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Student Spotlight: Malini Ranganathan
Student Spotlight Directory
PHOTO/J. FADDEGON
ERG PhD candidate, Malini Ranganathan, with Greater Bangalore skyline in background.
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Focused Group Discussions with residents. |
Cauvery River water transmission pipeline currently supplying Bangalore; the “Greater Bangalore Water and Sanitation Project” plans to extend this supply to peri-urban areas. |
"Urban Water Politics in India"
Malini Ranganathan is a PhD Candidate in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation research examines challenges related to water access on the outskirts of Bangalore, a rapidly urbanizing city in southern India. In particular, she is interested in how reforms in municipal governance and water supply are addressing these challenges.
In developing cities, the vast majority of peri-urban residents are left out of piped water and sewerage networks. On the fringes of Bangalore, for instance, most rely on groundwater provided through a combination of municipal borewells, hand pumps, and private water tankers. Access is often negotiated through civic activism and bargains with political parties and service providers. Groundwater continues to be unsustainably exploited due to expanding real estate development and population growth triggered by a software boom in the late 1990s. To provide an alternative source of supply, the city is investing in a project to extend piped Cauvery River water—already pumped from 100 km away to the urban core at enormous energy costs—to over 1 million people on the periphery.
Private water tankers are used to supplement municipal water supply.
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Sewage in garbage-clogged open drains in peri-urban Bangalore. |
Women collecting groundwater from a "miniwater tank" provided by the municipality. |
As one reform measure, citizens themselves are expected to bear a significant proportion of the project’s capital costs—a policy indicative of a shift to market-based financing for urban infrastructure. Malini is interested in how such policies affect water access to vulnerable groups, and the broader implications for citizen-state relations. She is also looking at how effective e-governance is as an interface between citizens and the state for responding to complaints about urban services. Her research methods include in-depth interviews with engineers, bureaucrats, elected representatives, residents, and civic associations. Through this spectrum, she expects to gain insights into policy formulation as well as field-level implementation. As part of her dissertation research, she interned at the Asian Development Bank in Manila in 2007 in order to conduct comparative research on other cities in Asia, and to understand how international financial institutions influence water reforms in borrowing countries.
Malini’s interest in water reforms and politics stems from another—and often connected—research passion: electricity access in developing countries. Through a Center for Human Rights fellowship, she explored these challenges in Dakar, Senegal while working at ENDA-Tiers Monde. Prior to coming to Berkeley in 2003, she worked at TERI in New Delhi on reforms, renewable energy, and electrification in Rajasthan. For her Master’s project, Malini considered the institutional and financing barriers to scaling up sugarcane waste-based cogeneration in India, for which she and her team received a fellowship from UC Berkeley-UNIDO’s Bridging the Divide Program. She has also interned at the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco, and worked as a Graduate Student Instructor for ERG’s Energy and Society class. Her consulting experiences include papers for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Secretariat and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
ERG has provided Malini with the academic space to transition from a natural science background to an interdisciplinary approach combining development theory, public utility regulation, and urban planning. She believes that such a cross-disciplinary understanding of technical systems (water pipes, electricity grids, etc) is crucial if we are to set ourselves on a more just and sustainable path. Her dissertation research has benefited from the guidance of UC Berkeley professors Ananya Roy (DCRP), Isha Ray (ERG), Dan Kammen (ERG), and Peter Evans (Sociology), and an incredibly talented set of colleagues in Berkeley and Bangalore.
8/08
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