Girard, Bérénice. 2025. “Public Civil Engineering, an Expertise of the Past?: Insights from a Contested Public Utility in a Time of Reforms.” in Engineers and Society in India, OUP.
Bérénice Girard, an associate researcher at CSH and a research fellow at Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), has authored a chapter titled “Public Civil Engineering, an Expertise of the Past?: Insights from a Contested Public Utility in a Time of Reforms.” in the book Engineers and Society in India: From circa 1850 to Present Times, edited by Vanessa Caru, published by Oxford University Press Oxford in April 2025.
Abstract: This chapter examines how liberalisation reforms and the advent of a new model of river management have affected, over the last 30 years, engineers from one of the regional water agencies in charge of implementing the Ganges River’s pollution abatement and management programmes. This chapter thus sheds light on the evolutions of the Indian State and its relationship with the private sector and international institutions. The demonstration shows how the careers of the engineers coincide both with the launch and implementation of the different river programmes and with the long process of reform. They can therefore be considered as a generation of transition within the profession, their personal and professional trajectories being intimately linked to the evolutions of the State post-liberalisation. This chapter analyses how the engineers conceive, promote, resist, and/or act as intermediaries for these changes and how this changes their professional and social self-representations.
The book is available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198935940.001.0001
