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In 2011, the “Swach Delhi Swasth Delhi” (Clean Delhi Healthy Delhi) campaign designated more than 20 settlements in the capital city to receive water and/or sanitation improvements. Tracing the water initiative in Delhi’s Rampur Camp, this paper employs a situated approach to the urban political ecology of water in order to tease apart the variegated governance and lived experiences of its flows. Rather than the conventional reading of the state as having “withdrawn” from water governance in illegal colonies, my analysis reveals shifting state and non-state political assemblages as playing key roles in the everyday regulation of water in Delhi. First, I demonstrate that everyday governance is shaped by (re)configurations of specific nodes and networks of the state and other actors, which enable particular powers of reach and authority to be exercised in relation to water. Second, my findings detail the situated impacts of new governance configurations within urban spaces, revealing how water is (re-)negotiated, embodied, and socially differentiated on the ground. These findings further reveal the pathways by which situated and distributed forms of social and political power shape incongruent urban environments for the city’s residents.