Book review: The great Indian phone book: how the cheap cell phone changes business, politics, and daily life

"The Great Indian Phone Book: How The Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life." Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron. Hurst & Company, London. February 2013. --- The cheap mobile phone is arguably the most significant personal communications device in history. In India, where caste hierarchy has reinforced power for generations, the disruptive potential of the mobile phone is even more striking than elsewhere. The book probes the whole universe of the mobile phone from the contests of great capitalists and governments to control radio frequency spectrum to the ways ordinary people build the troublesome, addictive device into their daily lives. Matt Birkinshaw hopes the broad scope and rich empirical detail found in this book will prompt a range of further, narrower, investigations in its wake

Photoblog: damming the Narmada – submerging land, livelihoods and cultures in western India

On a recent trip to Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, Matt Birkinshaw learnt about the effects that large dam projects on the Narmada River are having on the local community and environment

Urban water and sanitation: innovations from Delhi

A quarter of Delhi residents are not served by the city’s water pipelines, making access to drinking water and sanitation facilities a major challenge. Matt Birkinshaw highlights innovative solutions developed to tackle the issue, but argues that ultimately more systematic reforms are needed to address water supply inequalities

Policy hacking in Bangalore

LSE’s Matt Birkinshaw learns about water availability in India at IIMB’s annual Policy Hackathon, and calls for more team-based policy jams to promote evidence-based policymaking

India’s urban direction: learning from the renewal mission(JNNURM)

As India’s incoming government calls for a new urban policy initiative, Matt Birkinshaw analyses the difficulties in implementing the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) in light of India’s complex political and structural challenges

Book Review: monitoring movements in development aid: recursive partnerships and infrastructures by Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik

In Monitoring Movements in Development Aid, Casper Jensen and Brit Winthereik consider the processes, social practices, and infrastructures that are emerging to monitor development aid, discussing both empirical phenomena and their methodological and analytical challenges. It will be of interest particularly to students in information systems, anthropology and international development, writes Matt Birkinshaw

Muddy waters in Delhi’s ‘Dusty South’

Matt Birkinshaw writes on the discretionary nature of essential services and blurring of public and private power on Delhi’s unauthorised periphery. He also reflects on how things are beginning to change under AAP rule

Murky waters: infrastructure, informality and reform in Delhi

This thesis contributes a rich empirical analysis of urban water governance in Delhi, with particular attention to informality, groundwater and reforms. My research aims to develop understanding of the relationships between reforms, under both private sector management and a new progressive government, and existing informal water arrangements, particularly groundwater use, which households rely on in the absence of adequate public sector supply. I draw on interviews with 150 residents, as well as water suppliers, project officials, government staff, politicians and party workers over 18 months of multi-sited research in South Delhi’s unauthorised colonies and urban villages. I use the idea of ‘informal infrastructures’ or ‘infrastructural informality’ connects my empirical research across different sites and scales. Bringing ideas from the literature on informality and infrastructures together under this framing offers modifications to the ways that ‘informality’ and ‘infrastructures’ are often understood and used. I use informality in this way ‘as a method’ to focus on the contingently enacted, materially and socially constituted character of various infrastructure processes. I analyse the informal governance and politics of water supply at three difference sites and scales. Within Delhi’s government network at an all-city level I note the formally and informally differentiated nature of the network and the challenges of knowledge and control of it. Outside of the piped network, I examine the decentralised infrastructures of tubewells and water tankers, primarily in the South Delhi areas of Sangam Vihar and Deoli. These decentralised supply modes are socially embedded in systems of party politics, caste and land-ownership with a range of opportunities for discretion, patronage and misallocation. They illustrate the connection and contrasts between informality in different resources, such as land and water, and infrastructures. I then examine an additional layer of urban water governance, in a Public Private Partnership (PPP) for urban water reform, in a zone around the Malviya Nagar area, also in South Delhi. I argue that the complexity of India’s urban social hydrology, even in wealthy areas, has been underestimated by this initiative, and that despite an evolution of the PPP model concerns over the project’s equity and viability remain. The high level of informality across different infrastructural systems in my research sites suggests the coexistence of a submerged ‘technopolitics’ operating through bureaucratic and technical modes of governance, with both overt and covert uses of intercession, personalisation and force. The study makes contributions to knowledge in the following areas: informal urban water supply in India, particularly in unauthorised colonies and urban villages, in a region of high groundwater use, its relationship to water supply reforms from both government and a multinational public-private partnership

The hard X-ray view of the low-luminosity blazar in the radio galaxy NGC6251

We present results from a BeppoSAX (July 2001) observation of the FRI radio galaxy NGC6251, together with a re-analysis of archival ASCA (October 1994) and Chandra (September 2000) data. The weak detection above 10 keV and the lack of iron fluorescent K-alpha emission lines in the BeppoSAX spectrum rule out that the bulk of the X-ray emission is due to an obscured Seyfert nucleus. The study of the multiwavelength spectral energy distribution suggests instead that X-rays probably originate as inverse-Compton of synchrotron seed photons in a relativistic jet, indicating that NGC6251 hosts a low radio luminosity [L(5 GHz) ~10^40 erg/s] blazar. The BeppoSAX spectrum is flatter than in the earlier ASCA observation. This might be due to the emergence of a different spectral component during phases of lower X-ray flux. In this context, we discuss some possible explanations for the intense and mildly-ionized fluorescent iron line measured by ASCA.Comment: 8 Latex pages, 6 figures, To appear in Astronomy & Astrophysic

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Dynamical Masses and Scaling Relations for a Sample of Massive Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect Selected Galaxy Clusters

We present the first dynamical mass estimates and scaling relations for a sample of Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect (SZE) selected galaxy clusters. The sample consists of 16 massive clusters detected with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) over a 455 sq. deg. area of the southern sky. Deep multi-object spectroscopic observations were taken to secure intermediate-resolution (R~700-800) spectra and redshifts for ~60 member galaxies on average per cluster. The dynamical masses M_200c of the clusters have been calculated using simulation-based scaling relations between velocity dispersion and mass. The sample has a median redshift z=0.50 and a median mass M_200c~12e14 Msun/h70 with a lower limit M_200c~6e14 Msun/h70, consistent with the expectations for the ACT southern sky survey. These masses are compared to the ACT SZE properties of the sample, specifically, the match-filtered central SZE amplitude y, the central Compton parameter y0, and the integrated Compton signal Y_200c, which we use to derive SZE-Mass scaling relations. All SZE estimators correlate with dynamical mass with low intrinsic scatter (<~20%), in agreement with numerical simulations. We explore the effects of various systematic effects on these scaling relations, including the correlation between observables and the influence of dynamically disturbed clusters. Using the 3-dimensional information available, we divide the sample into relaxed and disturbed clusters and find that ~50% of the clusters are disturbed. There are hints that disturbed systems might bias the scaling relations but given the current sample sizes these differences are not significant; further studies including more clusters are required to assess the impact of these clusters on the scaling relations.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal; matches published version. Full Table 8 with complete spectroscopic member sample available in machine-readable form in the journal site and upon request to C. Sif\'o