ABSTRACT
On the streets of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, plastic water bottles appear everywhere. The recent rise of bottled water consumption in India has been critically framed in terms of the broader environmental insanity of bottled water's global success, and, more specifically, of capitalist urbanization and the reach of marketization into all realms of life. This chapter discusses the growing and diversified consumption of bottled water in Chennai to explore the ways in which bottled water actually participates in the making of its markets. The nonsustainable, nonrenewable, and polluting plastic culture is at war with civilisations based on soil and mud and the cultures of renewal and regeneration. Chennai's public water network offers one of the lowest levels of water availability per day on average in the country, earning this city of almost 4.7 million people the moniker of India's water scarcity capital.
