ABSTRACT
Beyond the Pale: Water, ‘Worlding’ Mumbai and the War on the Poor The Mumbai Mirror, Friday, 8th January 2010. A photograph shows a lineup of proud Mumbai police offi cers standing behind row upon row of what appear at fi rst sight to be rusted machine guns. However, this is not one of the arms caches regularly unearthed to demonstrate the police force’s effectiveness against the myriad of terrorist networks that regularly target urban sites in contemporary India. Rather, the objects are water booster pumps, pulled from the ground in Mumbai slums in a new campaign of dawn raids against ‘illegal’ water theft within the city’s burgeoning informal settlements in the city’s Shivaji Nagar and Govandi districts (see Figure 6.1).
