A toxic mix? Comparative efficiency and the privatization of sanitation services in India

public administration and development

Public Admin. Dev. 30, 124–135 (2010)

Published online 16 March 2010 in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/pad.564

A TOXIC MIX? COMPARATIVE EFFICIENCY AND THE PRIVATIZATIONOF SANITATION SERVICES IN INDIA

JONATHAN MURPHY*,y

Cardiff University, UK

SUMMARY

This article explores why the World Bank and its Indian government partners, in their efforts to reform the urban water andsanitation sector in India, have failed to recognize and address the intolerable working conditions of Dalit (outcaste) sanitationworkers. The conceptual framework for the article is provided by the theory of thought-styles, developed by Ludwig Fleck andrefined by Mary Douglas, and its application to neoliberal public policy by the North American legal scholar Sharon Dolovich,who observed the domination of the principle of ‘comparative efficiency’ in US prison policy debates. This approach is appliedto understanding how the worsening conditions of already highly vulnerable Dalit sewage workers have been displaced from thesanitation policy debate. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

key words—privatization; sanitation services; India; World Bank; thought style

INTRODUCTION

The call for papers for this 60th anniversary issue of Public Administration and Development challenges scholars to

examine ‘what future for development management’. Specific areas for exploration include the limitations of

development management in addressing global problems including poverty and inequality. In this article, I examine

the inability of a highly professionalized development management organization to address severe discrimination

within its strategy for public sector reform. The article uses an innovative analytical framework—Fleck’s ‘thought

styles’—to explore and explain how institutionalized approaches in the development management field can

obstruct consideration of broader issues of human dignity and justice that (should) underpin the practice of

development management.

The case study involves the World Bank, perhaps the archetypal development management organization, and

its strategy for reform of India’s water and sanitation sector. The Bank’s reform proposals involve rolling-out

a standard neoliberal prescription of marketization and privatization. However, the Bank appears unable to

acknowledge or address a glaring problem in sanitation services in urban India; the appalling working conditions of

Dalit (outcaste) sanitation workers. The plight of these workers, sent down sewers that are veritable death traps, is

regularly aired publicly, due to the campaigns of Dalit human rights organizations and the workers’ unions.

Nevertheless the Bank, although armed with a primary mandate to eliminate poverty (its corporate slogan is

‘working for a world free of poverty’), ignores the issue in its detailed water and sanitation sector strategies.

Development management organizations such as the Bank emphasize the rational and scientific nature of their

approach, which they commend to client states around the world. When they systematically ignore a major social

problem such as the persistence of feudalist discrimination within an economic sector targeted for reform, this

absence demands scholarly attention. What processes could be going on that prevent the Bank from assuming its

*Correspondence to: J. Murphy, Cardiff Business School, Aberconway Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK.E-mail: [email protected] in International Management.

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

PRIVATIZATION OF SANITATION SERVICES IN INDIA 125

development responsibility? What, if any, are the wider implications for development management practice of this

observed phenomenon?

The conceptual framework for the article is provided by the theory of thought-styles developed in the 1930’s by

Ludwig Fleck (1979 [1935]). It has been applied to the contemporary public policy field by the North American

legal scholar Sharon Dolovich (2005, 2007), who observed the domination of the principle of ‘comparative

efficiency’ in US prison policy debates. I adapt Dolovich’s approach to understand how the worsening conditions of

already highly vulnerable Dalit sewage workers have been displaced from the sanitation policy debate.

The article begins by exploring the concept of thought-styles and how they structure our understanding of the

world, restricting the scope of information we are prepared to consider as salient. Thought-styles are

institutionalized as the basis of ‘thought collectives’. These are made up of powerful groups of experts often hosted

in influential organizations that define how issues or problems such as in the scientific or public policy realm, will

be addressed. The article then explores the relevance to the present study of Dolovich’s work on ‘comparative

efficiency’, which demonstrates how public policy debate about US prisons has been telescoped into one about

privatization, at the expense of questions about the appropriate moral characteristics of a system of state-sanctioned

incarceration.

The article continues by exploring the policy debate surrounding reform of the water and sanitation sector in

India using the thought-style approach and the concept of comparative efficiency. Particular attention is paid to the

institutional drivers of privatization, and the central role of the World Bank as international purveyor of this

comparative efficiency thought-style. The article examines what is happening beneath the surface of the policy

debate, where Dalit (outcaste) sewage workers descend into gas-filled drains without safety equipment to clear

blockages. Despite an appalling toll of death and disability, the issue of caste discrimination, which is woven into

the very fabric of sanitation service delivery, never surfaces in any of the World Bank’s discussions about water and

sanitation policy. Privatization is shown to worsen already deplorable conditions, while failing to deliver

demonstrable benefits in service delivery or even cost efficiency. The article concludes by examining the usefulness

of the thought-styles and comparative efficiency approaches in understanding the issues surrounding service

privatization and caste discrimination in India.

The article has been developed as part of a continuing project exploring the interplay between globalization and

traditional social structures in India. It draws on material from interviews carried out between April and August

2009 in New Delhi, as well as documentary review. Interview subjects included sewage workers, Dalit rights

activists, Indian scholars of social stratification, World Bank officials and medical experts.1

THOUGHT-STYLES

‘Thought-style’2 is a term coined by Polish bacteriologist Ludwig Fleck,3 and further developed by the British

cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas (Douglas, 1996; 19961986; 1996). It refers to the institutionalization of

particular ways of thinking in social groups or collectives. Thought-styles are necessary in the emergence and

advancement of knowledge. They structure approaches and provide focus. They guide perception and interact with

it, developing bodies of knowledge. Fleck demonstrated how changing thought-styles associated with the

emergence of a scientific outlook led to an understanding of syphilis as a physical disease rather than a punishment

for immorality. This in turn prompted scientific enquiry into the nature of the ailment, development of a test for the

disease and ultimately an effective treatment. The thought-style thus frames the way in which people in social

collectivities allow themselves to think about the world around them, to the extent that we are generally unaware of

1A total of 23 peoplewere interviewed in the research on the conditions of Dalit sanitation workers. Interviews were carried out using a set of keyquestions tailored for the particular interviewee. Interviews were not taped as this would have caused discomfort, especially among the Dalitworkers, and would have inhibited full answers (Morse, 1994). Notes were taken of interviews and transcribed.2Fleck and Douglas do not hyphenate the term ‘thought style’, although somewriters do (Simmons, 1994). I find that hyphenating the termmakesthe paper easier to read; there is no difference of meaning.3First published in the original German in 1935.

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. 30, 124–135 (2010)

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126 J. MURPHY

our own thought-styles and do not subject them to scrutiny. Douglas in particular emphasizes the restrictive aspect

of the thought-style:

. . .the thought-style sets the preconditions of any cognition, and it determines what can be counted as a

reasonable question and a true or false answer, provides context, and sets the limits to any judgment about

objective reality. (Douglas, 1986: p. 13)

Thought-styles are vested in thought collectives and thought communities. The thought collective is made up of

an elite ‘hard core’ (in the case of Fleck’s investigations into syphilis, the scientists investigating the disease from a

particular perspective or thought-style). However, beyond the thought collective, there is a wider group of people

influenced by the thought-style, but not actively involved in producing and refining it; this is the thought community.

In Fleck’s syphilis case, the thought community would include wider public opinion leaders who came to view

syphilis as a malaise with physical rather than moral causes and susceptible to treatment rather than punishment.

The thought-style process is thus elite-driven with change occurring at the thought collective centre, while at the

periphery the thought community tends to reproduce in stylized fashion the understandings of the collective.

Thought-styles can have positive or negative impacts on wider society, and the nature of these impacts may be

contested. The scientific thought-style associated with new understandings and treatment of syphilis resulted in

reduced suffering of those inflicted with the malady, and in retrospect most Western observers would consider it to

have had a positive impact. However, Fleck, and particularly Douglas, emphasize that the key feature of thought-

style is not whether it leads to positive or negative outcomes, but rather its ability to frame and restrict the way in

which issues are viewed and thus addressed. The result of thought-style is that some aspects of a problem are never

considered.

COMPARISON OF THE THEORY OF THOUGHT-STYLES WITH RELATED APPROACHES

Fleck was one of the first contemporary scholars to explore the tendency for particular ways of thinking to become

established within groups and then act as an exclusive cognitive frame. Subsequently, a number of thinkers have

used similar approaches. Further, broader social theories such as institutional theory and post-Marxist hegemony

theories have aspects in common with the thought-style approach. I will discuss some of these theories in this

section and explain why Fleck’s thought-style is best adapted for the purpose of this article.

The theory most commonly linked with thought-style is Haas’ (1992) epistemic communities. Haas explicitly

references Fleck, and his theory could be described as derivative. Epistemic communities refer to communities

within a field with common perceptions, and they thus correlate with thought collectives, rather than thought-styles.

In his major expositions of epistemic communities, Haas generally presents them as benign institutions that serve to

strengthen the policy-making process; crucially he omits consideration of the restrictive aspect of thought-styles,

their exclusion of issues and evidence that do not for within the framework. Haas locates himself broadly within

the new institutional economics (NIE) approach, particularly dominant within development economics. While

thought-style is obviously a form of institutionalization theory, it is much closer to the ‘old institutionalism’

(Selznick, 1984 [1949]) than to new institutional economics, which mainly restricts its critique of neoclassical

economics to information asymmetry and consequently bounded rationality (Fine and Jomo, 2006).

Thomas Kuhn (1970 [1962]) translated Fleck’s thought-style concept into the scientific paradigm in the

development of his theory of scientific revolutions4 (Babich, 2003a, b). However, the paradigm concept, developed

in the course of the Cold War and defended against an onslaught of criticism from empirical positivists, dilutes

and undermines the critical thrust of Fleck’s thought-style theory. In contrast to Kuhn, Fleck insists upon the

fundamentally social construction of the thought-style, and the importance of problematizing the notion that

scientific issues (and even more so of course, social scientific issues such as development policy) are ‘resolved’

(Kuhn, 1977) with the implication that earlier or different conceptual frameworks can be dismissed and ignored.

4Kuhn acknowledges Fleck’s influence; see Kuhn’s introduction to Fleck (1979 [1935]).


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The thought-style approach dovetails with various broader social theories, particularly those in the critical

tradition. In common with post-structuralist discourse theories, thought-style emphasizes that scientific and

social scientific problems cannot be understood outside their existence as social constructions.5 In line with

Marxism and post-Marxism, thought-style emphasizes the power relationships that generate dominant thought-

styles and the thought collectives in which they are vested. In particular, there are close parallels with Gramsci’s

theory of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971). Unlike ‘strong’ versions of Marxism and post-structuralism, however,

Fleck’s approach is epistemologically open. There is an intersection between thought-style and elite theory

although the major elite theorists have typically not focussed on the discursive construction of elite rule (Wright

Mills, 1956).

Thought-style shares a common approach with frame analysis (Goffman, 1974; Gitlin, 1980), which is a

popular approach in the communications field. There are similarities between thought-style and actor-

network theory (ANT, Latour, 2005). Latour acknowledges the fundamental importance of Fleck to the

development of his thinking; particularly evident in Latour and Woolgar’s (1986) early Laboratory Life.

However, mainstream ANT is less concerned with the thought-style than the relationships between people

and objects in the network.

The clearest and most explicit extension of Fleck’s work is in the cultural anthropology of Mary Douglas

(1986, 1996); in this article I will consider the thought-style approach as a unified one including its extension by

Douglas into the social sciences. Douglas’ emphasis on closure as inherent in thought-styles and thought

collectives, underlines that, unlike epistemic communities, thought-style is fundamentally a theory of the

construction and exercise of social power. Thought collectives are not restricted to purely ‘intellectual’

perspectives but also represent divergent social and economic interests, which stand to benefit or be harmed by

the ascendance of one thought-style or another. This aspect is demonstrated in Dolovich’s exposition of the

thought-style of comparative efficiency, discussed below, and is also addressed in the case study of Indian

sanitation workers later in the article.

COMPARATIVE EFFICIENCY

Sharon Dolovich, a North American legal scholar, developed the concept of ‘comparative efficiency’ as an

application of thought-style theory to debates about prisons and punishment (Dolovich, 2005). She asserts its

general relevance to public policy, and in particular to debates about privatization (Dolovich, 2007).

Dolovich notes that debates around prisons policy in United States are almost invariably dominated by

discussion of the relative merits of private- versus state-run prisons, and in particular, their ‘comparative

efficiency’. This debate has various interest groups stacked up on each side of the argument and has generated a

voluminous literature around the costs of the ‘two alternatives’, both directly and in terms of long-term social

externalities.

The debate about ‘comparative efficiency’ of state versus private prison provision is an important one, but

Dolovich notes that a much more fundamental issue is raised by society’s penal policy in general, ‘it must first be

determined if the particular penal practice at issue is even legitimate’. The second problem is that the comparative

efficiency approach evades the issue of ‘[w]hether the baseline set by public prisons is itself good enough to meet

any justifiable objective standard’ (Dolovich, 2005: p. 442). Dolovich argues that the debate about private versus

public prisons obscures consideration of the possibility that incarceration in general is a disproportionate, abusive

and arbitrary punishment that is normatively indefensible.

Dolovich presents an alternative standard for judging policy issues, that of ‘liberal legitimacy’. Liberal

legitimacy argues that public policies need to be considered in terms of the broad range of accrued human rights

and responsibilities to which society has generally subscribed and which govern our day-to-day conduct and

broader social frameworks such as democracy and the concept of inherent human equality. To explain how

5Although this is not to say that these problems do not exist outside their social construction.


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‘liberal legitimacy’ would look at the private prisons debate, Dolovich contrasts this perspective with that of

‘inherently public’:

The question here is not: how do private prisons comparewith public prisons? It is instead: towhat extent is the

use of for-profit private prisons consistent with society’s obligations to those it incarcerates? (Dolovich, 2005:

p. 446)

The advantage of this approach is two-fold. First, setting aside the comparative element of the equation permits

an exploration of the characteristics of incarceration in private prisons, thus providing a valuable understanding of

how private prisons actually work. Second, this understanding of private prisons helps answer the broader question

of whether the incarceration system in general meets the standard of liberal legitimacy.

Dolovich analyses the history and development of private prisons, finding that the state’s real motivation in

contracting with the private sector is to save money, whereas equally the only real motivation for private providers

is to makemoney. Friction inevitably results, with the contractor seeking to savemoney either by failing to maintain

inmates humanely and/or failing to maintain adequate levels of security for society as a whole. This issue will be

salient as we consider the case study of sanitation workers.

COMPARATIVE EFFICIENCY IN THE SANITATION SECTOR IN INDIA

The quality of service provided by water and sewage utilities in India has been a contentious issue for many years.

Only a minority of urban residents have access to private water supply and supplies are unsafe for drinking. Sewage

treatment facilities are inadequate leading to massive discharge of untreated sewage into major rivers including

holy rivers such as the Ganges (Priyadarshi, 2009).

The dominant ‘thought-style’ in response to inadequate water and sanitation services argues that greater

‘efficiency’ is required in water and sanitation services, which can only be achieved through marketization and

privatization. This has led to policy initiatives to expand use of contingent labour within the municipal utilities, and

for privatization of service provision to outside contractors (Edwin, 2007). The World Bank has been the most

consistent and insistent international organization articulating this comparative efficiency thought-style. The

Bank’s support for water and sanitation service privatization has been determined globally and rolled out to

countries around the world (World Bank, 1997; Budds and McGranahan, 2003).6

While the World Bank is at the centre of the marketization/privatization thought collective, the Indian

government has for the most part been an enthusiastic supporter and partner; Bank water and sanitation projects in

India are almost always carried out in collaboration with Indian government at the central or state level (World

Bank, 2006a; Misra, 2009). The Indian government’s 2002 water strategy document clearly supports private

involvement in water and sanitation (Government of India, 2002). A senior Indian government official wrote a

congratulatory introduction to the Bank’s 2006 Indian water policy document that made privatization a central

recommended strategy. The higher echelons of the Indian government are certainly part of the thought community

that supports the Bank’s agenda.7

Privatization has also been promoted through theWorld Trade Organization, which presses developing countries

to open their water and sanitation sectors to foreign private sector participation (Shiva, 2005: p. 10). The European

Union too has been diligent in pressuring countries to permit privatization in collaboration with large French private

6There is a debate within the Bank, particularly at Washington headquarters, about the merits of privatization in water and sanitation and otherpublic utilities (Estache and Rossi, 2002). However, these debates have little impact on the Bank’s field practice which remains dominated byneoliberal precepts on the need to outsource state services, as seen in the Bank’s work in water and sanitation in India.7The role of the Indian government in the ‘comparative efficiency’ agenda onwater and sanitation is an interesting one that warrants further studybeyond the scope of this article. India made major policy shifts in the 1980’s and 1990’s to adopt marketization and privatization as key publicpolicy orientations (Rodrik and Subramanian, 2004). The government has a contradictory policy regarding caste. While caste discrimination isprohibited in the Indian constitution, the government goes to some lengths to downplay or even deny the continuing saliency of castediscrimination, for example in lobbying against the inclusion of caste in international anti-discrimination conventions (Clifford, 2007).


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water utilities Suez and Vivendi/Veolia (Politi, 2003). Other transnational financial institutions also support

privatization. For example, the Asian Development Bank makes financing available for privatization projects.

Bilateral development agencies also endorse water and sanitation services privatization. Britain’s DFID

sponsors an international government–private sector–civil society initiative called ‘Building partnerships for

development in water and sanitation’. BPDWS focuses on encouraging Public–Private-Partnerships (PPP) in

water and sanitation (Hardstaff, 2004). BPDWS which started life as ‘Business partnerships for development

in water and sanitation’, counts among its board members representatives of the private sector including

Veolia, and international NGOs including Care International as well as the British NGOWaterAid. WaterAid

is a founding member and hosts the project staff team. The roots of BPDWS derive from a World Bank

initiative to promote tripartite (government–business–NGO) partnerships as an alternative to state utility

provision, with BPDWS acknowledging that it is, ‘part of a larger World Bank-supported pilot project that

seeks to harness the potential of tri-sector co-operation for the development of communities throughout the

world’ (BPDWS, 1999).

Thus, the comparative efficiency thought-style, which makes privatization a key goal, originates in the World

Bank, extends through a broader thought community, and guides the policy framework of the leading institutions

within the India water and sanitation sector.

The description of the different actors involved in planning for water and sanitation service privatization in India

demonstrates a consistency not only with the genesis and growth of the comparative efficiency thought-style, but

also with Fleck’s ‘thought collective’; a core of experts who articulate a coherent perspective on an issue,

dominating the discursive field. As I have noted, the institutional centre of this collective appears to be the World

Bank. I will briefly explore why the World Bank should have assumed such a position.

There is an implicit assumption in mainstream development practice that certain management strategies are

superior, and that therefore a goal of development practitioners should be to introduce these best practices—

thought-styles—from developed country environments to Third World locales (Escobar, 1995). The dominant

institutional anchors of these thought-styles have shifted in line with changes in the dominant mode of production

(Cox, 1987). In the 19th and early 20th centuries the development thought collective was centred in colonial

administration (Cooke, 2003), in the post-war era of American hegemony the US military–industrial complex

(Djelic, 1998), and in the postcolonial order it is transnational organizations that provide the major impetus for the

evangelization of thought-styles—articulated as ‘best practices’—around the world (Rischard, 2001).

In the global arena, the dominant thought collectives are centred in different types of organizations in

different fields. In the private sector, multinational corporations set the pace in institutionalizing business

practices. International NGOs set the tone for civil society (Hudock, 1999), while in public administration,

transnational institutions such as OECD/DAC and the World Bank promote particular visions of the appropriate

functioning of the contemporary state. However, the World Bank attempts to straddle the public, private and

third sectors, thus acting as a proto-world governance institution (Cammack, 2002; Murphy, 2008). This

received mission is reflected in a very conscious effort on the part of the Bank to create a thought collective,

manifested in the Bank’s self-branding as the Knowledge Bank and the assiduous dissemination of World Bank

policy expertise (Wilks, 2002), as well as the organization’s emphasis on its ‘convening power’, bringing

different interests together to address issues from the Bank’s particular thought-style perspective (Stern, 2002).8

The Bank as thought collective thus facilitates the adoption of common features of thought-styles or ‘best

practices’ across fields, and can be found assuming a central role in the articulation and refinement of thought-

styles—and policy advocacy based on those thought-styles—in numerous fields of social and economic

development, including the water and sanitation sector in India.

8Whether the World Bank is the pre-eminent development institution is of course a matter for debate. There is a tendency for co-ordinatedtransnational forums to pronounce on global donor policy, such as the 2005 Paris Declaration and the 2008 Accra Agenda. Even in thesecoordination modalities, however, the World Bank is typically at the centre. For example, a Bank staff person co-chaired the Paris Declarationfollow-up Working Group on Aid Effectiveness, which led into the 2008 Accra meeting: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ACCRAEXT/Resources/Progress_Report-Full-EN.pdf.


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130 J. MURPHY

THOUGHT-STYLE MEETS DIRTY PRACTICE

In her description of the comparative efficiency thought-style in the prison sector in United States, Dolovich

showed how its focus on the privatization debate distracts attention from fundamental questions surrounding human

rights and incarceration. In this section, I will explore the operation of the sanitation sector in India, demonstrating a

parallel absence of a key human rights issue within the dominant, privatization-oriented thought-style; that of caste

exploitation and the reservation of ‘unclean’ work to an underclass.

Cleaning human waste and associated filth is an unpleasant job, and because of this fact, in most societies it is a

job carried out by those near the bottom of the social hierarchy. In India, where hierarchical caste systems remain

more prevalent and salient than most other parts of the world, cleaning of human waste is typically reserved to

members of supposedly ‘polluted’ castes, nowadays self-described as ‘Dalits’ or ‘oppressed people’. Although

India’s constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of caste, and various social engineering efforts have

impacted some of the more severe manifestations of ‘untouchability’, the cleaning of sewage systems and handling

of human waste in general is still carried out primarily by Dalits, Indians who are considered outside the Hindu

caste system (Ramaswamy, 2007).

Urban water and sanitation utilities in India employ an almost exclusively Dalit staff to physically clear

blockages in underground sewage lines (Mittal, 2009). Given rapid urban growth and inadequate investment in

public infrastructure, Indian sewage systems are grossly overburdened, with the result that breakdowns are

increasingly frequent. As might be imagined, the task of descending into subterranean drains armed only with a rod

to open blocked pipes, wearing nothing but a loincloth, is extremely dangerous (Mittal and Goswami, 2006). Risks

of immediate death include poisoning by hydrogen sulphide, explosions caused by methane and asphyxiation

through oxygen shortage. Elevated morbidity is caused by bacteria carried by faecal matter, and chemicals in

solvents dumped into drains. Sewage workers in Delhi reported loss of sense of smell, acute eye irritation and

gastrointestinal and respiratory disorders. Studies of Indian sewage workers consistently report high rates of

alcoholism that has been linked to the unpleasantness of the job as well as the social stigma it carries (Jha, 2006;

Anand, 2007).

In India’s business capital Mumbai, data from only 14 of 24 divisions of the municipal water utility showed 924

workers died in the drains between 2002 and 2005; about 25 workers per month. Similar carnage occurs in all

India’s major cities; 10 labourers, all Dalit, died in Delhi’s drains during a 6 week study period in Delhi in 2004, and

6 workers died in 4 separate incidents in another 3 week study period in March and April 2009. Sewer casualties in

Chennai led the city’s High Court in 2008 to order the municipal water utility Metrowater to stop sending workers

down the drains and to mechanize the blockage-clearing process (Ratnam, 2008). Anand (2007, interview, 2009)

calculates that across India ‘at least 22 327 Dalits . . . die doing sanitation work every year’.

It can be concluded that there is a human rights problem in the sewage sector in India; a carnage afflicting the

poorest, most exploited, socially outcast segments of the population. How surprising at first glance that the word

caste does not even appear in the Bank’s study of the Indian water and sanitation sector in which it calls for the

privatization of the sector. Worker safety in the sanitation sector also goes unmentioned, with much of the study

concerned with reducing costs (World Bank, 2006a). This absence parallels Dolovich’s observations regarding the

absence of discussion of violence in the US prison system; in both cases, attention of leading policy makers is

focused on the thought style of comparative efficiency and the consequent policy imperative of privatization.

THE PRACTICE OF PRIVATIZATION

There have been numerous privatization initiatives in sanitation in India following the adoption of comparative

efficiency as the most prominent aspect of the thought-style of water and sanitation experts. As an example, in 2003,

the Chennai Water and Sewerage Board let out a contract to K. K. Kumar Constructions Ltd., to provide ‘250 sewer

divers for working in 161 depots of CMWSSB for removal of sewer obstructions in the sewer system, silt removal

from manholes and allied works for 1 year’ (Anand, 2007). While a number of full privatization initiatives have

been thwarted due to opposition from civil society groups (David, 2005), various pilot projects have been launched


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(Seth, 2005), and contractualization of formerly secure government employment has occurred in most Indian cities.

In NewDelhi, for example, sanitation union officials state that no new sewage workers have been hired by the Delhi

Water Board for many years. Instead, contract workers are engaged, either as day labourers with the Water Board,

but more recently mainly as employees of private contractors (Singh, 2009).

Privatization and contractualization has not improved the lot of these outcaste sanitation workers. Mittal and

Goswami (2006) found the health status of contracted sewage workers was substantially worse than permanent

workers, with the majority underweight, conditions they ascribed to the much lower wages earned by the

contracted-out workers; about one-third of the wages of the Delhi Water Board sewage workers doing the same

jobs. Hemlata Kansotia, co-convenor of National Campaign for Dignity and Rights of Sewerage and Allied

Workers (NCDRSAW), states that of ten sewage workers killed in drains in Delhi in March and April 2009, nine

were contract workers (Kansotia, 2009). Another report states that between 3 August 2008 and 13 May 2009, 21

workers died cleaning drains in Delhi. Of these, three were employees of the Delhi Water Board, while the

remaining 18 were daily wagers working on contract (Shrinavasan, 2009). A similar pattern of elevated levels of

danger for contracted workers is seen elsewhere. In Gujarat state, 14 sewage cleaners died in drains between March

2006 and August 2007, of whom 12 were working for private contractors, despite the state’s High Court having

ordered that ‘civic bodies are directed to discontinue the practice of engaging contractors’ (Indian Express, 2007).

The travails of contracted-out sewage workers could not have escaped the attention of the water and sanitation

experts at the World Bank’s India office; the rash of fatal accidents in Delhi in March and April 2009 featured

prominently in the media. Newspapers also regularly reported on a court case successfully prosecuted by

NCDRSAW for improved working conditions for sewage workers (Hindustan Times, 2009). A senior World Bank

water official, who spoke to the author on condition of anonymity, commented that ‘of course safety rules need to

be respected by contractors’. However, no proposal emanated from the ‘Knowledge Bank’ about how to address

the human catastrophe. Just like the question of violence in US prisons, the safety of sewage workers lies outside

the dominant thought-style of comparative efficiency.

Despite the World Bank’s enthusiasm for privatization of water and sanitation (World Bank, 2006b),

independent research suggests private operations are unlikely to improve water and sanitation systems. Budds

and McGranahan (2003) conclude that, ‘It would be a serious mistake to assume that private sector participation

will attract sufficient finance to play a major role in providing adequate water and sanitation to deprived

neighbourhoods’. Writing in the World Bank’s own journal, Estache (a Bank employee) and Rossi (2002)

concluded from a statistical analysis of 50 Asian water utilities that there is no demonstrable difference between

public and private sector utility efficiency. Mitra (2008) argues that the Bank’s privatization selling point of 24� 7

water provision is impossible whether water utilities are public or private, as the line losses which preclude regular

water supply are mainly from trunk line degradation which would require enormous investment to resolve, and

which end-user metered supply (proposed by the Bank as a cost recovery and waste reduction measure) cannot

possibly address.

The apparent irrelevance of privatization in terms of actual delivery outcomes9 raises the question why Bank

water experts should go to such lengths to advocate privatization? A Marxist approach would suggest that Bank

staff is carrying out their role as agents of the international bourgeoisie; by promoting privatization they are

furthering the interests of international capitalism in helping corporations expand their markets through

privatization (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001). This is an overly simplistic analysis. World Bank staff are professionals

whose incentives derive mainly from evaluations of their contribution within their organization and specialist

professional fields. It is unlikely they feel a personal need to assist multinational companies extend their horizons of

activity. However, organizations, especially large, prestigious ones like the World Bank, ‘think’ for people, they

provide an interpretive framework within which their employees operate. To some extent, individuals hew to the

interpretive will of the organization for reasons of rational choice, but more fundamentally because no individual

has the time and intellectual energy to confront each new interpretive challenge by revisiting fundamental questions

9Although not irrelevant in terms of sanitation worker conditions, which have demonstrably worsened, see discussion above.


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132 J. MURPHY

of cognition. We rely upon stylized cognitive frameworks; typically those frameworks held in common within our

social networks, particularly within our work organizations:

Any institution then starts to control the memory of its members; it causes them to forget experiences

incompatible with its righteous image, and it brings to their minds events which sustain the view of nature that

is complementary to itself. It provides the categories of their thought, sets the terms for self-knowledge and

fixes identities. (Douglas, 1986: p. 112)

Paradoxically, there may be a tendency for the interpretive frameworks—thought-styles—to be asserted more

vigorously in development organizations than in other fields, because the objective evidence available to support

one set of development policy options over another is absent.10 Whereas other professional fields—for example,

mechanical engineering—may have a stable set of cognitive principles that structure the fields over a long period,

the development field (and public administration in general) undergoes frequent and relatively fundamental shifts

in what constitutes ‘best practices’. The substantial possibility that development prescriptions are sub-optimal—or

even counterproductive—means that thinking outside the predominant thought-style can be personally

destabilizing. There is therefore an incentive to remain within the psychologically protective boundaries of the

organizational thought-style.

A major internal evaluation of the Bank’s development orientation describes the Bank’s status as a dominant

thought collective, reflected in its projected image of superior comprehension of development challenges, which

underpins the organization’s assumption of expertise in its fields of interest, and its use of ‘convening power’ to

proselytize its vision and implement its policy prescriptions:

‘The majority of respondents complained that the Bank is too narrowly focused in the analyses and ‘‘best

practices’’ that it presents, with little or no attention to alternative perspectives. Many respondents expressed

frustration about the Bank’s insistence that its models and solutions represent the only viable approach to solving

economic and social problems in their country’. (World Bank, 2003: p. 74)

The Bank is the centre of a particularly powerful and tightly-knit thought collective. Its dominant thought-style

of comparative efficiency, and its manifestation in the promotion of privatization in the water and sanitation field in

India and elsewhere, structures thinking well beyond the organization’s walls. As long as the Bank retains its

predominance in the development community, the comparative efficiency thought style which it applies to

development problems will continue to structure development practice, even though the thought style manifestly

fails to deliver policies that respect society’s minimum obligations to its members; specifically in this case, outcaste

Indian sewage workers.

CONCLUSION—STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF THE COMPARATIVE EFFICIENCY

APPROACH

This article explores caste oppression in the Indian sanitation sector by employing Fleck and Douglas’s thought-

style theory and Dolovich’s ‘comparative efficiency’ approach. The phenomenon of workers, selected purely on the

basis of their membership of a feudally oppressed caste, being sent down the drains of rapidly globalizing cities to

die, mirrors the inhumanities and structural inequalities Dolovich notes in the US prison sector. The blindness of

elite policy-makers to such phenomena appears, prima facie, incomprehensible. Thought-style theory helps explain

how and why these apparently important questions are institutionally structured out of the viewing frame, and

systematically excluded from the policy debate. Dolovich’s liberal humanist approach provides an alternative

foundation for public policy debate that is applicable to the Dalit sanitation worker issue and to development policy

more generally.

10For a discussion of the conflicting responses to performance measurement in another ‘difficult to quantify’ sector, see Townley’s (2002)discussion of museum professionals.


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One problem with the thought-style approach is that, like institutionalization theories in general, it provides an

incomplete explanation of power (Lok and Willmott, 2006), and specifically why certain thought-styles rather than

others predominate in hegemonic thought collectives. Dolovich does note that the comparative efficiency thought-

style corresponds with the interests of companies that benefit from privatization, and to state interests in reducing

costs. However, she does not explain why these sectional interests become incorporated in the predominant

thought-style while other perspectives, such as liberal humanist values, should be marginalized. The thought-style

approach explains why perspectives are structured out, but not which perspectives. Marxist theory offers one

explanation, but as I noted earlier, the vehicle of economic interest does not necessarily apply, and would not

explain why the Bank’s thought-style strongly favoured state-driven development until 1980, and thereafter

switched direction and adopted privatization. Even the economic evidence in favour of privatization in the water

sanitation is marginal at best and could not possibly justify the dogmatism of the comparative efficiency thought-

style.

One approach might be to build up the thought-style approach to encompass several layers. We might

conceptualize the world of thought collectives and their distinctive thought-styles not as atoms free-floating in a

universe of ideas and their advocates, but rather as an onion consisting of layers of thought-styles that shape the

layers that they in turn envelop. Dolovich’s prison privatization and the Dalit sanitation workers are locked into the

broader structuring discourse or thought-style of neoliberalism into which subordinated thought-styles in fields

such as development must fit. The process through which the thought collective with its ‘master’ neoliberal

thought-style became hegemonic is well documented (Cockett, 1995).

There are parallels between the thought-style approach and other theories of social power, discussed above. The

role of thought-style in restricting the scope of discussion is quite similar to Bachrach and Baratz’s (1962) ‘two

faces of power’, in which the second or hidden face of power is the power to exclude topics from discussion.

Thought-style also connects with a Gramscian understanding of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971), helping to explain the

mechanics of the process of hegemonic normalization.

A final contestable aspect of Dolovich’s critique of comparative efficiency is her assertion that it is a

thought-style that allows prison conditions to contravene what she describes as ‘liberal legitimacy’, which

includes the ‘humanity principle’—essentially a normative condition of life below which humans should not

be subjected except under exceptional circumstances. Normative approaches to development are

unfashionable both within the economic mainstream—where rational principles are said to determine

actors’ behaviour and policy making—and on the critical left, where norms are either seen as obfuscations of

economic laws, or as reflective of an inappropriate social totalization. On the contrary, Dolovich (2004: p. 410)

has been courageous in applying a carefully argued moral philosophy to a question of public policy. She

defines inhumane conditions as those that are an ‘assault on the very capacities of the targets to recognize their

own interests and know how to pursue them’. While her attention is to the treatment of people who have

committed crimes against others, the Dalit subjects of this article have committed no offence against anyone.

Their exclusion purely through birthright to employment so degrading and dangerous as to lead many, if not

most, to chronic alcoholism undoubtedly fits the criterion of inhumane treatment. Any thought-style that

hampers consideration of this scourge such as the World Bank’s comparative efficiency focus on privatization,

contravenes the humanity principle, and fails to meet an acceptable moral standard for the management of

public policy.

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A toxic mix? Comparative efficiency and the privatization of sanitation services in India

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