The Ecology of the Welfare State: Studying Sarnath Banerjee's All Quiet in Vikaspuri

Abstract: The depletion of groundwater in the capital region of New Delhi and the consequent community scuffle as depicted in Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel All Quiet in Vikaspuri is the subject of the paper. The urban ecological crisis is refracted through the prism of the neo-liberal state policy and is seen as the great galvanizer of the mass, hitherto pushed to oblivion by the neo-liberal State and corporates alike, who reckoned the crisis and its perpetrators and resisted them. The ecological theories of ‘bioregion’ and ‘biophilia’ are brought in to analyse the community resistance and the role of the State is scrutinized both in terms of its welfare role and its dwindling into a facilitator of the corporate profiteering that has a direct bearing on the ecological catastrophe. The Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock and Morgulis, the paper proposes at the end, needs to accommodate the notion of the welfare State to ensure an equitable distribution of the ecological resources and their protection. Keywords: Ground water; Unsight; Bioregion; Biophilia; Gaia Hypothesis; Welfare State