Becoming Time-Bound The Temporalities of Construction in New Delhi

In recent years Indian construction firms have come under increasing pressure to present their building projects as ‘time-bound’. In industry discourse, time-bound projects smoothly and sequentially hit project deadlines. While such an ideal is never realised in practice, I argue that the temporal politics of ‘time-bound’ projects lies not in their enactment of a smooth and progressive time but rather in the work of orchestration that binds together the heterogeneous temporalities of kinship, debt and migration that support work on the site. I demonstrate how these heterogeneous temporalities are erased in the image of the time-bound project, even as they support the project. Focusing on the implementation of the project-form itself elucidates the orchestration and contestation of diverse temporalities at stake in infrastructural development.