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State quantifications of Delhi’s water supply proclaim some of the highest levels of access in urban South Asia. However, accompanying such representations are a number of discrepancies and ambiguities, suggesting an appearance of legibility is produced in the absence of data and key calculations. This paper examines the co-production of both knowledge and ignorance with regard to the city’s water, showing how their entanglement serves to powerfully shape both urban biopolitics and diffuse modalities of state power. First, I demonstrate that the appearance of legibility is maintained through fragmented measurement and bureaucratic practices that build material ambiguity into the system. Secondly, I examine the political, discursive and material effects of such illegibility, which include outcomes that are both arbitrary in nature (inadvertently allotting more water to one area versus another) and well as more …