Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Delhi’s shifting waste metabolism through political ecology, tracing how transitions from dhalaos to privatised waste infrastructures reconfigure material flows and urban ecologies, displacing waste pickers and exposing deep inequalities in the city’s metabolic order.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the politics of urban waste in Delhi through the lens of urban metabolism, foregrounding the labour and spatial practices of waste pickers. Waste, far from being a mere by-product of urban life, is central to Delhi’s metabolic processes with its flows of material, labour, and value. The paper traces how recent shifts in waste infrastructure, from decentralised dhalaos (community sorting centres) to privatised Waste-to-Energy plants and Material Recovery Facilities have restructured this metabolism by excluding informal workers from critical nodes of value generation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in waste picker settlements such as Bhalswa and Rangpuri Pahadi, the analysis situates waste work as “infrastructural labour” that maintains urban sustainability while remaining unrecognised and precarious. Through a political-ecological reading, the study explores how caste, gender, and class hierarchies mediate access to waste resources, shaping who is dispossessed and who benefits from urban "development" and “greening” projects. The displacement of waste pickers from dhalaos exemplifies processes of accumulation by dispossession, where public waste is enclosed within private circuits of profit. By conceptualising Delhi’s waste system as a socio-metabolic network, the paper argues that informal workers constitute the city’s hidden infrastructure (both materially and socially) whose erasure undermine ecological and labour justice.