Walking for Water: Street-views from India’s Thirsty Capital Region

India’s thirsty capital city is one of the world's largest urban regions, and it continues to grow. As this expansion is ongoing, a number of attendant environmental challenges, particularly relating to water, trail in its wake. Officials and citizens alike, amongst other actors, have initiated a range of campaigns and actions to meet water supply challenges facing the city. These campaigns entail the redevelopment of various parts of the city including heritage water bodies. In this talk, tracing this ongoing process of adaptation in the context of historical change and water security efforts, I will invite attendees to join me on a “walk” through parts of Delhi to reveal, ethnographically, views from the street that counterpoint (and perhaps complement) state visions of urban sustainability planning.

Lav Kanoi (PhD, Anthropology and Environment, Yale University) is interested in the social-environmental dimensions of cities and sustainability particularly from the point of view of water provisioning. Dr. Kanoi’s research has appeared in various notable journals and in book collections such as Environment and Society: Advances in Research, Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability and The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences among others. Dr. Kanoi is also a literary translator who has published book translations of Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea from English to Hindi, Sukumar Ray’s Pagla Dashu stories from Bengali to Hindi, and the First Book of Virgil’s Aeneid from Latin to English.

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