The Value of Being Time-Bound

While the phrase ‘time-bound’ had a particular valence in the Indian construction industry, the term is not specific to this industry, nor to India. The phrase was always used in English, even in Hindi conversations, indicating its uptake as part of a global managerial discourse, specifically project management. As we will see, this background is a key factor in Indian construction professionals’ concern with producing time-bound projects. In management and organisational studies, the term emerged as a way of characterising the temporary forms of organisation that distinguish project work from earlier forms of industrial organisation (Lundin and Söderholm 1995; Turner 2003). This research draws attention to the unique challenges of coordination and supervision in work contexts that are characterised by delimited temporal horizons. Projects are defined by their transitory nature, bringing various workers, materials and machinery together in different configurations to achieve fixed goals in specific timeframes (Jacobson et al 2015; but for a critique, see Brookes et al 2017).

While the phrase ‘time-bound’ circulates globally in discourses of managerial science as a seemingly neutral technical description of work structures, the phrase takes on an evaluative dimension in popular discourse in India. Here it is associated not only with temporary project work but specifically with speedy completion, clearly documented deadlines and a general efficiency of production. The term becomes a mode of praising as well as critiquing projects, both within and well beyond the construction sector. For example, government officials have called for a ‘time-bound programme’ to reform the financial sector and bring it ‘on par with international standards and perceptions’ (The Hindu 1999). Being time-bound is a key goal in all sorts of government action, from the delivery of services (Express News Service 2022) to court decisions (Fernandes 2022). Corporations proclaim their capacities to act in a time-bound manner and are praised for their time-bound execution of projects (The Times of India 2021). A public statement from Reliance Infrastructure Limited, after being awarded a large construction contract, credited the company's ‘expertise in engineering and time-bound execution in the EPC [engineering, procurement and construction] space’ (quoted in Press Trust of India 2016). More often, however, time-boundedness features as an imperative, as when news headlines insist that legal investigations ‘must be time-bound’ so that they remain above accusations of corruption (The Print Team 2020). It also features as a critique by virtue of its absence, pointing to the possibility of corrupt or substandard practices slowing down the execution of a plan (Fernandes 2022; Sinha 2017).

More than a simple ideal, time-boundedness as a quality of projects works as a disciplining discourse in a similar way to discourses of transparency as described by Llerena Searle (2016). Searle demonstrates how international real estate investment funds leverage their positions to pressure Indian construction firms to present themselves as transparent actors, operating within legal bounds and meeting international standards of product quality and timely completion. In a context where firms bid competitively on projects, being seen as transparent or as capable of time-bound execution is an immediate market advantage (Mikhaylova 2018). The CPWD leverages its position as a provider of contracts and evaluator of bids. Here a company's track record and reputation for time-bound construction plays an important role in their ability to access lucrative government contracts.

The value of time-boundedness within the politics of competitive contracts is located within the larger emergence of time-boundedness as a sign of good and modern governance. We see this clearly in recent debates around the provision of public services in which access to timely delivery of services has been framed as a right (Pareek and Sole 2020). As of 2011, nine states in India had adopted legislation to ensure a citizen's right of ‘receiving services in a time-bound manner’ (Raha 2012: 2). This legislation presumes a contractual relation between citizens and the state, enforcing penalties on government service providers if citizens can prove that they did not receive services at all or within stipulated timeframes. This framing of the citizen as a customer in the delivery of time-bound services points to the larger history of state reform, both in India and globally, from which a focus on being time-bound emerged as a central goal of projects. Urvashi Pareek and Nagendra Sole (2020) trace the focus on time-bound delivery to the citizens’ charter movement that came to India from the UK in the early 2000s and was part of a general shift in neoliberal governance from the state as the provider of public services to the state as a facilitator of public services in partnership with private contractors. Although the charter movement failed in India, it gave rise to the more recent demands for legislation around the right to time-bound service delivery.

In this context, the time-bound execution of projects takes on a moral character as the sign of good and efficient corporate or government action. Such action is communicated in the timely completion of buildings but also, as we will see, in the careful documentation and reporting of progress. Across reports, inspections, account books and other documentary artefacts, firms represent the stepwise completion of project milestones. Indeed, the production of these genres of documentation is part of what makes the diverse activities of, in this case building, legible as a project at all (Graan 2022: 741). Even when these practices do not result in the timely completion of a project, which they often do not, they do construct an image of a time-bound project. That is, they present the complex and heterogeneous activities of a project as the careful and temporally contained completion of a plan. In India, producing such an image of a time-bounded project is both a general moral good and an imperative increasingly built into the structure of project governance through contracting.

A Time-Bound Project

At the beginning of my time on the site, I spent much of my days in the CPWD site office, a small but tidy brick building with a carefully manicured front yard, situated at the northern edge of the site.² Here I met with project managers, engineers and accountants who were responsible for overseeing the project, a ‘state of the art’ lecture hall and lab complex for a public university. It was as I was on my way to this office building one day that I met Ashwin, a tall assistant engineer from Delhi. For reasons that were never fully clear to me, Ashwin had taken a particular interest in my presence and on seeing me that particular day he immediately invited me into his shared office to hear about my research. Ashwin had a degree in civil engineering from a reputable university and was intent on climbing the rungs of the CPWD to a position in the organisation's central administration. He took great pride in what he described as the ‘strict’ standards of the CPWD and seemed to believe in its mission of creating high-quality infrastructure. As I began to explain my research, he immediately insisted that if I wanted to understand the project I needed to read the contract. Taking me to a meeting room with a long table, he picked up a large volume off a bookcase and set it down in front of me. He explained that this was a copy of the ‘composite item rate’ contract, which had been signed after the CPWD had selected the tender submitted by a company I call Prakash Limited. Leaving me with strict instructions not to take the contract out of the room, Ashwin gave me time to consult the document, which he assured me would tell me everything I needed to know about the project.

The composite item rate contract consisted of a series of per-unit rates for every material in the building. These rates included the work of installation: it was not simply bricks, steel and stone, but cubic metres of bricks laid, tonnes of steel reinforcement bent and arranged, and square metres of stone cut and set. The contract also specified the conditions under which these rates could be renegotiated as well as penalties that Prakash Limited would incur for late delivery. Here construction work was explicitly framed as a time-bound exchange of materials with defined penalties for failure to deliver them within stated timeframes. As a disciplinary device, stipulations such as these seem to be relatively ineffective at ensuring that projects are completed on time, since it must be determined that the fault for time overruns lies primarily with the builder and was not, for example, caused by lack of materials or last-minute design changes. Regardless of whether they are followed, the stipulations render the work of construction as a bounded project with a clear beginning and end.

While Ashwin and his colleagues in the CPWD all stressed the importance of the contract in understanding the project, most of their daily work was not with this document directly but rather involved inspecting, recording and accounting for work done on the site. On subsequent days, Ashwin allowed me to accompany him on his daily rounds around the site, during which he would review reports of work completed by Prakash Limited, through trade-specific sub-contractors. Often accompanied by a Prakash Limited engineer, Ashwin took these rounds as an opportunity to complain about the pace of progress and quality of work on the site. Back in his office, Ashwin used the reports collected from Prakash Limited to draft an accounting document called a running bill. These bills took a standardised form across the CPWD and captured the amount of work done in terms of the units specified in the contract – for example, tonnes of rebar bent or cubic metres of bricks laid. In a separate column, the bill listed the amount of each material in relation to the total amount of that material that would eventually be in the building. Each running bill provided a snapshot of the progressive completion of the building in terms of the amounts of different component materials installed since the last running bill. Taken together, the running bills charted the stepwise progress of construction as the fulfilment of the various items listed in the contract. With visible pride, Ashwin explained to me the long process of checking and rechecking that these documents went through before being stored as the authoritative account of the project. Taken together, the contract and the running bills generate an image of the project as time-bound, framing all the varied types of work on the site as the orderly and sequential fulfilment of the contract and measurable with respect to stated timeframes.

Of course, this image of steady, stepwise completion glosses over the daily negotiations, delays and struggles that characterised work on the site. Coordinating work on the site required interfacing not only with Prakash Limited engineers and supervisors but also with a range of subcontractors (thekedar) with whom Prakash Limited had written contracts for the supply of various types of workers. While there was considerable variety in the specific terms of contracts that subcontractors had, they almost all specified a piece-rate to be paid by Prakash Limited while the subcontractors offered their workers a day wage. As I will demonstrate, subcontractors operated as a key fulcrum around which the image of a time-bound site was constructed out of the heterogeneous temporalities of patronage that mobilised work on the site. Coordinating work on the site required translating the carefully delimited increments of the piece-rate item contract and the lines of the architectural plan into the work practices of diverse groups of workers and their relationships to their subcontractors. Yet, on the CPWD site, it also required retranslating this work into terms that were tractable to the running bill and the piece-rate item contract. This process was what made the CPWD site into a time-bound project and it required the careful orchestration of the diverse rhythms and temporalities of construction work into an image of the sequential accretion of materials. This image, as we will see, would come to eclipse its own reliance on those who produced it.

Binding Time in Practice

I first met Ranjeet, a young shuttering subcontractor (thekedar), during one of Ashwin's inspection rounds. Ashwin had noticed that some of the plywood forms for pouring the cement floor of one of the lecture halls were out of place. He had complained loudly to Sandeep, a Prakash Limited engineer who was accompanying us. Sandeep had seemed surprised and immediately called Ranjeet to correct the issue. Ranjeet arrived looking somewhat sheepish and quietly listened while Ashwin explained the problem, but he insisted that the wood forms had been built according to the plan. At that moment, Ashwin was called away and he and Sandeep quickly left. I stayed behind to ask Ranjeet about the argument and he explained that the forms had been built to the plan, but that possibly the plan had been changed after the work had already been done. He complained that the engineers were always changing the designs at the last minute. This meant that the work would have to be redone and, if not properly accounted for, would cost him money.

Like most of the subcontractors that Prakash Limited worked with, Ranjeet was paid a per unit rate and was responsible for recruiting, overseeing and paying his own workers. Prakash Limited supplied him with materials, tools and space to house his workers and in return he was paid a fixed rate per square foot of shuttering installed. Now in his early thirties, Ranjeet had quickly worked his way up from being an unskilled ‘helper’ to a carpenter and now to running his own modest crew of twenty workers from near his home village in Madhya Pradesh. He had a friendly style, joking with workers and engineers alike. He often jumped in to demonstrate how a task should be done. In this way, he was able to direct the work of younger workers while maintaining the respect of older carpenters. Like all subcontractors, Ranjeet recruited workers that were ‘known’ (jaan pachaan) to him. This meant that most of his workers were kin, from the same or nearby villages in Satna district and mostly from his caste (Ahir), traditionally farmers and a group with growing political influence. Indeed, since most subcontractors used such networks, workers often shared linguistic, religious, caste and regional backgrounds, although subcontractors almost always hailed from better-off, landholding families. Ranjeet's own family maintained a significant plot of land in his village that was mostly managed by Ranjeet's brother, who also helped him recruit workers when needed. Indeed, it was this family capital and network that had allowed him to start working as a subcontractor relatively quickly.

Bonds of shared dialect, religious practices and village residence tied workers and subcontractors to one another in relations that went well beyond a particular project. As Ranjeet explained to me one day, hiring men who were known to him allowed him to be able to advance credit to his workers since, even if they did run off with an advance, they would have to eventually come back to their families in the village. Workers too spoke of knowing a subcontractor's village and family as offering protection against a subcontractor absconding from a project without paying out full wages. The result was that workers working under different subcontractors were often differentiated by caste, religion and region. Although workers from different groups could and did make friends across groups, these ties were relatively weak given the temporary nature of the site. Gender cut across categories in the sense that trade workers were men, with women working almost exclusively as general labourers (Baruah 2010; Sargent 2020).

Ties based on shared background were cemented by relations of debt. Karthik, a carpenter who worked for Ranjeet and hailed from a neighbouring village, had received an interest-free loan of 50,000 rupees from Ranjeet to cover medical expenses when his wife had been injured in a road accident. Like many of the workers I met, Karthik did not know his exact age. He guessed that he was in his late twenties, although he looked older with hard leathery skin from long days spent working outside. On pay day, Karthik would gather with the rest of Ranjeet's workers at a makeshift table that had been cleared off for the occasion. Sitting behind the table with his well-worn notebooks, Ranjeet would distribute his workers’ fortnightly wages. Finding the worker's name, Ranjeet would scan across the attendance record adding up all of the day wages the worker had earned in the last two weeks. Stating the sum, he would then ask how much the worker needed. In Karthik's case, they would have to determine how much Karthik needed for daily needs on the site, how much must be sent home and how much would be used to pay off his debt. Given that Karthik earned a daily wage of 250 rupees, he would likely be paying off this debt for many years to come. Thus while Ranjeet always made sure that his workers had enough money from their daily wages to cover ongoing expenses, he was also able to bind workers to him through this patronage.

Such patronage was not only a way of binding workers to a subcontractor but was also part of being a good subcontractor. While not necessary, access to interest-free loans was a key sign of a subcontractor's generosity, along with practices such as allowing workers to return to their villages to tend to fields, and for religious holidays and family events. Workers often referred to such practices, or their absence, when evaluating their own and others’ subcontractors (Sargent 2019). Failure to offer such patronage could result in workers moving to a different subcontractor. Crucial here is the way that relations of subcontracting extended beyond the punctuated and progressive time of the time-bound project, offering instead deeply asymmetrical yet reciprocal relationships that endured across projects. They responded to the times of life stages and reproduction. Yet such practices enabled subcontractors to amass workers and mobilise them in ways that responded to the needs of the plan, even when recently updated.

Attracting and maintaining groups of workers relied not only on longer term acts of patronage but also on more immediate ones. These acts had to do with the way that work was distributed. Early every morning, Ranjeet assembled his workers and assigned them in groups to different tasks for the day. To do this, Ranjeet had to keep careful watch of the status of other work on the site and stay in communication with Prakash Limited engineers like Sandeep (and supervisors working under him), who would tell him which areas of the building were to take priority. These priorities were set by Sandeep's superiors in Prakash Limited and often responded to pressure from the CPWD. It was in one such meeting that it was decided that the fourth floor of the east wing of the building would become a priority.

I learned of this priority from Ranjeet, when I met him one afternoon just as he was returning from speaking with Sandeep. In discussions that I did witness between Sandeep and Ranjeet, as well as in the meetings where priorities were set, shuttering work was treated as part of completing the building. What was crucial was the component (floor shuttering) and location (fourth floor east wing) of work to be done rather than the capacities and effort it might require. Especially as they were articulated by engineers on the site, directives to finish this or that part of the building partook of the temporality of the time-bound project. Yet they could only be enacted through taking into account the rhythms of the labours that go into completion.

This is precisely what Ranjeet did when he assembled his workers the following day and selected a particular group to complete the shuttering for the floor of the fourth floor of the east wing. He offered this group of workers two days’ wages for completing the task, in recognition that the amount of work he was asking them to do was above and beyond that of a normal day's work. Grumbling about the size of the floor, Ranjeet's workers asked for three times the day wage to which Ranjeet had countered with an offer of a ‘party’, consisting of store-bought food and possibly alcohol. Such negotiations were common on the site as subcontractors and workers struggled over the timing and rhythms of their work. This negotiation, as well as the offering of loans and coordinating leave to return to the village, was part of the way that subcontractors translated the milestones and directives of time-bound projects into the temporalities of social reproduction and patronage that catalysed and controlled work on the site. When they were successful, they were able to extract a profit by supplying the project with what appeared to be fungible labour as and when needed, while on the other hand becoming patrons to their workers.

Yet this translation of work had its tensions that illustrate the multiple temporalities at work on the site. Tensions that can fracture the subcontractor's accumulation of value (DeNeve 2014). Like many subcontractors on the site, Ranjeet relied on Prakash Limited to supply the materials needed for his work. At one point during my fieldwork, there was a problem with the supply of plywood. Sandeep told me that he thought the problem was that the supplier Prakash Limited used was having trouble filling the order. As Ranjeet explained, this glitch cost him dearly. Without materials, it was impossible to give his men tasks that would ensure they produced large amounts of shuttering. This meant that the piece-rate that Ranjeet earned from Prakash Limited had dropped. Yet Ranjeet was obligated to pay his workers at least one daily wage no matter how much material they created. For the week or so that it took to sort out the supply of materials, Ranjeet had paid out more money in wages than he could bill Prakash Limited. As I have noted elsewhere (Sargent 2019), subcontractors had ways of negotiating these problems, but what is significant here is the way that this issue highlights the different temporalities at play on the site. Here the delays and hesitations that are part and parcel of the biography of infrastructure projects (Appel 2018; Arican 2020) illuminate the divergent temporalities of the time-bound project and the patterns of social reproduction that characterise work on the site.

These tensions and negotiations were subsumed under the figure of the subcontractor. Engineers and supervisors regularly spoke of the complex activities of trade work on the site by reference to the relevant subcontractor. Shuttering carpentry was called ‘Ranjeet's work’. By responding to general directives to complete parts of the building under piece-rate contracts, subcontractors enabled forms of accounting for work that figured it as dated transformations of material. In order to be paid, subcontractors would have their work measured by a Prakash Limited supervisor or engineer, who would make provisional notes that would become the basis of formal reports from which payment was issued to subcontractors and which would be sent on to the CPWD and ultimately form the basis of the running bills. In Ranjeet's case, Sandeep would measure the areas that his men had built wooden forms for and create a diagram with the square metres completed, the location of the work and the date completed. From this information, the Prakash Limited accounting department would work out payment based on the piece-rate listed in a subcontractor's contract. This process too could involve negotiations between Prakash Limited engineers and subcontractors, in which the measured amounts could be altered to account for delays or difficulties in the work that were not the subcontractor's responsibility. This most likely happened in the aftermath of the event where I first met Ranjeet. According to Ranjeet, the CPWD had changed the design of the building, forcing him to redo shuttering work. These negotiations, like those between the subcontractor and his workers, translated the inconsistencies, delays and hesitancies of everyday work on the site into the dates and amounts of materials by which the progress of the project could be measured.

From the perspective of the subcontractors’ negotiations with workers on the one hand and supervisors and engineers on the other, the project appears as a careful and tenuous orchestration of multiple temporalities that sit uneasily one with another. Scholars of infrastructure and development have long pointed to such multiplicity in highlighting the ways actors impose alternative times on projects that delay, defer and deform the promise of incremental progress (Arican 2020; Hetherington 2014; Nguyen 2017). The temporalities of debt, kinship, migration and reciprocity that characterise labour on the construction site do indeed exceed the carefully projected and delimited temporality of the time-bound project. Like the other contributions to this special issue, an ethnographic attention to projects shows up the multiple temporalities that jostle, diverge and even subvert a project's supposedly time-bound nature. Attending to projects through the lens of the project form further focuses our attention on the normative power of this specific mode of organising activities, of orchestrating and containing the divergent temporalities and rhythms that emerge from, support and threaten projects on the ground.

It is not enough to end our analysis with the existence and contestation of multiple temporalities as revealing the illusory nature of the project form. Subcontractors, as well as supervisors and engineers, do indeed juggle multiple and often contradictory temporalities on the site, but this juggling itself gives rise to the image of the time-bound project. When Ranjeet converts the complex patterns of his workers’ lives and livelihoods into the timely or late construction of so many square metres of wooden forms, he enables forms of accounting such as the running bill. Indeed, subcontractors accumulate value through precisely this orchestration binding workers to themselves in the enduring temporalities of debt, kinship and circular migration so as to supply fungible and transitory labour to construction sites. On the one hand, the forms of accounting and contract that present the construction site as a time-bound project rely on these varied temporalities in that it is within these temporal rhythms that labour is extracted from workers. On the other hand, subcontractors are valuable precisely because they allow labour to conform to these forms of accounting and contract. That is, the image of the time-bound project as the stepwise fulfilment of contract agreement is itself produced in the everyday negotiations on the site alongside the varied temporalities of patronage and negotiation that govern labour.

Conclusion

A year after my initial fieldwork, I returned to Delhi to visit the CPWD site and see the finished building. From the outside, the building looked complete. Students milled around outside and in the building's central atrium. As I approached the entrance, I was surprised to see a Prakash Limited engineer I had met during my fieldwork. When I asked if the project had been completed, he told me that it had been handed over to the CPWD and that students were now using the building's lecture halls and labs. Seeing my quizzical look, he explained further. ‘Now we're just doing maintenance’. As we toured the building, it became clear that ‘maintenance’ included adding final coats of paint to walls, installing electrical fixtures and similar tasks that would seem to be part of completing the structure rather than work done to fix the damage of wear and tear. In one sense, this is a final indictment of the time-bound project: not only was the building delivered late, but also its delivery did not actually coincide with the completion of the structure. The project illustrates an argument that scholars of infrastructure have long made that maintenance and repair should not be treated as separate from the often spectacular events that officially signal the completion of infrastructures (Anand 2017; Graham and Thrift 2007; Jackson 2014). Here the everyday temporalities of labour overrun official narratives of projects as time-bound processes with fixed material effects. Instead, project work morphs seamlessly from ‘construction’ to ‘maintenance’, always characterised by multiple and conflicting times of social life and livelihood.

From the analysis that I have been developing here, however, what is important is not simply that the image of the time-bound project is not accurate. Rather it is the way it operates to orchestrate relationships between the messy and multiple temporalities through which projects are carried out. It draws attention to the project form not as an illusory discourse floating above the realities of the site but rather as something that is built out of and depends on even as it seeks to organise those realities. It is made across laborious negotiations, reports and account book entries. It emerges from the orchestration of the diverse temporalities of debt, kinship, migration and obligation that compel and control labour on the site. These orchestrations are not seamless, as Ranjeet's losses due to low supply indicate. Nor do they result in persuasive performances of timely project completion. As Ajay's joke suggests, the CPWD is largely seen as failing to deliver time-bound projects. What the negotiations of subcontractors, the reports of Prakash Limited engineers and the running bills of the CPWD do create is the ideal of a time-bound project. Whether the given project is finished on time or not, it can be evaluated in terms of time-boundedness. Third parties can, and sometimes do, look back over the series of running bills to determine where and how a project went wrong. Where it diverged from the progressive and discrete temporality of a time-bound project. The image of time-bound construction is more than an official narrative, but is in fact produced, at least as an ideal, in the mundane reports and accounts of ‘modern’ construction sites.

Such an analysis requires that we take the socio-moral registers of infrastructural work seriously. In this case, relations of kinship, debt and migration are not obdurate impediments to the developmentalist time of the time-bound infrastructural project. Rather they support this very image in the sense that it is through these relations that subcontractors like Ranjeet are able to turn patronage into fungible labour. Indeed, we should think of the image of the time-bound project as a way of orchestrating the temporal rhythms of labour catalysed through the patronage of subcontractors with the dictates of contracts and investor pressure. The image of the time-bound project enables this orchestration even while it rarely ensures the timely completion of a project. This suturing of time-bound delivery to the relations of kinship, debt and migration that mobilise and control everyday labour on the site ensures that the ideal of timely completion remains persuasive even as it continuously fails to materialise.

As capitalist modes of accumulation turn increasingly to production models oriented around projects – temporary, time-bound and mobile conglomerations of workers and materials as opposed to durable workplaces – ethnographic attention to the project form can provide broader insights. Indeed, as the editors of this issue note, the project form has become an increasingly ubiquitous, even presumptive, mode of organising production. Capitalist time, like projects, is characterised by multiple and conflicting temporalities (Bear 2014), yet this multiplicity itself has become a route to accumulation (Tsing 2009, 2015; Yanagisako 2002). This is not determined beforehand but is rather the effect of concerted and repeated acts of orchestration. The project form provides a template for such orchestrations, which is an aspect of its ‘normative power’ (Rommel and Graan this issue). In this sense, it is productive not as a tool of temporal disciplining but rather as a guide to the conversion across divergent temporal registers. Attending to the project form as it is produced and reproduced in the everyday negotiations, reports and forms of accounting that organise projects allows us to see how narratives of and calls for the developmentalist time promised by infrastructure may actually be rooted in and mobilise the very registers of social relation they purport to eclipse.