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Paper short abstract

This paper examines environmental casteism in Mumbai through Sanjay Nagar, an informal settlement beside a dumping ground. It argues that housing precarity and environmental harm are structurally produced through caste–class hierarchies that push marginalised communities into hazardous urban spaces.

Paper long abstract

Abstract

This paper examines environmental casteism as a form of caste-based marginalisation that shapes urban space, housing locations, and environmental exposure in Mumbai. Focusing on Sanjay Nagar, an informal settlement located beside a major garbage dumping ground, the paper argues that environmental degradation is not an accidental outcome of urban growth but a structurally produced condition tied to caste–class hierarchies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, residents’ narratives, and critical engagement with Dalit autobiographies and urban scholarship, the paper demonstrates how marginalised communities are systematically pushed into environmentally hazardous spaces where pollution, housing insecurity, and state neglect become everyday realities.

The paper extends existing discussions on environmental injustice by conceptualising environmental casteism not only as a denial of access to natural resources, but also as the forced settlement of specific caste and class groups in unsafe and unhealthy living environments. It shows how housing locations near dumping grounds, drains, and polluted infrastructures are shaped by long-standing processes of social exclusion, limited social and financial capital, and caste-based segregation. Residents’ migration histories reveal that settlement in such spaces is driven not by choice, but by constrained survival strategies within a deeply unequal urban structure. By foregrounding caste as a central organising principle of urban environmental inequality, this paper argues that debates on pollution, housing, and urban development in India must account for caste as a fundamental axis shaping who bears the socio-spatial burden of environmental harm.