Presentation short abstract

This paper unpacks the criticality of infrastructural labor in Delhi’s solid waste management and the unequal distribution of environmental harms due to current waste policy. It envisions just infrastructural transitions in southern cities to be predicated on the better organization of this labor.

Presentation long abstract

Municipal strategies to address the waste crisis and modernize Delhi’s solid waste system revolve around technology investments and outsourcing contracts. This paper traces connected transformations at the first-mile collection and last-mile disposal stages of municipal waste management to unpack the reconfiguration of spatial, labor and capital relations around urban waste. Across both, I argue that: (1) caste-ed manual labor remains a critical input in handling waste, and (2) environmental harm from municipal incapacity is borne by all urban residents, but to varying degrees. At the beginning of the waste stream, as primary collection is privatized and increasingly mechanized, informal workers continue to manually collect and consolidate waste. However, these characteristics, being labor-intensive and technology-light, are seen as roadblocks preventing systemic modernization and worker integration. Materially, this allows labor to be incorporated in more precarised arrangements where they bear heavier economic and environmental burdens, while also undercutting material recovery through recycling. These shifts connect to the final stage of waste disposal wherein over-capacity landfills are sought to be replaced by the ready solution of Waste to Energy plants. Here too, research reveals landfills to be ongoing critical sites of waste work and the transfer of toxicity to peripheral waste worker communities. Thus, by deploying an “infrastructural labor” framing across two scales – the neighborhood and the city – the paper highlights the indispensable force that labor provides to infrastructural functioning and the political-ecological imperatives to better organize this for just transitions in southern cities (Stokes & De-Coss Corzo, 2023; Gidwani, 2015).