Out-of-sync infrastructure and the everyday politics of water injustice

This article examines how fragmented and misaligned infrastructures in informal settlements produce enduring forms of water injustice. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Film Nagar Basti, Hyderabad, it develops the concept of out-of-sync infrastructure to describe how multiple systems (water, drainage, electricity, and waste) operate on disconnected temporal logics. These mismatches reflect deep-rooted patterns of uneven urban governance. As infrastructures operate in conflict or contradiction, residents are drawn into continuous adaptive management such as queuing for water at night, coping with sewage overflows, and improvising during power cuts and floods.

The article foregrounds the gendered and embodied labour required to navigate these everyday breakdowns. Women, in particular, shoulder the burden of adjusting routines, protecting children from contaminated water, and absorbing the emotional and physical toll of infrastructural uncertainty. Water insecurity, in this context, is embedded within a wider ecology of neglect, territorial stigma, and piecemeal governance. Rather than attributing water injustice to scarcity or policy failure, the article argues that temporally misaligned infrastructures produce risk as a routine condition of urban life.