Field observations, research commentary, and essays on water, cities, and sustainability.
What 636,699 Indian households can tell us about who treats their drinking water before they drink it — and why that decision is shaped by caste, wealth, religion, and geography as much as by germs.
What happens to a small town's water when millions of pilgrims start arriving every year? A political industrial ecology of Bodh Gaya tracks the flows — and who bears the cost.
Sitting with the head of Bodh Gaya's street vendor union — a man who arrived to our interview dizzy and still spent an hour taking apart municipal governance piece by piece.
An itinerant vendor near the Mahabodhi Temple has been selling from a cloth on the ground for over a decade. He remembers exactly what was there before.
An argument about a road shortcut turned into an hour-long conversation about permits, access, and what it means to work the edges of Bodh Gaya's temple economy.