violence, of infrastructural transformation in the everyday. Specifically, we show how the practices to monitor and “prove” the presence of toilets throughout the city produce a set of rippling consequences that intersect with, and re- shape residents’ lived experiences of other infrastructures. Thus, by following the infra- structures of toilets, we examine the repercussions of toilet-making on informal housing, specifically, the infrastructures of the city’s “Housing for All” scheme. We demonstrate that the repair of sanitation in Indore, through “cleaning” the city, is inflected by tensions between it and the demolition and displacement associated with informal housing. Consequently, we trace how changes to the infrastructures of sanitation ultimately produce snow-balling effects on both the material infrastructures of housing and social infrastruc- tures of collaboration and support in informal settlements.

The optics of toilets and the politics of housing

The state of Madhya Pradesh is remarkable compared to other Indian states because of a 1984 Act that is, in theory, designed to assure housing rights to the homeless. Through what is known colloquially as the Patta Act (MP Nagariya Kshetro Ke Bhoomihin Vyakti Adhiniyam), the state is required to provision housing for the poor on government land. In addition, there are pro-poor laws regarding land—15% land provision in every colony has to go to “weaker portions of society,” and 15% towards a relocation/resettlement zone. De jure housing rights, however, manifest themselves differently in practice. Furthermore, the “Housing for All Scheme,” operating at the center, provisions funds to the municipality of Indore, which have mostly been used in practice to shift residents from informal settle- ments to resettlement areas (usually on the periphery of the city). Residents’ housing status in relation to these schemes serves to further shape their unequal lived experiences of the SBM and its rippling repercussions.

When the Swachh Survekshan came to Indore in January 2017 to measure the city’s cleanliness, city officials scrambled to erase from visibility those houses and neighborhoods of the poor that had not yet been provided toilets. A visible lack of toilets for its population would stymie any hopes the city had for a top ranking, and would also hinder its “smart city” goal of achieving an ODF city, for which the city had also received funds. The temporary need by the municipality to hide the absence and decay of toilets for the poor resulted in the haphazard displacement of slum dwellers through the removal of their homes and “missing” toilets from the landscape. Here, we see how the city’s sanitation drive orchestrated at the municipal level, but funded and mandated at the central level of the state, serves to propel the destruction of housing and toilets that were intended to correct infrastructural forms of uneven development, but instead reproduced the marginalization and precarity of the poor by simultaneously destroying other infrastructures of social and material support.

For example, on Sukhniwas road (discussed in the introduction), despite households paying the IMC for toilets in advance of the SS’s arrival, the municipality razed 40 houses belonging to the Bhil community (classified by the GOI as a Scheduled Tribe) because of the IMC’s own failure to build and install the toilets before the SS visit. In an adjacent lane to Sukhniwas road, 72 houses were also demolished through the same tactics. When residents asked IMC officials why they were demolishing their homes, IMC officials responded by blaming the sudden demolition on “higher ups,” saying that they had been

728 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

ordered to demolish “houses without toilets,” and thus were only following directives (Shantha, 2017). Here we see a multiplying effect of infrastructural violence on the Bhil community, orchestrated and revealed in the tensions between the construction and demo- lition of intersecting infrastructures: the inability of officials to build and install toilets in a timely way resulted in the destruction of housing and displacement of Bhils from both their homes and long-established social networks. Sunita, a woman living near the Sukhniwas road who had her house demolished, recalled: “Pits were dug for the toilets. But when they came to demolish our houses, they also filled up those pits and planted saplings there,” apparently in an effort to obscure evidence of the municipality’s unfinished work to build the toilets (Shantha, 2017). Freshly dug pits materially represent slum dwellers’ hopes for state benefits and a new security of urban belonging—expectations that were raised and then dashed. Moreover, filled pits and planted saplings supply material evidence of the power of the state to recognize and render invisible material and social infrastructures.

While some Sukhniwas residents attempted to stay on the site after demolition, using makeshift material (tarpaulin and sheds) to repair their housing by fashioning temporary shelter, the majority were forced to leave. For example, a group of families that worked for the same employer were offered shelter in a nearby plot he owned. Although their belong- ings were scattered and lost, they had a temporary place to stay. However, such displace- ment put these residents further in the debt of their employer, while simultaneously removing them from their neighborhood and setting in motion the erosion of the social infrastructures of cooperation that supported them. For example, the social networks that help residents find temporary jobs, the collaborative work of women to arrange for water, and the sharing of electricity were no longer possible. Such experiences further reshaped affective trajectories of home and belonging (Ramakrishnan, 2014), with some residents expressing hope of a return to Sukhniwas, while others remained reeling from the emotional impact of being separated from long-standing communities simply due to an absence of (already paid for) toilets. Additionally, there were no toilets at the new site, which appeared to be outside the purview of the SS monitoring team as it was the employer’s property. One resident, named Shilpa Bhabar, indicated that she was allowed to move back to the place of her demolished home after around one month. She states: “We were asked to leave the city for some days [when the SS came]. When we returned, we were allowed to build our houses here [again]” (Shantha, 2017), a practice that would surely entail significant rippling hard- ships, eroding any savings her family might have and forcing them to begin from scratch in gathering the materials for their home. If material infrastructure is unstable and unpredict- able over time, then so too is the affective experience multiple and fleeting. For Shilpa Bhabar, loss through demolition and worry over the labor and cost of repair flowed in parallel with the instability of infrastructures. On Sukhniwas road, as with Bhuri Tekri as we shall see below, the timing and geography of both the SBM and the “Housing for All Scheme” overlapped in ways that resulted in the paradoxical extension and demolition of both toilets and housing with uneven affective consequences.

In the settlement called Bhuri Tekri, which is situated in a hilly area that used to be a quarry, the city’s use of the ‘Housing for All’ scheme had scheduled the area for demolition and resettlement of more than 800 households, a prospect that many residents had protested and resisted (DBSS, 2018). The IMC’s plans became further complicated by an impending visit by the SS and its measurement of toilets. An area of land outside the city center (and far from employment and transport) had been allotted for relocation of households, although two multi-story buildings for re-housing had not yet been constructed there (a point of alarm for Bhuri Tekri’s residents). However, the demolition was scheduled to occur several months after the SS was due to arrive in Indore. This placed IMC officials in a conundrum

Truelove and O’Reilly 729

of how to handle the fact that the centrally located settlement did not have toilets on site, and thus could potentially jeopardize the city’s ODF ranking. To ensure that toilets would be visibly present on a site shortly to be demolished, the IMC spent more than 13 million rupees to build 825 toilets in advance of the SS’s visit (Shantha, 2017).

Bhuri Tekri residents had been formally protesting their eviction since it was announced, and hoped that installing toilets might solidify their claims to remain in their homes. For example, Krishan Kuma Vishwakarma paid Rs. 1400 to have a latrine built in his 300 square foot house, wanting to stave off resettlement. But he and approximately 700 addi- tional families had their toilets and homes destroyed two months after toilets had been built to showcase their presence to the SS. These residents had their lives moved to the periphery of the city where neither new homes, nor latrines, had been built on the site. In fact, around 50 mobile toilets had been brought in for their use, many of which residents reported fell quickly into disrepair, reeked, and had no drainage system in the area. The makeshift toilets were particularly problematic to women as they were forced to choose between the risks of a hazardous and dysfunctional toilet and those associated with open defecation. Residents found themselves simultaneously displaced from their homes, new latrines, livelihoods (since new residential locations are far from the city), and social networks. The poor were thus displaced from long-established and incrementally accruing infrastructures to unfinished, decaying and absent housing, sanitation, and water infrastructure (Shantha, 2017). In quick succession, residents experienced the optimism of recognized, permanent neighborhoods in the city due to state-provided household toilets, followed by feelings of disappointment, disgust, and neglect as the IMC pushed them literally and figuratively to the periphery. In sum, here we see the disproportionate and intersectional effects of national SBM policies and the locally implemented Clean City drive on the making and unmaking other infra- structures of the city on lower-caste, poor, and female bodies.

Conclusion: Infrastructural intersectionality

In this paper, we demonstrate the connections between the implementation of sanitation infrastructure and the rippling effects onto other vital and critical infrastructures that result. We reveal how the violence ensuing from national and local sanitation initiatives to “Clean Indore” gives rise to compounding forms of corporeal suffering that distinguished “offending” bodies and exposed particular caste, class, and gender groups to intersecting hardships related to material and social infrastructures, ultimately reifying intersectional power geometries in the city amidst ongoing changes. As there have been few studies to date that analyze the social impacts of the Clean India Mission—specifically within the cities awarded the highest rankings—our research addresses this gap. Our analysis calls for an approach of “infrastructural intersectionality” to situate the uneven impacts and situated violences of infrastructural transformation.

In particular, our findings regarding the material and embodied effects of the SBM in Indore necessitate working through the differing dimensions of what we term infrastructural intersectionality. We specifically show two dimensions of intersectionality with regard to Indore’s infrastructure and the SBM. The first draws directly from feminist theory and prior sanitation scholarship, referring to the intersectionality of social identities and power rela- tions that are embedded and stabilized through the temporal fragility of infrastructures, as seen through the material and affective consequences of the SBM. The second considers the intersectionality of infrastructures in different phases of construction, decay, repair, and demolition that are co-constituted and entangled, and revealed through the spillover effects of latrine-making onto the unmaking of housing and social networks of support (that also in

730 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

turn shape intersectional power relations). By putting forward these conceptualizations regarding the intersectional effects of infrastructure, we call for approaches to situate the political, material, and affective dimensions of infrastructure and its associated forms of violence.

In analyzing this second dimension of infrastructural intersectionality, or the ways the transformation of one infrastructure spills over to affect others, this study considers Indore’s sanitation infrastructure through the analytic of temporal fragility—specifically, construc- tion, decay, repair, and demolition. Our findings expose the relationality between the making of new sanitation infrastructures, on the one hand, and the simultaneous unmaking of toilets, housing, and social infrastructures of support. In particular, the city’s attempts to repair its absent and decaying sanitation infrastructure were activated by a decentralization of power from the central government through the SBM’s urban mandate. This resulted in empowering local officials, upper-caste groups, and men in the policing of open defecation and, more specifically, poor women’s bodily practices and spaces. Furthermore, the emer- gent power geometries associated with enumerating and documenting infrastructure, includ- ing those used to “prove” that open defecation had ceased and the monitoring and counting of neighborhoods with toilets, brought visibility to Indore’s urban spaces and infrastruc- tures at critical moments in time. As such, poor households in locations where the state had failed to fully construct and repair toilets (in time) were demolished for the SS’s survey. Open defecation and absent or incomplete toilets were temporarily eradicated from the landscape. In other words, evidence that would prevent Indore’s ODF status and lower its cleanliness ranking was erased from view by removing bodies, practices, and infrastruc- tures from urban spaces. Such practices also served to dislocate people from homes, rever- berating through other critical infrastructures. In perhaps the most paradoxical of moments, millions of rupees were poured into the construction of new toilets that the state knew could never be used, since the new latrines were located in a settlement (Bhuri Tekri) slotted to be demolished shortly after their construction. After the Swachh Survekshan came to Indore and completed their measurements, both the new toilets and homes in the vicinity were leveled to the ground, revealing the uneven and contradictory material and socio-political effects leveled across the cityscape in the name of becoming India’s cleanest city.

Finally, regarding the ways intersectional social identities and power relations are shaped through the multiple infrastructures discussed above, we show that the effects of making Indore India’s “Cleanest City” reified specific power geometries and compounded hardships for the urban poor, women, and lower-caste groups. Although the guidelines of the Clean City Mission are discursively represented as fulfilling Gandhi’s dream—understood as the national goal for all citizens of making India a clean, healthy place—the effects in Indore produced situated corporeal suffering, inequities, and infrastructural violence for specific groups of city-dwellers, namely poor residents, women, and lower-caste groups. We show that the Mission’s focus on ensuring cities are open defecation-free shaped not only uneven sanitation practices and access to toilets, but also drove intense affective encounters with infrastructure for particular urban citizens through processes of construction, decay, repair, and demolition. Thus, we demonstrate the criticality of embodied and gendered approaches for analyzing how caste, class, and gender intersect with both visible and invisible urban infrastructures, revealing the power of the state to both unequally impact and even erase specific bodies from the urban landscape.

Thus, our findings show the everyday ramifications of new regimes for monitoring, enu- merating, and documenting sanitation infrastructure in Indore that deepened intersecting social inequities and power relations in the city. Gendered bodies, specifically those of lower-caste women, became the disproportionate subjects of new policing tactics that made

Truelove and O’Reilly 731

the physical and affective experiences of already inadequate sanitation in predominately poor

and informal settlements even worse. Such tactics heightened visibility and the punitive

repercussions (including intensified psychosocial stress) of women’s open defecation, as well

as the power of upper-caste, predominately male groups in policing women’s bodies in service

of the city’s cleanliness. However, lower-caste women’s experience of infrastructural violence

reached its most extreme when their investments in toilets (that never came) resulted in the

subsequent demolition of their homes, creating a crisis in which women were unable to access

multiple, critical infrastructures of urban life. We show that this compounded, corporeal

violence is crucial for understanding the unequal socio-political and lived experiences of the

SBM and quests to make cities “clean”, “smart,” and open defecation-free.

Highlights

• In 2017, Indore was nationally recognized with the Cleanest City award of India. • The SBM redistributes governmental power to municipalities, upper-caste groups, and

minor officials, restructuring local power geometries and generating infrastructural

violence. • Processes of installation, decay, repair, and demolition of infrastructure simultaneously

work to unmake other material and social infrastructures. • “Infrastructural intersectionality” is an approach tailored to situate the political, mate-

rial, and affective dimensions of infrastructure. • We demonstrate the criticality of embodied and gendered approaches to analyzing the

power of infrastructure in the everyday.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jessica Budds and Kavita Ramakrishnan for their helpful and con-

structive feedback on multiple drafts of this article. We are also grateful to the organizers and par-

ticipants of the 2018 University of East Anglia "Processes of Decay and Repair: Ecologies of Life,

Politics and Urban Infrastructure" workshop for their suggestions and engagement with the ideas

presented here. Additional thanks to Anu Sabhlok and Jennifer Fluri for their feedback on the article

when presented at the 2018 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers session on

Gendered Infrastructures. We are also indebted to Anand Lakhan for his insights on Indore. Finally,

we greatly appreciate the time and effort that Leila Harris and three anonymous reviewers gave toward

improving this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or

publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this

article.

ORCID iD

Yaffa Truelove https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9295-122X

732 EPE: Nature and Space 4(3)

Notes

1. These secondary sources have also been utilized to document residents’ experiences and interviews

in real time preceding and during the days of the SS visit, in which the authors were not present in

Indore. 2. On 2 October 2019, Prime Minister Modi contentiously declared that SBM had met its goals,

despite numerous studies that suggest otherwise (Economic & Political Weekly, 2019). 3. Here, we do not mean to infer that women do not resist and exert their own agencies with regard to

their urban experience, but rather to indicate the unequal structural, material, and discursive

conditions shaping women’s bodies.

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