The work of waste: inside India's infra‐economy

Abstract

My essay focuses on the marginalised people whose livelihoods depend on gathering, sorting, transporting and selling garbage in India's huge informal economy, livelihoods now challenged as municipal governments contract the recycling of waste to corporations. The evolving, bumpy geography of the waste economy creates permanent border areas of primitive accumulation and both devalorised and valorised people and places. I make a case for understanding informal sector activities, such as the work of transforming the city's detritus, as part of a vast infra‐economy and the varied forms of labour performed within heterogeneous value chains of waste transformation as infrastructural labour that produces what Marx called capital's ‘general’ and ‘external’ conditions of production. Through close examination of the spatiotemporal lattice of informal municipal solid waste recycling, I demonstrate how these economies are at once highly organised and brittle, with each node in their value chains subject to disruption by state and market forces. While relative opacity, labour intensity of tasks and dependence on embodied knowledge (metis), indeed a ‘bodily’ feel for space, give informal economies the capacity to resist external efforts to transform, subsume or eradicate them; lack of social security and employment protections also means that workers and micro‐enterprise owners within them inhabit the thin line between survival and failure, rendering them vulnerable to economic and political fluctuations. The upshot is that the labour of waste and other informal sector workers is critical for maintaining the quality of life desired by the well off in cities of the global South, but fails to get the recognition it deserves. Waste workers are poorly compensated, regularly stigmatised and frequently invisible in policy decisions. This is an enduring inequity that demands urgent correction.

Environmental change and the informal plastic recycling networks of Kolkata

“…Third, they offer an ‘ecological subsidy to the city’ (Chengappa, : 1) by diverting waste from the public waste stream, which results in reduced public expenditures (Reddy, ). Nevertheless, informal recycling has been largely negated by state authorities and the general public and has continued to operate mostly beneath and beyond government regulations and municipal waste management systems (Furedy, ; Gidwani, ). The intricate relationship between formal MSWM and informal plastic recycling in India has been studied by Gill () in the case of Delhi.…”

“…These recent studies however, deploy quantitative methodologies used to develop models and draw on exceptional cases like the confined trade area of the biggest domestic plastic recycling market of Tikri Kalan in Delhi (Kroiss, ) or a small number of comparably big and formalized wholesale, processing and recycling units (Gasser et al ., ). They do not sufficiently take into account the critical social science literature on informal waste handling and recycling in India (Gidwani, ; Reddy, ). As a consequence, they appear to grapple with understanding the economic, political and social intricacies of the informality of recycling in India and its often messy, dispersed informal settings and relationships.…”

“…This can be ascribed to a confluence of unfavourable conditions that shape Kolkata's recycling networks, which pertain to the political‐economic conditions of informality (Gidwani, ), and the prevalent social stigmatization of waste related works (Bagchi & Mitra, ) in Kolkata. While conditions of informality point to the complicated territorial embeddedness of recycling networks in the face of institutional power of the state and the regulatory environment it constitutes, the social stigmatization of waste related works articulates mainly through the societal embeddedness of actors directly engaged in the recycling network.…”

Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work

“…This kind of precarity -informal labor held at arm's distance from capital intensive formal production -Vinay Gidwani argues, has been the modal condition of labor in many parts of the post-colonial world since independence -and is as important to understand as the conditions of work and labor organizing in factories and other traditionally industrial worksites. 28…”

Shifting modes of governing municipal waste – A sociology of translation approach

“…Fourthly, the modes of governing approach treats waste simply as something that can be manipulated, categorised and managed with no opposition (Gregson and Crang, 2010). This assumption is different from the relational view of waste, which approaches it as a constitutive element of social and economic processes (Gidwani, 2015). The changing nature of waste, the societal relations that interpret waste in diverse ways, and the distributed human-nonhuman agency of waste that may lead to ambivalent outcomes (Bennett, 2005;Gille, 2010;Moore, 2012), are overlooked aspects in the governing modes framework.…”