Godot in Bombay: a Tragicomedy in Two Decades

Abstract

An exploration of the two-decade-long political and discursive battles over water “privatization” in
the Indian city of Mumbai reveals how, beginning in the 1990s, the water department, “got stuck in
between public and private infrastructures.” This essay demonstrates how widespread speculation among policymakers, bureaucrats, and engineers on the likelihood and desirability of privatization entrenched some of the very dynamics that such solutions were supposed to cure – dynamics that ironically, would ultimately derail a privatization initiative when it fi nally arrived.