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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the everyday practices of sewer work in Delhi. Foregrounding workers' daily repair work that sustains the sewage system, I make the case for centering 'work' in infrastructure studies in order to better examine the invisibilisations & polarisations undergirding these systems.

Paper long abstract

The overarching questions guiding this paper are: how are large-scale urban infrastructures made functional on a day-to-day basis? Whose bodies and labour get mobilised in the management of essential urban services? How are infrastructural risks and toxicities distributed?

Drawing from my year-long ethnographic study of sewage work and infrastructure in Delhi, India, this paper examines the everyday practices of sewer work in the city. It discusses the range of tasks that constitute this work; the local tools and equipment considered essential to this work; the skills, embodied knowledge, and sensory cues that workers rely on as they undertake work that is ‘dirty’, risky, and hazardous; and, how this work continues to rely on manual labour despite reforms – a telling sign of how ‘modern’ urban infrastructures are undergirded by caste-based manual labour, made more precarious under conditions of contemporary capitalism.

Tracing these routines of sewer work, I highlight how workers’ everyday repair and maintenance work is essential to unclog the blockages in the city’s sewage infrastructure. Further, engaging with workers’ narratives on work, and the skills and techniques that it demands, I discuss how workers – while closely aware of the devaluation of sewer work – also contest this devaluing. Unpacking the sewage system at the level of everyday practices and narratives of work, I argue that re-centering ‘work’ in the study of infrastructures foregrounds the labour of historically invisibilised workers, while also allowing an examination of the relations and polarisations – of caste, capital, contractualisation – greasing those infrastructures.