Maintained disrepair: Accumulation by rejuvenation,financialization,and the politics of restoration in India's Namami Gange program

Abstract

India's multi-billion-dollar Namami Gange program is simultaneously a celebrated river restoration success and an ecological failure. This study analyzes how the project's failure to restore ecological integrity nevertheless functions as a productive and stable system of governance. Using multi-sited ethnography, including interviews with state officials and external consultants, analysis of government documents, and event ethnographies at key water summits, this paper demonstrates that the program operates through a logic of maintained disrepair. This system is driven by two interdependent engines: a financial engine of ‘Accumulation by Restoration’ that turns pollution into de-risked, bankable assets for private investors and a political engine that manufactures public consent through a spectacle of repair by mobilizing sacred and nationalist sentiments. I argue that the program does not fail to clean the river but rather succeeds in its unstated goal: to maintain the river in a state of profitable, politically generative crisis. The concept of maintained disrepair offers a critical framework for understanding an emergent mode of governance that thrives not on resolving environmental crises, but on perpetually and profitably managing them.