Paper short abstract:

This paper explores an unlikely ecological cooperation between a scrap dealing caste and middle class urbanites working to provide e-waste recycling infrastructures in Delhi. I ask questions about environmental justice and dispossession between the lower caste Maliks and corporate India?

Paper long abstract:

Rather than a place of anonymity and equal opportunities for all, postcolonial Delhi has become iconic as the site in India where stark social and economic inequalities are most tangible. These inequalities have often been portrayed as contributing to urban disfunction, and exacerbating unequal effects of poverty and various environmental stressors. In contrast, this paper proposes to examine an unlikely alliance between the city’s upper middle classes working in corporate offices and the city’s Muslim scrap dealers operating out of informal markets. The Maliks, Muslim Telis from West UP, operate an all-India community-based e-waste and scrap collection network that converges in New Delhi. Sahih Kaam, a for-profit Producer Responsibility Organisation, takes advantage of the community’s aggregating work to buy up e-waste in bulk to help corporations comply with India’s E-waste (Management) Rules of 2016. Delhi’s waste management system and scrap trade is communally organised, with particular types of waste being taken care of by different groups. When developmental aspirations and environmentally responsible business schemes of the middle classes are conceived of, lower caste groups such as the Maliks and their “Bottom of the Pyramid” communicative infrastructures need to be acquired to make money while doing good (Elyachar 2012; Cross 2019). This paper explores this cooperation and what it reveals about urbanites' changing horizon of hope and aspirations and the emerging role of cities as aggregators of people and things in providing solutions to ecological challenges. I ask where environmental justice and where dispossession lie between the Maliks and corporate India?