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100			_a Roy, Indrajit _951384
245			_aNegotiating power: Disputes over electrification in rural India
260			_aModern Asian Studies
300			_a58(3), May, 2024: p.865-884
520			_aHow are infrastructures socially appropriated? This article uses my fortuitous presence in a rural locality in eastern India as its residents discussed proposals for its complete electrification, allowing me to reflect on social negotiations around infrastructure prior to its installation. Drawing on a detailed ethnography of electrification in a West Bengal village, I illustrate the nuanced ways in which people inflect infrastructural projects with their collective ideas of what is right and good. As far as they can see, such projects are neither the unalloyed benefit that proponents celebrate nor the unmitigated evil that opponents lament. Rather, they are evaluated in relation to people’s imagination of the collective good, to which such infrastructures may or may not be central. Drawing on the insights offered by my interlocutors as well as recent advances in the literature on the politics of infrastructures, this article interrogates the perspective that infrastructures advance governmental rationalities. Building on well-established insights that technological infrastructures are not socially neutral and that infrastructures are socially appropriated, disputed, and negotiated, this article demonstrates that people’s engagement with infrastructures politicizes, rather than governmentalizes, them.- Reproduced https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/negotiating-power-disputes-over-electrification-in-rural-india/74D92B95756A5D07C96F755ABFF88884
650			_aInfrastructure, Development, West Bengal, Ethnography, Politicization. _951385
773			_aModern Asian Studies
942			_cAR