Fixing Mumbai: broker-life, expertise, and technology in the urban bureaucracy
Creators: name: Banerji, Sangeeta
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: This dissertation explicates the imperceptible underlying processes that continually thwart the ambitious reform initiatives designed for streamlining urban policy, land management, and property markets of Indian cities. It is also the first institutional ethnography of the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the largest municipal bureaucracy in South Asia and perhaps the world, as it underwent a complete technological overhaul. Based on time traversing the spaces of this labyrinthine municipal bureaucracy, moving from its central offices to its remote outposts, this dissertation focuses on the elusive figure of the fixer operating within a complex brokerage structure – ultimately illustrated as a field of fixing. This dissertation claims that this social field inhabited by fixers constitutes the underlying processes that variously shadow, support, and subvert the postcolonial bureaucracy.This dissertation finds an incoherent and multi-scalar bureaucracy made legible to those outside of it only through specialized fixers based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork. The practices of knowing the required provocations, pressure points, and motivations of bureaucrats – allowed fixers to achieve the prodigious task of getting things done in these bureaucracies. While agents within the field of fixing continue to be the source of social, cultural, economic, and informational capital, international development agencies fallaciously dismiss them as mere agents of petty corruption or as the idiosyncrasies of “popular economies.” This dissertation synthesizes anthropological literature on brokerage, the everyday state in South Asia, and urban planning theory with a spatial-analytical approach derived from political geography and Bourdieusian field studies to conceptualize the field where these fixers reside. The explication of this space challenges the notion of South Asian cities and postcolonial cities more generally as inevitable sites of failed public policy institutions. It paves the way for creating “viable institutions” in the majority world, which scholars and policy analysts must conceptualize on their terms. To illustrate the field of fixing, this dissertation begins by following ‘tracers,’ low-level bureaucratic functionaries who operate at the BMC central office and are responsible for literally tracing the individual project plans on the land-use map, but whose slip of the pen can also re-zone multi-million-dollar land plots. Based on an internship with a mid-level bureaucrat at one of the BMC’s six zonal offices, who worked to implement the World Bank’s Doing Business (DB) Guidelines, this dissertation shows how technological reform policy and building norms were implemented, performed, or thwarted in everyday practice. At the next step down in the bureaucratic hierarchy in the ward office, this dissertation observes low-level bureaucrats, called junior engineers and muqaddams, managing the material form of the building code. This multi-scalar examination of the everyday functioning of the bureaucracy’s management of land, building code, and construction permissions were incomplete without considering the crucial labor of the teams of fixers who circulated in and around these same offices. This examination is substantiated in this dissertation by following a group of men popularly called ‘follow-up boys,’ whose job of chasing paper to ensure it reaches the correct desk is essential to the performance of the building code and the realization of real-estate projects big and small.At every scale, official narratives claimed that the World Bank’s technological and procedural reform initiatives would update Bombay’s byzantine bureaucracy for the twenty-first century. The new Geographic Information System (GIS) database was introduced by the bureaucracy to track environmental and land-use code violations at the central office. In the Zonal offices, the Single Window Clearance System software claimed to have converted the cumbersome construction approval process into a hassle-free, paperless one, promising to inspire sustainable and green architecture. At the ward offices, the Centralized Complaints Registration Platform promised to seamlessly and transparently track unauthorized construction initiated by migrant populations and their nefarious patrons, leading to violations of the land-use regulatory code. These changes within the bureaucratic field were meant to eliminate corruption and increase transparency by challenging the fixers’ capacity to take advantage of the complexities of the city’s building code. However, this dissertation documents how fixers appropriated reforms, taking advantage of the gaps in the algorithms that merely mimicked without replacing the systems over which the fixers already had command. This dissertation finally claims that this conflict between fixers and the World Bank culminated in institutional reforms merely shifting without superseding negotiated processes of bureaucratic adjustment, a political process of fixing that endures even in the now fully digital era.