‘Without Water, We Cannot Survive’: Entanglements of Water and Young People in Hyderabad

Political ecology gains salience by interrogating the intersectionalities that produce various ecologies, especially water in urban landscapes. This article locates and reads such intersectionalities, especially relating to youth and gender as they navigate everyday multiplicities that consider water as a site and subject of contestation. It focuses on the theory of urban water as a hybrid socio-natural phenomenon and the cycle of water and society as mutually co-constitutive. Drawing on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two neighbourhoods of a Global South city, the article discusses how spaces of inclusion and exclusion are co-constitutive in everyday urban negotiations. It postulates how urban ecology is mediated by the social class of youth, their mobility and the production of high-tech spaces. Their water experiences are further interwoven with the dimensions of water safety and discourses surrounding it. While the flow of urban water limits its access and use, the youth have demonstrated resilience and negotiated their access and use of it through their everyday practices. Broadly, this article contributes to the understanding that water is more than just a product of nature; it has a socio-nature which is a product of multiple complex entanglements and intersections of space, social class, gender, mobility and the subjectivities of the young.