Legacies of past institutionalized political discrimination reverberate in present-day patterns of commercial drinking water consumption. We investigate several case studies – redlining, the Voting Rights Act implementation in North Carolina, institutionalized neglect in Appalachia, and political marginalization of Hispanics in the Southwest – to illustrate the relationship between moral distrust of government and citizen-consumer behavior. We find that areas redlined in the 1930s are more likely to host present-day water kiosks. Parts of North Carolina protected by the Voting Rights Act in 1965 have lower present-day bottled water sales than unprotected areas. Counties located within Appalachia have higher bottled water sales than counties outside of Appalachia. Water kiosks in the Southwest today are most likely to be located in predominantly Hispanic communities. Commercial water companies capitalize upon these legacies of moral distrust to market commercial water products to politically marginalized populations. “Cultural” preferences for commercial water stem from citizen-consumers’ beliefs about the competence and morality of government.

Balbir Singh, a resident of Shahpur Jat, then a village in the outskirts of Delhi, remembers the time when land acquisition began taking place in the year 1958. The news had first come to them wafting in as a rumour, but it grew limbs and fangs to become reality soon enough. He remembers having accompanied a group of villagers headed by Dalip Singh Panwar, a local Congress leader, to appeal to Jawaharlal Nehru, the then prime minister, to not acquire the land. Nehru had merely thrown up his hands in despair, expressing his helplessness in the matter and said, ‘Badhte hue bachhe aur badhte hue shahar ko main nahi rok sakta.’

There probably could be no better analogy than the one Nehru had used. In the life of a newly independent nation, in the heyday of Nehruvian socialism, cities were indeed like children. They needed to be nurtured, nourished and sacrificed for. It is entirely another matter that cities as we know them today are less like growing children and more like insatiable monsters, which demand blood sacrifices on a regular basis. Their appetite for resources has only grown exponentially. So much so that these monstrous cities devour almost everything that falls in their way. And while cities devour and keep growing bigger, they end up changing the entire morphology of the spaces that they consume. Quite like how Nehru saw the fate of these villages in Delhi's hinterlands, the question of rural dispossession has been treated akin to ‘collateral damage’. For the monstrous city, the periphery is the space waiting, like a sacrificial goat, for its turn to be consumed. But zooming closer, the city appears more like a bored and slow sloth, which creates a trail of half-eaten, half-chewed out debris. In the process, urbanisation does not look like a sharp, linear transition, but rather a curious mosaic made of such semi-devoured landscapes.

Lakshmi is a woman in her seventies who belongs to the Nai community. She came to Munirka as an 11-year-old bride in the 1960s. Her husband had a barber shop in Tilak Nagar, West Delhi, before he got a job with the Central government. When I spoke to her, Lakshmi seemed oddly fixated on high-lying areas ‘jahan paani nahi jamta’. She muses that the capital was moved to Delhi from Calcutta only because the city is situated at a height and therefore water does not stagnate in Delhi. Munirka, according to her, is also a far better place than a suburb like Dwarka for the same reason. Even her memories of her natal place, a village near Palam, are strongly tied to recollections of waterlogging. This impression of a relationship between topography of land and its value stood out for me during our conversation because it was so unique. No other person I had spoken to had made such associations.

I soon got a better sense of the reason for Lakshmi's preoccupation with low-lying areas and waterlogging. She owns a building right in the middle of Munirka village, which one can access only after crossing several meandering narrow lanes. Left to myself, I would never be able to trace my steps back to her house. She lives with her son on the ground floor of the same building. The floors above have been rented out. There is no separate entrance, so there is a constant flow of people going up and down through the living room. In order to ensure that the lanes were not awash with rain and sewage water during the monsoons, resurfacing was done repeatedly to make them higher, so much so that Lakshmi's ground floor has now sunk to a level below that of the lane. This is not a problem unique to Munirka. Unauthorised coloniesacross Delhi, built on cheaper, unused, low-lying land increasingly suffer from the same issue. Lakshmi's house faces chronic seepage on the ground floor, and she fears that the entire structure and its foundation have considerably weakened.

Four hundred square yards of land in Mohammadpur-Munirka, owned by a Murli Manohar and a Gordhan Dass, was set to be acquired around 1989. The brothers decided to put up a fight and file a counter claim under Sections 9 and 10 of the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, of 1 crore rupees as compensation, in addition to solatium and interest. The land acquisition collector knew the drill by then. The formula of coming to a just compensation had evolved to calculating average land prices for the last five years before the land had been notified. According to the collector, most of the land sales had happened in 1984 and the average price was 44 rupees per square yard. No sale was reported during 1985–87. The collector noted, however, that in 1988, one sale had taken place for 1,900 rupees per square yard. On this issue, the collector writes,

There has been increases in prices of land from time to time but no reliance can be placed on the solitary sale deed executed from the year as the prices would not have jumped so much from Rs. 44 per sq. yard to Rs. 1900 per sq. yard during a span of 4 years.

Therefore, 1984 prices of 44 rupees per square yard were held as the baseline for calculating land values in 1989. The brothers were only awarded 39,901 rupees as compensation at the rate of 65 rupees per yard. The hike in 1988 was brushed off as bewildering. The collector saw nothing that could possibly explain why land values could go up so much.

What could possibly have led to such price hikes is anybody's guess. The 1980s was a phenomenal period in Delhi's urbanisation. The 1982 Asian Games, the 1984 Sikh Riots and the construction of a new airport terminal in 1986 presumably created heavy incentives for quick land deals at speculative values in this decade. The land acquisition awards attempted to remain silent on these urban developments.

This chapter reverses the vicious cycle from previous chapters into a virtuous cycle of trust and government excellence. Excellent and responsive government agencies foster trusting citizen-consumers who use, advocate for, and support public services. Citizen-consumers who consume public services instead of exiting to commercial alternatives are more likely to support paying for further improvements to public services. Specifically, tap water drinkers are more likely than bottled water drinkers to support paying increased water rates to fund water infrastructure improvements. We then show how the citizen exercise of voice pushes public officials to provide higher-quality services. Although governments are not well suited to respond to citizen-consumer exit, they are designed to respond to the use of voice. Increased political participation raises the possibility of punishment for poor service delivery, incentivizing officials to keep service quality high. We find that increased electoral turnout is associated with decreases in water quality violations. Reframing the relationship between trust and public services as a virtuous cycle allows us to imagine a better way forward.

Basic services – the mundane but essential necessities of daily life – hold the promise of redeeming and strengthening American democracy. The burgeoning crisis of legitimacy besetting democratic governments across the globe has emerged in large part because many citizens no longer trust authorities to secure their basic needs. Americans’ experiences with and observations of failing basic services shape their behaviors as citizens and consumers, contributing to a cycle of distrust and government failure. Breaking and reversing this vicious cycle begins with sound public administration at every level of government. Government leaders who commit to excellence, openness, and equity in basic services can spark a new, virtuous trust-building cycle. Rigorous evaluation should accompany basic service implementation to ensure excellence and build performative trust. To establish moral trust, the agencies responsible for basic services must treat people respectfully and honestly, lavishly share information, and actively engage with the communities that they serve. Rebuilding democratic governance begins with literally rebuilding the basic infrastructure that sustains life.

M. C. Mehta vs Union of India and Others was a landmark judgement passed in 2004 concerning industrial units in residential areas. It had its roots in a writ petition filed by M. C. Mehta in 1985, an environmentalist and lawyer, on unauthorised land use by stone crushers. Though it was only about the stone crushers, in the wake of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, this writ acquired a life of its own and stretched across decades. By 2004, this public interest litigation (PIL) had become representative of all manner of unauthorised industrial activities in residential spaces. The judgement noted that close to 93,000 such units were operating out of Delhi and that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) had been granting them registrations and licences although they were in clear contravention of the Delhi Master Plan. This case had a far-reaching impact and led to sealing drives extending even to shops, nursing homes and banquet halls across the city. Protests by angry traders eventually led to revisions in the new Master Plan that allowed for more flexible land use. The M. C. Mehta case, therefore, would continue to hold a very important space in the tussle between the state and private players, and concerns of environmentalism and livelihood. The judgement brought the trading community together against the state, but it also brought the extent of unauthorised construction in Delhi out into the open.

M. C. Mehta vs Union of India came after a series of judgements on the fate of slums and unauthorised settlements. Olga Tellis and Ors vs The Municipal Corporation of Bombay, 1985, reflects the dilemma of the times. At one level, it acknowledged the right to livelihood of the slum dwellers and took note of the structural inequality of city spaces. But on the other, it settled for rehabilitation for the slum dwellers despite noting the structural injustice. By the 2000s, this dilemma had evaporated. Almitra H. Patel and Another vs Union of India compared slum resettlement to rewarding a pickpocket.