Changing Infrastructure in Urban India: Critical Reflections on Openness and Trust in the Governance of Public Services

Abstract

Cities in India are in a state of flux characterized by rapid changes in population, land use, and infrastructural arrangements. With approximately 68 percent of its nearly 1.21 billion residents still living in rural communities (Census of India 2011a), the relatively recent rapid growth in India’s cities has exerted severe pressure on local governments to better supply public services. Indian cities can be understood as vast provisioning machines (Amin 2014) that provide services and infrastructure for sustaining the lives of their citizens (figure 6.1). In this critical reflection, we discuss how questions about open systems and trust— elaborated on in the theoretical work of Rao et al. (chapter 3, this volume)— relate to the provision of urban services and infrastructure. Internationally, a variety of open practices and systems demonstrate apparent promise for improving urban public service delivery. For example, governments and civil society groups have created open platforms and have crowdsourced citizens’ input on diverse issues linked to local service or infrastructure needs (Hagen 2011). Our research— drawing on perspectives of both local government and civil society intermediaries— provides insight into public service and infrastructure issues in a rapidly changing city in India, as well as theoretical reflections for advocates and theorists of open systems. We link our study to a critique of Rao et al.’s operating theory, discussed in chapter 3 of this volume, about trust (or trustworthiness) in combination with open systems (or openness), and we apply this to questions about the provision of public services and infrastructure in Chennai, India. Rao et al. (chapter 3, this volume) have introduced a trust model that applies to open systems in a 6 Changing Infrastructure in Urban India: Critical Reflections on Openness and Trust in the Governance of Public Services