Isolation in COVID, and COVID in Isolation—Exacerbated Shortfalls in Provision for Women's Health and Well-Being Among Marginalized Urban Communities in India

The containment measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have had severe economic consequences on the lives of the urban informal poor in India. Several scholars have commented on the vital yet insufficient role that government-run food relief programmes, mutual aid practices and private charity have played in addressing hunger during lockdown periods. This article investigates the impact of lockdown measures on food security among waste pickers in nine Delhi neighbourhoods through an analysis of data collected from daily telephone surveys with 70 adult and 69 child waste pickers over a 54-day period. Analysis of this data reveals that while respondents relied heavily on emergency food relief programmes, their sense of hunger was closely connected to their ability to provide food for themselves. Drawing on these insights, the article concludes by offering policy and programmatic recommendations to address food security problems for the urban poor in general.

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Waste Picking in the Age of COVID-19: An Environmental Justice Perspective

Shanmugasundaram

2024

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All over the world, waste and the disposal of waste is becoming a more prominent issue, as landfills fill up and more evidence points to landfills and trash contributing to climate change and environmental degradation. In the developing world, waste pickers sort through solid waste and sell it to vendors, who will recycle the product into something consumable. The work they do is vital to climate change mitigation, as well as urban cleanliness. In a way, waste pickers, especially in India, are vehicles of environmental justice, but they are often discriminated against, subjected to inhumane working conditions, and can barely make a living. During this all, the pandemic hit, making waste pickers’ already precarious life even worse. This paper attempts to fill the gap in the academic literature by compiling a systemized literature review of the impacts of COVID-19 on waste-pickers’ lives using an environmental justice perspective. The review also uses a Feminist Political Ecology perspective to illuminate the double jeopardy that female waste pickers face in the era of COVID-19, which is often ignored in academia. Ultimately, this paper shows that COVID-19 exacerbated preexisting injustices that the waste picker community faced and created an immense burden on women. This paper will show that it is important to notice the differentiation between female and male waste picker challenges, especially at the crux of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper has important policy implications as well as research considerations for both environmental justice and feminist political ecology scholars.

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Isolation in COVID, and COVID in Isolation—Exacerbated Shortfalls in Provision for Women's Health and Well-Being Among Marginalized Urban Communities in India

Cited by 5 publications

References 11 publications

A scoping review on the operationalization of intersectional health research methods in studies related to the COVID-19 pandemic

A scoping review on the operationalization of intersectional health research methods in studies related to the COVID-19 pandemic

Poverty, Provisioning and the Pandemic: Income and Food Insecurity Among Waste Picker Households During the 2020 Lockdown in Delhi

Waste Picking in the Age of COVID-19: An Environmental Justice Perspective

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