Waste(d) Collectors: Politics of Urban Exclusion in Mumbai 9783839458242

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Sneha Sharma Waste(d) Collectors

Urban Studies

Sneha Sharma is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Geography, University of Bonn, Germany. She was awarded a DAAD scholarship for undertaking her PhD from the Centre for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn. With her keen interest in discard studies, urban practices, and questions of informality and infrastructure, she continues to draw from critical perspectives in urban sociology to shape her current research.

Sneha Sharma

Waste(d) Collectors Politics of Urban Exclusion in Mumbai

The doctoral work was funded by DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). The research for this book was part of a doctoral thesis at the Department of Geography, University of Bonn, Germany. Supervisor: Prof Dr Detlef Müller-Mahn Second reviewer: Prof Dr Christoph Antweiler The thesis was defended on: 21.01.2020

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de © 2022 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Sneha Sharma: The Dawn of Resistance – A regular sight at Deonar Dumping Ground, Mumbai, India Proofread: Diane Bowden Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5824-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5824-2 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839458242 ISSN of series: 2747-3619 eISSN of series: 2747-3635 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements ......................................................... 11 List of Abbreviations ....................................................... 15

Preface The Fire – from Space ....................................................... 19 References ................................................................. 23 Introduction ................................................................ 25 Wasted spaces in the city ................................................... 25 Waste in Mumbai ............................................................ 28 Waste-free development .................................................... 33 Dumps as spaces of production ............................................. 38 Waste(d) work............................................................... 42 Going beyond binaries....................................................... 46 Fieldwork at the margins .................................................... 48 Aim of the book .............................................................. 51 Chapter scheme ............................................................ 52 References ................................................................. 55 Chapter 1 Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance ...................................... 63

History of Deonar: Contradictory representations and development plans...................................................... Policy shifts towards a management approach to waste...................... Value in waste .............................................................. Governance of Deonar....................................................... The waste of informal economy ............................................. References .................................................................

64 70 74 78 82 86

Chapter 2 Waste in the city ............................................................. 91 Mumbai’s waste network..................................................... 93 Encountering the city at Deonar ............................................ 103 The political economy of recycling .......................................... 110 The technical know-how of sight and touch ................................. 115 Socio-spatial distribution of waste: Caste, class and the city ................. 118 References ................................................................. 122 Chapter 3 The middle class and the miscreants................................... 125 We pay taxes, give us clean air! ............................................. 127 Public Interest Litigation ....................................................134 Accreting narratives of suspicion ........................................... 137 Revocation of access........................................................ 142 References ................................................................. 147 Chapter 4 Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty............................153 Exclusion at and from the periphery ......................................... 161 The chasing act: circulation of fear and anxiety............................................... 173 The photo-pass ............................................................. 178 References .................................................................185 Chapter 5 Struggles for reclaiming the dumping site ................................... 187

Towards mobilisation........................................................ 189 Right to waste .............................................................. 199 Everyday practices and right to the city? ................................... 203 Pehchaan – forging contacts ............................................... 207 Money is not enough ........................................................ 211 Differentiated violence of the everyday ...................................... 214 References ................................................................. 218 Epilogue .................................................................... 221 Returning to the field........................................................ 221 Towards conclusions ....................................................... 225 Metonyms of waste......................................................... 234 Waste as a spatial practice ................................................. 238 References ................................................................ 242

Dedicated to all the waste workers of the world!

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support and kindness of the waste workers in Shivaji Nagar who allowed me to learn more about their lives. They shared their stories, experiences and encounters that became the anchor around which this book has been woven. I am grateful to the numerous respondents in Mumbai who were kind enough to share their time, space and emotions in making this research fruitful. I humbly extend my thanks to all the respondents who opened their doors to me. I have changed all the names of the respondents to protect their identity and maintain anonymity except for public figures. The research for this book was part of my PhD thesis that I concluded in 2020 at the University of Bonn, Germany. The research period was financially supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) during which I participated in multiple conferences and workshops to develop my work. I would like to express my deepest gratitude and indebtedness towards my supervisor, Professor Detlef MüllerMahn, for his sustained guidance and encouragement. The excitement, openness and intellectual fervour with which he nurtured my project has boosted my spirit during the lowest times. Heartfelt thanks goes out to Professor Christoph Antweiler who enlightened me with his zealous anthropological avidity. I cannot thank Dr Saravanan Subramanian enough for his constant mentorship during the thesis. My heart-felt gratitude to Professor D. Parthasarathy at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay for extending his full support and making my research stay in Mumbai possible.

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I would like to thank Professor Amita Bhide from the School of Habitat Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) who kindled my initial interest in Henri Lefebvre’s work. I would like to express my appreciation for the Center for Development Research (Zentrum für Entwicklungsforschung, Bonn) and Department of Geography at the University of Bonn for providing me with the most congenial environment to undertake this study. I am grateful to the Centre for Development Studies (ZEF), Bonn, particularly to Dr Günther Manske and team who provided immense support in my initial years of moving to Germany for doctoral studies. A special mention to Mr Volker Merx from the ZEF library, who tolerated my random request for books and made generous efforts to arrange them. During the writing phase of the thesis I reached out to close friends and colleagues who engaged in critical discussions and pushed me to expand my perspective. I owe many thanks to Christiane Stephan, Epifania Amoo-Adare, Mercy Mashingaidze, Alejandro Mora Motta, Quyen Mai Le from Bonn, and my dear friends Arslan Waheed, Abhinav Sharma, Brijesh Chandra Tripathi and Deepak Sharma for being reliable and patient with my long and boring drafts. They made me realise my strengths and weaknesses and I am indebted to them for this learning curve in my journey. Working on this book after my PhD would not have been possible without the support of Irit Eguavoen who provided feedback on the chapters and encouraged me to keep writing. For this and much more, I am deeply indebted to her. I would like to acknowledge the meticulous efforts of Diane Bowden who proofread the final drafts of this manuscript. This journey has also benefitted from Discard Studies, the online hub that has constructively brought together diverse waste scholarship on their platform. I would like to thank my family for supporting me in all my endeavours and trusting me with my ambitions. Thanks to my notorious brother Shubham for keeping me on my toes. Most importantly, I want to express my appreciation for Rishabh Garg, my partner for being my biggest critique and posing endless questions all the time that kept my enthusiasm high. He has motivated me with unparalleled zeal and enthusiasm during this arduous journey.

List of Figures and Tables Figure 1: Map of M-east ward in Mumbai. Note that the northern section which is the Deonar dump has been marked as ‘area reserved green’. ...................................................................... 30 Figure 2: Location of the area of study M-East Ward in Mumbai. .............. 66 Figure 3: A generic schematic diagram of the waste chain in Mumbai. ........ 94 Figure 4: Showing the green compactor vehicles used by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation for collection of waste in Mumbai. The location in the picture is Shanti Nagar with the Deonar dump in the background. ............................................................ 99 Figure 5: Heaps of recovered materials by waste workers lined in front of scrap shops in Rafique Nagar (II). .................................... 111 Figure 6: Scrap dealer’s shop in Rafique Nagar (II). ........................... 114 Table 1: A broad comparison of categorisation of waste by government and waste pickers .................................................... 117 Figure 7: An example of a photo-pass (an ID card) issued to waste workers by the local NGO on behalf of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. ................................................................ 144 Figure 8: The segregated sites of waste workers juxtaposed against the annual fair on the reclaimed marshes near the Shivaji Nagar bus terminus.163 Figure 9: The boundary wall depicting collected materials by waste workers. . 166 Figure 10: The wall with people crossing over to access the dump. ............ 172 Figure 11: Protest by Deonar’s waste workers against the ban on their entry .......................................................................193

List of Abbreviations

ALM Advanced Locality Management AQI Air Quality Index BMC Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation CAA Constitutional Amendment Act CP Commissioner of Police CrPC Criminal Procedure Code CRZ Coastal Regulation Zone DPR Detailed Project Report FIR First Information Report FSI Floor Space Index GL Ground Level IIT Indian Institute of Technology KVSS Kachra Vechak Seva Sangh MCGM Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai MLA Member of Legislative Assembly MoUD Ministry of Urban Development MSF Maharastra State Forces MSW Municipal Solid Waste NDZ No Development Zone NEERI National Environmental Engineering Research Institute NGO Non-governmental Organisation PIL Public Interest Litigation PPP Public-private Partnership RDDP Revised Draft Development Plan SBM Swachh Bharat Mission

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SEZ Special Economic Zone SMS Stree Mukti Sanghatana SWM Solid Waste Management TISS Tata Institute of Social Sciences ULB Urban Local Body WTE Waste to Energy

The Fire – from Space “A huge garbage fire in India’s biggest city was so bad that you could see it from space.” – The Washington Post (Tharoor, 2016)

On 28 January 2016, a large fire engulfed parts of Mumbai’s biggest landfill site at Deonar, producing a plume of smoke that was captured by a NASA satellite.1 The fire was so huge that 14 fire engines, eight water tankers, one ambulance, six poclains (excavating vehicles) and seven dumpers were relentlessly at work for four days and nights trying to bring it under control (Rugg, 2016). The fire covered various parts of the densely 2 populated city of Mumbai in thick smog which spread extensively across the eastern suburbs and up to Wadala in the south-central part of the city and Andheri in the north (∼20 kms). The Air Quality Index dipped to a ‘poor’ category of 323 for the eastern suburb of Chembur where the dump is located and to a ‘moderate’ 187 category for the whole city while the fire continued for the next six days (Chatterjee, 2017). As the fire at the 12 million tonne garbage mound was being controlled, smoke spread across the nearby areas, stoking frenzy amongst politicians, local leaders and different sections of society residing

1 2

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States of America. The last Census in India took place in 2011 which fixed Mumbai’s population at 12,442,373 and the entire metropolitan agglomeration’s population at 18,394,912. The current figures are estimates based on the growth rates recorded per year which is approximately 1.11%.

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around the dumping site. Thousands of people living around the site started posting on social media, sharing images of the smog in their immediate neighbourhoods. Municipal authorities were blamed and asked to bring the situation urgently under control. Local schools were shut, older people faced health complications due to the toxic air, and people were locked inside their homes as the financial capital of India came to a standstill. Newspaper reports called it a severe public health crisis as the hazardous smoke and gases emanating from the dump contained toxic chemicals and unwanted materials thrown away by the city. Both slum dwellers and gated affluent communities residing around the dump protested in unison, referring to the heaps of garbage as the fuel that fed the fast-spreading fire. Environmentalists and doctors joined in a protest march wearing black clothes to demand clean air for the citizens of Mumbai. Garnering ample attention from the local, national and international media, the fire and smog inflamed a blame game amongst the authorities, who kept passing the responsibility from one bureaucratic department to another. Political opposition leaders blamed the ruling government for risking citizens’ health and alleged a massive corruption scam had led to the appalling state of affairs at Deonar. The Chief Minister of the state of Maharashtra was forced to give a public statement to the residents as the government proposed scientific solution-based projects like Waste to Energy (WTE) to handle the crisis. In the following months of February and March 2016 more fires broke out at the dump raising further concerns amongst city residents and environmental activists. Having been in use since colonial times, the dump was said to have turned into a ‘time bomb’ from excessive waste disposal over the years. Despite the political outcry and international criticism of poor waste management by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the entire blame for the fire was attributed to the informal waste workers who lived around the Deonar dump. The narrative of sabotage circulated by the BMC blamed the misdemeanour of waste workers in igniting fires inside the dump. The BMC immediately cancelled waste workers’ identity cards, banned their entry to the dump and

The Fire – from Space

arrested many on the grounds of suspicion. The incident of the fire left hundreds of waste workers and scrap dealers unemployed, depriving them of their livelihood. Fast forward to the summer of 2021, BMC’s ambitious WTE plans remain unfulfilled, frequent fires continue to be reported at the dump and waste workers are still banned from entering the site. The dump is guarded and closed for informal workers while BMC’s consultants and potential investors continue to access the dump for conducting studies and surveys. The dispossessed waste workers continue to wait in anticipation for the dump to reopen; some have decided to take up odd jobs in the surrounding bustees (officially called slums) while waiting in obscurity. Mumbai’s waste is managed by the labour of thousands of informal workers who constitute its waste economy. From recyclers to scrap merchants to middlemen, a highly complex informal economy operates incessantly to keep the city functioning through recycling, repair and maintenance. Waste workers at the dump occupy the lowest and the most impoverished position in the waste chain, yet the BMC has failed to formally include them in the system, flouting national regulations on waste governance that call for recognising and securing the livelihoods of waste workers in India. The understanding of the ‘informal’ workers as being outside the system has deprived the waste workers from being legitimately recognised as essential drivers of city life. Instead of seeing them as the primary victims of the dump fire, they are blamed for causing harm to the residents and ecology of Mumbai. Irrespective of the intensive security measures taken by the state after the January 2016 fire, multiple fires have ignited at the Deonar dump since then. However, arresting and banning the waste workers from the site seems to have failed to solve the issue of fires at the dump and improve the poor waste governance in the city. Deonar, at this moment, raises more questions about waste management in the city rather than providing a solution. The city is struggling to find appropriate disposal technologies and space to consume the large amount of solid waste generated daily. The Deonar fire incident is emblematic of the underlying puzzles in waste management in Mumbai that this book takes up. The politics around the fire follow more

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than one narrative with regard to the challenges in waste governance, city planning, consumerist economy, infrastructural deficit etc. Deonar presents a paradox: with all the technological innovations, successful models, municipal investments, knowledge sharing and decentralised institutional structures, why has Mumbai not found an answer to deal with its waste? Fires continue to erupt at Deonar and some streets remain deprived of any municipal waste picking services. The nature of the current crisis may appear to be centred on ‘managing’ the excess rejectamenta of the city but the events following the fire call for breaking open the silos of waste management in Mumbai to reveal the contestations, negotiations, and struggles associated with the waste economy. It calls for investigating beyond the facade of waste management policies and technological interventions in order to map the emergent geographies of exclusion through the politics on waste. Deonar is not an isolated case of a poorly governed dump as cities across India are grappling with increased volumes of waste and a shortage of alternatives for garbage disposal. Open dumps present in most cities of the global South are a challenge for governments dealing with scarcity of land and increased waste generation while its inhabitants live in toxic environments. Pollution of land, water and air caused by open landfills poses a major threat to both humans and ecosystems, but many urban local bodies continue to hunt for more and more land to dump waste materials. Disposal of waste is a challenge for policymakers, planners, and engineers who constantly seek technological solutions to solve the garbage crisis. The term waste has multiple meanings. On one hand, it is a threat to public health; it pollutes the environment and emits toxins, but on the other, it generates employment for the urban poor and allows them to live in the city. In fact, most of the so-called slums in Mumbai stand on land that has been reclaimed by filling up low-lying marshes with refuse. The highly contentious and subjective meanings associated with waste and waste materials call for studying its micro-politics by analysing situated practices around waste in their respective social and political contexts. The book traces contestations around Deonar

The Fire – from Space

to analyse the key social and spatial practices that shape the larger politics around waste and social exclusion in Mumbai.

References Chatterjee, B. (2017, January 2). On the first day of 2017, Mumbai breathes most toxic air since Deonar fire. Hindustan Times, Mumbai. https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/on-the-first -day-of-2017-mumbai-breathes-most-toxic-air-since-deonar-fire/ story-AePjVQCBongH4fpkOmeiKJ.html Rugg, P. (2016, February). This Mumbai garbage fire is so huge you can see it from space. Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/article/10992-t his-mumbai-garbage-fire-is-so-huge-you-can-see-it-from-sp Tharoor, I. (2016, February 3). A huge garbage fire in India’s biggest city was so bad you could see it from space. The Washington Post. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/03/a-hu ge-garbage-fire-in-indias-biggest-city-was-so-bad-you-could-seeit-from-space/

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The Fire – from Space

to analyse the key social and spatial practices that shape the larger politics around waste and social exclusion in Mumbai.

References Chatterjee, B. (2017, January 2). On the first day of 2017, Mumbai breathes most toxic air since Deonar fire. Hindustan Times, Mumbai. https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/on-the-first -day-of-2017-mumbai-breathes-most-toxic-air-since-deonar-fire/ story-AePjVQCBongH4fpkOmeiKJ.html Rugg, P. (2016, February). This Mumbai garbage fire is so huge you can see it from space. Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/article/10992-t his-mumbai-garbage-fire-is-so-huge-you-can-see-it-from-sp Tharoor, I. (2016, February 3). A huge garbage fire in India’s biggest city was so bad you could see it from space. The Washington Post. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/03/a-hu ge-garbage-fire-in-indias-biggest-city-was-so-bad-you-could-seeit-from-space/

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Introduction

Wasted spaces in the city We are not allowed inside the Khadi [dump], our identity cards have been cancelled. Our lives have drastically changed since the big fire in January. All the waste workers are prohibited from collecting recyclables there. In fact, now there is strict surveillance with security cameras and watch towers. There are new security guards who keep a vigil; they move around in jeeps and do not allow our kids to play here even if it’s just outside the dump’s edge [pointing to the boundary wall constructed after the fire]. With every passing day there are new stories of violence by the security guards.   The khadi has always supported us. It is so big that it can feed us till the end of our lives. Never did we think a day will come when it will get closed. In earlier times we used to get valuable stuff, sometimes even gold, silver or bundles of currency. But these days we collect fugga [soft plastic]. It is available in the garbage heaps that come to Deonar, and we can sell it at high rates. The dump is all about kismet [luck]; if your luck is good then you will find much more than fugga, everything that one needs like clothes, shoes, rings whatever…but now it is shut, I heard they will open a plant to burn waste. What a loss! [Sigh] who burns such valuable waste? The above quote by Shamina, a waste worker in her 50s, reflects the lived experiences of working and living at Deonar, Mumbai’s 94-year-

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old dump site. The implementation of added security features to the dump like CCTVs, light masts and a wall topped with barbed wire has unleashed new kinds of violent experiences for the informal waste workers, leaving their futures in precarity. They continue to wait with the hope of resuming their work at the dump someday. Shamina’s story resonates with hundreds of waste workers who lost their source of livelihood in the aftermath of the 2016 Deonar fire but it also hints towards the struggles faced by the city’s informal waste workers. The quote captures the puzzles of Mumbai’s waste management system that I will address in this book through the study of the Deonar dump site. On one hand, the waste management system is undergoing technological upgradation and modernisation with increased top-down impetus on integrating informal waste workers at the city level. But on the other, the informal waste workers who have been the backbone of waste management in the city are now being prohibited from accessing waste at the dump by the very same authorities who had allowed them to thrive there. Despite these prohibitions the waste workers continue to access waste in innovative yet precarious ways that challenge the functioning of the formal municipal waste system. This book will take the reader on a journey to the dump site through practices, strategies and coalitions that shape the politics of waste in Mumbai that goes beyond the formal and the so-called legal geographies of the city. This research asks how are waste workers excluded from urban spaces? In other words, how do politics on waste reproduce exclusionary urban spaces and how does the dump become a site for contestations and negotiations? The book’s primary argument is that modern scientific waste management systems operate through and by reinforcing existing social exclusion. By tracing everyday practices around the dump, the analysis reveals a politics of waste that takes place through boundary making, uncertainty and differentiated violence. I show how violence is enacted in the production of space brought about by the interactions of the state and waste workers. The study is located in the everyday which looks at the political agency of the waste workers and their dependencies on waste and waste work. Debates on urban informality as understood by post-colonial urban scholars like Ananya

Introduction

Roy, Asef Bayat, James Holston, Solomon Benjamin shape the backbone of this book. Informality is broadly elucidated as an organising and governing logic, but it is also explained as a range of political actions of marginal groups who make claims to the city through ways that blur the binaries of the formal and informal. Drawing from debates in Southern urbanism I argue that waste workers do not fit into a single framework but act towards the continuation of their survival in the city. At this point, I must admit that the initial theoretical standpoint for addressing the key question in this research was heavily influenced by Henri Lefebvre‘s ruminations on space which also finds a place in the empirical analysis. However, I avoid resorting to a single overarching theory and draw from a range of Southern scholars which opens up space for a more situated and heterogeneous analysis. Foregrounding the call for Southern urbanism(s), the study attempts to tell a story ‘from the South’ (Bhan, 2019; Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012; Watson, 2009) by dismantling and critiquing singular narratives of the production of space. A spatial approach which focuses on everyday practices allows me to overcome territorial understandings of marginalisation and instead, trace moments and practices which (re)produce the violence of exclusion. The book pushes through critical urban scholarship by drawing insights from Deonar’s waste conflicts to reassert the role of spatial politics in the study of marginality. Towards this, the next section of this chapter will draw upon existing frameworks of situating waste as a resource for capital accumulation followed by reflections from the global South scholarship on urban development and informality. The debates on the political economy of waste and its association with informality provide the necessary theoretical coordinates to unpack the contestations around Deonar. The chapter engages with notes on the marginalisation and agency of waste workers and ends with a detailed chapter scheme of the book.

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Waste in Mumbai The dump1 (see Figure 1 below) is surrounded by Shivaji Nagar, a cluster of resettlement buildings and auto-constructed housing located in the M-East ward of Mumbai. Seen from Rafique Nagar (II), one of the newly inhabited areas in Shivaji Nagar, the Deonar dump rises like a lush green hill with cattle grazing and children playing on its capricious slopes. It is only when one crosses past the visible green facade that the expanse of the city’s decaying refuse rises into view. On any given day one can spot a trail of garbage trucks entering and leaving the site. Bulldozers work tirelessly to press down heaps of garbage into the earth. It is common to see flocks of people carefully nested in their chosen spots with burlap sacks, working and chatting against the background noise from the vehicles. One would see small vendors selling vada pav (a local snack), and cheap plastic packets of water. The activities at the dump never ceased till the biggest-ever fire took place in 2016 which left the waste workers debarred from entering the site. Shamina’s description tells us how the dump was an integral part of the lebenswelt (lifeworlds) of migrants living around it. The site became a substratum of life not just for waste workers but also for the residents of the bustees that comprise Shivaji Nagar. The dump marks time and space in the lives of waste workers for whom the everyday experiences of organising life around the dump shapes their identity and sense of belongingness to the city. Living with garbage is a reality for many inhabitants who end up residing in the numerous low-income neighbourhoods in the city, surrounded by pollution and toxic effluents. It is by navigating their lives around the dump that they inhabit the city. Mumbai has significantly transformed over the last decades, pioneering development as the country’s financial capital with sky-high

1

Unlike the English term ‘dump’, which in public discourse evokes negative connotations of dirt and disgust, in India the term khadi (which translates to a bay) is a topographical reference to the low-lying marshes of the Arabian Sea where the dump is located.

Introduction

towers boasting of its urban landscape. With an aggressive rebranding project of becoming a world-class city, it has embraced market interventions in solving its infrastructural concerns and land scarcity by taking up intensive constructions, demolitions and redevelopment. The city now hosts aesthetically maintained gated neighbourhoods, gleaming office towers and spotless malls, but slums have also increased over time. Not far away from its skyscrapers stand mountains of rubbish dotting its coastal terrain. Mumbai has a dense urban population of over 22 million inhabiting its land and generates around 7,000 metric tonnes of waste materials each day. Garbage is churned out from homes, hotels, vegetable markets, malls and industrial units. Most of the population lives in chawls (working-class neighbourhoods) with sporadic waste collection services. The chawl residents are forced to tolerate the presence of garbage and its sensorial existence while the middle-class and affluent residents have succeeded in distancing themselves from their own refuse, but only temporarily. On various occasions repercussions from piling heaps of mixed waste at the landfills have affected residents aerially through toxic smoke from landfills or through choking of subterranean storm water drains with plastics that resulted in devastating Mumbai floods2 in 2005. Mumbai’s urban landscape is highly uneven: clean and fancy condominiums co-exist with the country’s poorest slums lacking essential public services. Interestingly, the Municipal Corporation that is tasked with sanitation governance and maintenance of the city is the richest3 in the country yet its dumps4 continue to be ravaged by recurring fires. 2

3

4

On 26 July, 2005 unprecedented monsoon rains (944 millimetres in 24 hours) caused severe flooding in Mumbai killing around 500 people and leaving thousands stranded in torrential rains. The floods resulted in an estimated loss of $4,500 million. In the year 2016, the BMC estimated a revenue income of INR 19,256 crore with a total budget of INR 37,052 crores. But by the end of the year it still had around 43% of its budget unutilised. In the subsequent years the municipality increased expenditure on infrastructures to improve waste disposal. I differentiate between open dumps and regulated landfills. Dumps are open excavated areas where usually unsegregated garbage is dumped, while land-

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Figure 1: Map of M-east ward in Mumbai. Note that the northern section which is the Deonar dump has been marked as ‘area reserved green’.

Source: Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) website, 2016.

The BMC has struggled to figure out what to do with city’s waste and the issues have been mired with litigations.5 Until 2016 the BMC did not have a long-term plan for processing waste and it was only after

5

fills are regulated by the governing bodies. Landfills have infrastructure to collect leachate (toxic liquid) and gases like methane which are generated from decomposition of solid waste. Deonar’s official references oscillate between a dump and landfill, its status remains ambiguous, as efforts by the BMC to convert it to a sanitary landfill failed. Moreover, Deonar continues to be ubiquitously referred as a dumping ground in public discourse (henceforth referred here as a dump). In 2015 the BMC had set up a designated scientific landfill at Kanjurmarg with bio-reactor technology which is now facing judicial enquiry by the High Court for violating environmental regulations. Meanwhile, the state government’s hunt for a new 300-acre land parcel in Taloja was met with local resistance (Nayak, 2018).

Introduction

the High Court order following the Deonar fire controversy that it appointed a private consultant to develop a waste treatment plan. Over the past years the Corporation has claimed a reduction in waste generation and increased its investment on waste infrastructures. Despite these measures, waste management continues to be a burning civic issue in the city. Given the high budget for waste management why has Mumbai failed to solve its waste problem? How does the city of Mumbai continue to function irrespective of these serious inadequacies in its waste governance? Mumbai’s waste is handled by its waste workers who are the real foot soldiers of waste infrastructure in the city. Their labour prevents decay, degeneration and insalubrious streets as they incessantly work to clean, maintain and improve the liveability of its residents. They are the lifeline of Mumbai who clean, collect, transport and recycle excess materials. Each arterial street in the space-crunched city oozes out plastics, kitchen waste and an odd collection of used items which are collected and recycled by mostly informal waste collectors. Without the labour of hundreds of informal waste workers waste would be left unattended on the streets. The efforts of waste workers in keeping the city running and the challenges that are entailed in it are obscured by grand visions like a world-class city and Mumbai First. The presence of waste workers is occasionally recognised during election campaigns or when a national policy like the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Rules 20166 mandate their inclusion through urban local bodies. Even then the politicians, officials and planners have failed to provide secure employment and institutional framework to protect the waste workers in the city. In recent years formal state-recognised initiatives like mechanisation of street sweeping, waste transport and treatment have displaced and fragmented their existing informal networks. The waste workers continue to live in deplorable conditions with low wages and even face so-

6

The SWM Rules in India specify how waste should be handled at each stage and it is enforceable by respective municipal bodies. The 2016 Rules released by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change have replaced the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000.

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cial discrimination from residents whose waste they collect daily. They are either seen as heroes or are looked down upon with disdain. While waste work in general is stigmatising, the workers at the dump site are further marginalised and discriminated against. In India, waste workers predominantly come from the low castes and religio-ethnic minorities who have been historically made to bear the stigma associated with waste (Butt, 2019; Gidwani & Reddy, 2011; Gill, 2012; Harriss-White & Rodrigo, 2016; Kornberg, 2019; Kumar, 2020). Despite the legal mandate on the inclusion of waste workers into formal waste networks, Mumbai has not inched close to officially recognising them. The Municipal Corporation bureaucrats assert that the Corporation has successfully decentralised waste management under which local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can support waste worker organisations but various issues hamper the successful implementation of these efforts. They work as self-employed segregators in the streets or at the dump, those working with the municipality or NGOs have temporary work contracts or are treated as volunteers. Deonar lies in the most marginalised and polluted ward in the city that hosts a slaughterhouse, fertiliser plant and a bio-medical waste incinerator. Due to severe environmental pollution the ward has a high incidence of health issues, malnutrition and inhabitable living conditions. Research has shown that the location of waste siting facilities affects only particular communities who are made to face the brunt of pollution and environmental hazards, be it determined by race, class or caste (Bullard, 1990; Newell, 2005). Some communities are forced to live with the adverse impacts of polluting materials such that “they diminish, even forego, their life capacities so that the life capacities of others might be preserved…” (Gidwani & Maringanti, 2016, p. 115). Through everyday practices of contestations, negotiations and resistance, spaces are politically reconfigured to include or exclude certain communities. Therefore, conflicts around dumps are symptomatic of deeper social inequalities and environmental injustices (Nixon, 2011). It is in this context that waste links the built environment of cities with social inequalities. The processes of development and the containment of waste go hand in hand and determine the socio-spatial relations i.e. who can

Introduction

live in the city, who can access better services and who has to live with others’ refuse. Within these transitions the book traces the emergence of such ‘waste’ spaces in Mumbai, in other words, the spaces made unwanted, and answers why certain people, practices and things accrue less value and are made disposable. To address this question, the present book examines the politics surrounding the Deonar dumping site by using waste as a lens to study the everyday lives of waste workers. It investigates how spatial hierarchies and social exclusion are reproduced at the site by studying the contestations and negotiations between actors staking claims. It uses the event of a dump fire to reveal the unequal social relations that produce violent exclusionary spaces in the city. The dump becomes a signifier of risk, refuse and the unwanted which are closely connected with the uneven fabric of Mumbai’s development trajectory. To understand the lifeworlds of the marginalised one has to ask how they perceive life and how they inhabit the city. Dumps are not margins in the sense that they are cut off from the city, in fact they are integral parts of the city connected through flows of waste, materials and practices. The study identifies that waste is not merely ‘matter out of place’, but it is through it that social boundaries are reproduced. Materials are not called as waste because of certain physical attributes but are made waste through a political and social process. The book argues that social hierarchies are reproduced using dominant discourses, restricting access, changing land-use patterns and increasing control over certain actors. These myriad interactions around the dump also throw light on the meaning-making of waste. At a broader level, this work calls for a rigorous socio-geographical analysis of the dump site by establishing strong linkages with space, boundaries and politics.

Waste-free development Urban development in the global South has justified the socio-spatial ordering of the city based on aesthetics. The creation of a modern city

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was rationalised by the removal of shantytowns and hawkers (Anjaria, 2006), and the demolition of slums and spaces which did not fit the moral order of the emerging affluent classes in India (Dupont et al., 2000). The aesthetic ideal generated a binary spatial structuring by delinking spaces of poverty and informality from imaginaries of worldclass infrastructural projects (McFarlane et al., 2012). Such a binary underpins the modern approach to urban life where cities are seen as pinnacles of modernity but prone to being disrupted by its metabolic excretions such as the presence of material excesses, sewage, trash, pollutants etc. Disposal sites were inevitable to serve the modern city as they promised a temporary disappearance of refuse. This provided a sense of order, cleanliness and security brought about by what Hetherington (2004) calls as ‘placing absences’. Such a management of absences is necessary because when cities are oriented towards aesthetic ordering, the accumulation of its discard poses the risk of the city being subsumed in disorder by the very material it produces. In the development discourse, notions of progress, modernity and smartness are projected as aspired attributes that define a contemporary city, based on which desirable and unwanted spaces and materials are defined. The removal of obsolete things is regulated via formal waste management systems which also manage absences, or in other words, the act of excluding, by determining what or who should be discarded. Removing waste is not only an individual moral act of personal cleanliness, but has been an established mechanism to order spaces by moving materials and people perceived as waste from one place to another. Hetherington’s concept helps us to go beyond understanding waste disposal as an act of regulating garbage and compels us to look at the social relations that shape the management of exclusionary practices at Deonar. Large circuits of capital investment kept places like dumps outside capitalist interests and criminalised those who threatened the aesthetic ideal of the city. The presence of rubbish generates havoc if left over certain periods of time, disrupting collective ideas of social order. Waste dumps and development are intrinsically connected through capitalistic logics. Modern-day capitalism has found ways to appropri-

Introduction

ate value from the management of absences. Waste scholars note that capitalism has identified value in waste and wasted spaces. Jason Moore in his conception of a ‘commodity frontier’ (Moore, 2000) argues that modern-day regimes of accumulation seek to identify new ecological frontiers or cheap nature through spatial reorganisation for the appropriation of nature. It is not only urban land that is exploited by capital, but waste has emerged as the new frontier (Schindler & Kanai, 2018) which is produced, appropriated by capital and pushed into circulation. Sites from where “high-calorific waste is sourced (for example, doorsteps, neighbourhood depots and retail outlets) have become a commodity frontier” (p. 836); dumping yards and Waste to Energy (WTE) processing plants are a spatial manifestation of such commodification processes. The political economy of capitalism tends to produce excesses which create the need for circulation and re-appropriation of surplus value; therefore, the new corporate waste regime has identified waste as a renewed market that promotes recovery of value through technological advancement. Capital confronts its crisis i.e. the ‘end of cheap nature’ by identifying new sources of value generation, untapped labour, and zones of ‘negative value’ (Doherty, 2019; Moore, 2000; Tsing, 2003). As resources are created and identified, often with ownership of the state, these spaces are ‘made’ attractive for investments by transforming them. Existing forms and practices of resource frontiers are replaced with the use of technology, automation and infrastructures. Scholars like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, Don Mitchell and Doreen Massey propose a spatial approach to understand transformation in and of cities. Scholars suggest that spatial transformation is central for advanced capitalism as it seeks to mend its ecological destruction and find new places of accumulation through a ‘spatial fix’. Embedded in Marxist critique of social systems, their critique attributes displacement of the urban poor, informality and the formation of slums to be the work of neoliberal ideology and capitalism. Harvey argues that understanding uneven development in cities should incorporate “how local transformations relate to broader trends” (2005, p. 87) by tracing the destructive currents of uneven geographical development produced through neoliberal processes. Brenner and

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Theodore stated that unequal development takes place where there is a “historically specific geographical landscape in which some places, territories, and scales are systematically privileged over and against others as sites for capital accumulation” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002, p. 355). Spatial transformation in India was undertaken with the help of neoliberal market reforms which advocated large projects that required spaces to be available to them through the acquisition of land, clearance of slums, and removal of migrant peasants in rural areas through forceful dispossession. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (2001) use the term splintering urbanism to describe how neoliberal processes fragment the urban landscape into polarised unequal spaces, for example, high-value zones and the periphery, aesthetic gated societies and the slums etc. This can be observed in Mumbai too when the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s were accompanied with the restructuring of space. Uneven spatial transformations took shape in the city through the nexus of state, private companies, urban planners and real estate7 developers. It led to a reassembling and realignment of social relations between the state and people, shifting power relations and fracturing community practices (Banerjee-Guha, 2002). Low-income neighbourhoods were marked for redevelopment (Chatterjee, 2013; Holwitt, 2020), slums were demolished (Bhide, 2017; Doshi, 2013; Weinstein, 2014) and informal workers were displaced from the inner city to build infrastructures. In this process, the social and political fabric of the city was fractured with unequal class-based growth and socio-spatial segregation, while ousting the urban poor to the margins. The creation of margins or toxic sinks, as the above scholars have argued, is a way to facilitate the accumulation of money to a targeted end and is a means to commodify and capitalise on the material and social resources of society. These insights point to the role of capital in exaggerating consumption and also creating spatial toxic sinks which can be later 7

Cities like Mumbai became economically volatile in terms of the housing market (Nijman, 2000; Weinstein, 2014) with property prices shooting up as the city increasingly ‘developed’.

Introduction

manipulated for generating value by the market. This background is helpful to understand the case of the Deonar dump in relation to the increasingly privatised nature of formal waste governance in India. However, critiquing this line of argument, postcolonial and global South scholars argue that capitalism might be just one amongst the many aspects that shape urban space (Robinson & Roy, 2016; Roy, 2009). For example, local patronage politics or middle-class activism can also drive urban change (Ghertner, 2011; Hansen, 2001). They argued that critical urban theories rooted in the Chicago school left out the study of cities and towns which were not in the network of economic prominence. Scholars of Southern urbanism criticise the hierarchical structuring of space and seek to capture other diverse connections, forms of using urban space which can also be disconnected, informal or even off the maps. Since then there has been a surge in the literature across the cities of the global South advocating for epistemological and ontological positioning of ‘Southern urbanisms’ (Bhan, 2019) against Eurocentric explanations of the urban form. According to postcolonial urban scholars, the notion of urban development is centred around global visions seeking a ‘milieu of interventions’ that cannot be reduced to a singular logic like capitalism or postcolonialism. Therefore gentrification of cities, the formation of the margins, be it a slum or a dump site, are not outside the formal structural relations but are constitutive of the very process of urban transformation.8 This perspective creates space for alternative explanations, logics and diverse forms of existence to understand urban transformation. This line of thought emphasises the importance of a situated and context-based study of processes which is relevant to studying waste 8

Roy (2005) theorises that informality is a mode of governance practised by the state which is shaped by local political factors through which power structures get disrupted and maintained at the same time. These studies hint at multiple logics and discourses that complicate Mike Davis’s (2005) linear and apocalyptic perspective of globalisation. Davis associates urban formations with slums as a highly global process but Nijman (2000) argues that globalisation and structural adjustment reforms have had localised, place-based consequences in different nation states.

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in Mumbai. While the waste crisis across the globe appears as an issue of the environment and climate change, waste flows are entangled in complex local, social, environmental and economic dynamics which call for a situated understanding. Gidwani contends that “to a considerable extent, waste defies dialectical integration by capital. It has an irreducible logic of otherness” (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011, p. 20). As waste circulates and flows across geographies and time, it reconfigures and shapes the relations of people and objects. The examples of transnational e-waste (Furniss, 2015; Lepawsky & McNabb, 2010) from the Western countries landing up through sea routes in Cambodia and Vietnam, or hair waste being refurbished as wigs and sold at enormous prices in Hollywood (Tarlo, 2016) hint at the many hidden geographies and temporalities that shape throwaway things as waste or counter-intuitively bring them back into circulation. The ‘spatial fix’ of capital is confronted by infrastructural and political fixes of the everyday practices of the people. Waste disposal sites, a spatial fix by capital regimes, have become the hotbed of conflicts made visible when top-down approaches are imposed in the management of waste disposal without incorporating existing indigenous practices and local knowledge systems. The more-than-economic nature of waste is entangled with socio-cultural categories of race, caste, gender, identity and notions of purity and pollution. In Indian society, waste spills over, transgresses boundaries and refuses to follow neoliberal logic given the situated cultural and social perceptions of waste. Deonar’s waste workers challenge the linear, top-down appropriation of the dump by competing and claiming other vital resources apart from the ones valorised by capital, such as social capital, livelihood and identity.

Dumps as spaces of production Reflections on waste and space have been critical for insights on urban politics. Dumping grounds are entangled in processes that travel beyond being an object of governance. Scholars have placed emphasis on studying niche spaces like Bholakpur (Gidwani & Maringanti, 2016)

Introduction

or Nehru Place (Corwin, 2017) which are ‘hubs’ of recycling activities and sophisticated ecosystems in themselves. Deonar’s social geography urges us to weave in perspectives from both scholars of informality and critical urban theory. Urban scholars have called for a renewed focus on informality which is central to urban politics in the global South (AlSayyad, 2004; Bayat, 2000; Benjamin, 2008; Watson, 2009). Informality is explained as a site of critical analysis (Banks et al., 2020), i.e. it is a process embedded in urban life rather than being in opposition to formal urban structures. Informality should be understood as a wide spectrum of social relations by which different groups claim entitlements from the state and practise differentiated forms of citizenship. Informal relations are not limited to the urban poor but are negotiated by formal and state actors alike. These relations, which cannot be neatly categorised as formal or informal, play a key role in determining how city spaces are designed and experienced. It is between these theoretical debates that the current story of Mumbai’s waste disposal is situated. To explain the contestations at Deonar, it is crucial to consider the local histories and political trajectories but also reflect on the broader inter-linkages with global discourses of development. In this way it highlights the broader connections of the dump with the city and with the larger politics of development-induced displacement in India. A key aspect of taking a dedicated spatial approach is that the dump becomes a metaphor for studying the politics of marginalisation in the city. The struggles and contestations around the dump are located in the production process of space making, i.e. the imagination, construction and experience of everyday life. The production of space extends beyond the physical boundaries in space; its definitions incorporate the abstract realms of meaning-making, livelihoods and displacement. Everyday practices are at the centre of this study; it is within the domain of the everyday that the making of waste and ordering of space take place. The dump and the city are connected intimately through flows of materials, in the form of the old and the new, the rejected and the recyclable, along with situated practices of labour and squatting at the dump. The dump adds value to lives by not just providing essentials

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for the functioning of the everyday but its sociality offers avenues for making political claims for the urban poor. In the public discourse, dump sites are seen as unwanted abject spaces to be kept hidden from the public eye. Like waste, landfills are public secrets (Hawkins, 2003) which no one talks about. City residents see dumps as a threat to the environment and wellbeing. Idies (2020) and Moore (2009) observe that waste dumps are material manifestations of fault lines between the expectations of modernity and the material realities of a hyper-consumption society which result in environmental, social and political conflicts. As a residual category these spaces are seen as a surplus of modernity which refuse to get regulated by the existing technologies and institutions of the state. Gay Hawkins (2003) observes that waste (or for that matter waste dumps too) are perceived as risks because of the fragile relationship between elimination and return. The underlying threat of return constructs dumps as despicable spaces in common parlance. Dumps present a paradox between waste and value: on one hand dumps succeed in providing temporal resting points for concealing waste and preventing disorder but at the same time they are being increasingly transformed into spaces of value generation. Calling for attention to the visibility and temporality of disposal, Idies (2020) argues that imposing notions of circularity at a dump is problematic. Dumps are a residual entity when seen from the framings of circularity which is described as desirable for the economy. A closed circular system is considered as the best solution waste management can provide but a dump, as Idies calls it, is the “conditio sine qua non” (2020, p. 137) of a circular system. A dump has its own lifetime – its birth (identification of the site), life span (receiving waste) and death (closure). The optimism of circular economy envisaging waste flows as closed loop systems is untenable. Even the apparent death of a dump does not necessarily mean all the buried waste can be made to disappear. Contrastingly, dumps are critical spaces that facilitate the containment and leakages of materials into the environment. Leakages and transgressions are unavoidable. Gray-Cosgrove et al. (2015) and Liboiron et al. (2018) show that even if dumped waste materials are relocated

Introduction

from one place to the other, their toxic elements continue to contaminate the environment. The optimism behind circular systems is challenged when dumps fail to contain chemical leakages that pollute the environment. Therefore, dumping sites are not the final destination for making waste out of sight but a facilitator of its return. This perspective should be incorporated in discussions on circular economy which presume that circularity of waste flows can contribute to sustainable development. Waste scholars see such spatial niches as points of urban innovation systems (Lepawsky et al., 2015) and value generation (Gidwani & Maringanti, 2016; Gill, 2012) where various functions are performed and social lives are lived by labouring on repairs, maintenance and rebuilding. The waste infra-economy generates considerable revenue (Gill, 2012; Gregson & Crang, 2015; Lepawsky & Billah, 2011; Rathore, 2019; Schlitz, 2019) and refutes being categorised as a residue of the mainstream formal economy (Gidwani & Maringanti, 2016). At spatial niches like Deonar, the afterlives of materials are invested with value sustained by the labour of marginal migrants, waste pickers, women and children. Kathleen Millar (2008) refers to these forms of work as a “form of living” (p. 9), thereby countering the notion of waste work as merely an economic practice. She argues that the form is both a livelihood and a way of life, which makes possible alternate ways of existence considered unapt by the normative capitalist paradigms. She rightly illuminates the problematic of singular narratives which can be dismantled by non-conventional ways of living. The perception of dump sites and landfills as the margins of the city is rooted in the binary thinking of the city consisting of a centre and an outside. But dump sites in densely populated cities such as Mumbai are located within the precincts of the city, yet are seen as abject places. The term ‘dump’ is used as a metaphor for slums, ghettos or refugee camps where a vocabulary of waste invokes images of dirt, litter and disgust which are attributed to certain population groups. Similarly, singular narratives by municipal governments, bureaucrats, planners and residents frame a dump as a crisis which needs a solution.

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Most landfill sites succeed in keeping waste ‘out of sight and out of mind’ from the waste generators, except during moments of disruption. Landfill disasters such as waste-slides or landfill fires have become frequent with increasing waste quantities in the global South,9 killing waste workers and causing irreversible damage to local ecologies. With the increasing privatisation of waste management services and closing of landfills, the modernisation of the waste infrastructure has exacerbated conflicts with local communities and disrupted the livelihood of waste workers. From landfill disasters to overflowing noxious leaks, such apparent moments of crisis are predominantly addressed through technocratic approaches. Technological strategies are preferred by waste managers who see waste as a scientific and apolitical problem which can be solved by top-down engineered solutions. These technologies remain limited to being imported from the global North.

Waste(d) work Prior to the fire, Deonar was a stable source of income for waste workers. For decades the humongous site has been receiving tonnes of waste. The waste workers residing in the vicinity of the dump believe that the dump has always been a source of survival during their hard times. There was a common saying amongst the workers that one never leaves empty handed from the dump.10 The city produces profuse quantities 9

10

In 2017, a garbage dump collapsed in Colombo (Sri Lanka), killing more than 25 people (Kotelawala, 2017). The Mbeubeuss dump in Senegal, Dakar, is a 175-hectare site that reported multiple incidents of fires in 2016 and 2018 as tensions between waste communities and the government escalated after an upgradation project for a modern waste management system failed. Maputo’s Hulene dump (Mozambique), located in the most impoverished neighbourhood, reported a waste-slide in 2018 killing 16 people (Swingler, 2018). The local mayor was forced to resign and the state had to organise a collective funeral. This is not to suggest that secure conditions were available at Deonar in terms of drawing wage-like salaries, protection from accidents or social security. The

Introduction

of waste which can provide competitive market values to make a living but waste work comes with risks. In fact, the reference to ‘kismet’ at the beginning of this chapter is a direct reflection of the uncertainties experienced by waste workers. There were times when the waste workers found expensive valuables or came back with low-value items. But, what remained ensured across their lifetime was a consistent source of income. Waste workers continue to live in precarity with informal jobs, battling threats to health. Precarity in their working conditions is exemplified through frequent injuries, accidents and unpredictability of earnings. The dump, therefore, is a space of stable precarity, where on one hand, it offered livelihood and income, but on the other people faced anxieties and health risks. Waste work is located at the margins of society. In his book on modernity and globalisation titled Wasted Lives, Zygmund Bauman (2004) notes that global processes of capital flows have unleashed the production of waste which is not just material but also human waste. The state’s withdrawal from welfare, free play of the market economy and a high consumption economy has rendered populations as waste. Contradictory to the idea of globalisation with transnational flows of people and things and promises of employment, capitalism generates redundant lives where a large section of the population are seen as unfit for contributing to the capital world. Bauman contends that modernity needs order, therefore it generates outcasts, i.e. disposable surplus people who are no longer needed in the system, and pushes them into refugee centres, slums, ghettos etc. Use of such binaries produce ‘the other’ by “the crafting, elaboration and imposition of categories that lay the groundwork for determining what is out of place, where and when” (Kamete, 2020, p. 930). The underlying assumption in Bauman’s work is that the wasting of human lives is an inevitable end product of capitalism. However, this assumption is problematic. The excesses of materials and people produced by capital are not redundant, instead waste workers laboured there under toxic and precarious conditions but the dump provided them a means of survival, particularly when the city failed to offer secured employment and affordable housing to its migrants.

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what is important is the active process through which capital renders material – people – as waste but also brings them back into circuits of production through the creation of what Gidwani & Maringanti (2016) refer as an infra-economy. By this the scholars hint towards an economy that is not recognised by the state; it is seen as external and unregulated but at the same time it is “vital to the production of urban space such that it is conducive for capital accumulation” (p. 113). If we extend Bauman’s conception to understanding informality then informal labour can be seen as a residue of formal systems. However, informal labour is not the dead end of capital. Gidwani (2015, 2006) argues that generation of waste and wasted lives is a transformative process which allows capitalism to continue circulation of value necessary for its reproduction. He says waste is dialectical to value, meaning capitalistic economy generates waste to continue commodity consumption but at the same time waste “poses jeopardy to capital’s reproduction” (Gidwani & Maringanti, 2016, p. 115). Spatial niches have come up where informal workers have developed intimate networks of waste reduction and recycling that are affiliated yet distinct from formal waste systems. Waste workers add value to thrown away materials through their labour that extends the life of the commodity and slows down the consumption cycle. Informal recycling economies are significant for “…enabling environmental conditions for social reproduction and second, providing cheap raw materials for reprocessing” (Harriss-White, 2020, p. 240). They are able to transform materials into a resource. Every day, thousands of waste workers harmoniously work together within different stages of the waste stream by identifying, recycling, repairing, and recreating the lives of materials through global value chains (Reddy, 2016; Schlitz, 2020). Unlike Bauman’s conception of agency, the people made redundant by capital employ their acquired skills to navigate local economies to survive and channel new possibilities. The underbelly of the waste system is comprised of recyclers, waste pickers, itinerant buyers and repairers, who sequester scavenged items while working with the market to sell their collections. The contribution of informal sector waste pickers is pivotal in reducing the waste

Introduction

that ends up in landfills while recycling a significant percentage of materials back into the economy through repair and recycling (Corwin, 2017). They also make claims to the dignity of labour and the right to the city. They use their social capital to thrive in the market circuits, ascertaining production of value in the capitalistic economy and at the same time entering into complex arrangements to negotiate their exclusion. Waste workers are not without agency but have resisted, opposed and countered the hegemonic forces of capitalism to survive dispossession. Examination of this dialectical framework by waste scholars will allow this study to unpack the creative amalgamation of the formal–informal domains by the waste workers at Deonar. Waste workers are not always victims of the formal waste chains but they are able to shape and alter its flows. For instance, along similar lines, Fredericks (2014) notes that in Dakar, Senegal, municipal refuse workers protested against the state seeking wage protection which led to one of its largest garbage crisis. Workers staged a revolt by “refusal to be refuse” (Fredericks, 2018, p. 4), fighting citizenship struggles through waste. Demaria and Schindler (2016) observe that in New Delhi waste pickers entered unlikely alliances with the affluent sections of society to oppose the use of a waste incinerator. Their resistance required forging new collaborations which helped them to formally secure their demands for justice and inclusion in the local waste management system. To overcome precariousness of the informal sector, waste workers across the globe have formed unions and co-operatives with the help of NGOs to leverage better bargaining power. Corporate waste consultants, medium and small private enterprises have entered the market to capture the newly identified value in waste and waste(d) spaces. Services generally undertaken by informal neighbourhood pickers are being displaced by private contractors for waste collection and transportation (de Bercegol & Gowda, 2019). Studies have illustrated that social movements in waste worker communities are not limited to isolated issues of employment but are embedded in the larger struggle for citizenship claims; this is particularly true for the global South (Fredericks, 2018; McFarlane, 2019).

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Going beyond binaries The political economy of waste spans across the formal and informal spectrum. Harriss-White (2020) has demonstrated that informality is constitutive of the state’s business model whereby bureaucratic politics and governance practices are designed to deregulate the waste economy. In case of the Zabaleens in Cairo, the state which had tacitly tolerated the traditional waste collectors is now pressurising them to replace their old systems and upgrade to ‘modern’ infrastructures for garbage collection (Fahmi & Sutton, 2006). If the traditional and indigenous waste systems are assumed to be outside the regulated, scientific waste management systems then how have such highly organised structures developed in the recycling economy? Informality plays out in various forms at different stages of waste work but structural inequality is its common denominator. Urban scholars have produced a rich scope of work on informality that complicates the binaries of formal–informal and state regulated–unregulated etc. As discussed in the previous sections, postcolonial urban scholars like Ananya Roy, Aihwa Ong and Jennifer Robinson have argued that informality is not outside the state, but defined, governed and operated through it. For this, the state engenders a porous nature which opens up multiple sites for practices of informality. The tendency to analyse urban life through the compartmentalised lens of formality–informality is problematic as it limits our understanding to seeing informality as transient, temporary and unregulated. Debunking the binaries of state as formal and the informal as outside the state, scholars have questioned the very monolithic definition of the state itself. Responding to the calls for developing ‘conceptual vectors’ (Roy, 2009), global South scholars have used informality as a critical ‘vector’ to analyse the place-based contexts and forms of waste economies and find one that is also applicable beyond the South. In this book, I am concerned with the production of space understood as a relational process which studies the configurations of urban politics at the interface of state-society relations. Urban politics take place by means of the configurations that shape the state-society interaction through the messiness of informality. The state (through

Introduction

its heterogeneous functionaries11 ) produces an assemblage of practices that contribute to the idea of the state. This work is inspired by the Gramscian notion of the hegemonic state which is not limited to being the government but an assemblage of institutions, functionaries and rationales. The state is broadly read as social relations which develop throughout the book. I have used the term state or state-led to indicate a centralised institution of power which is juxtaposed against those being governed. The primary agents that act as state functionaries are a municipal corporation, the Solid Waste Department of the BMC, the High Court of Bombay and state pollution regulators. The task of cleaning the city rests with the urban local body which is the BMC in this case. The Solid Waste Management department has a structured hierarchy of bureaucrats and officers who carry out the task of waste removal, transportation and disposal. As the chapters progresses I delve into micro-actors who are part of the state institution but transgress its formal boundaries and act in informal ways. The informal roles that state agents play carve out the mechanisms of informal governance. Hence, the moments of formality–informality, legality–illegality are relational in the sense that they are constantly shifting in meaning, form and location, allowing for the production of space. Similarly, the terminology of waste workers employed in this book is specific to indicate waste pickers who are at the lowest in the waste economy. The term ragpickers is more commonly used in the public domain in Mumbai which has been retained in direct quotes and statements cited in the book. Samson (2010) illustrates the politics behind using names that include derogatory terms like ‘scavengers’ which reflect the attitudes of academia (and the society). She calls for critical reflection before employing names for different kinds of workers. For example, waste workers are called different local names across the globe, for example, Catadores in Brazil or Zabaleens in Egypt (Samson, 2010, p. 2). While

11

The state is not a single actor but is a system comprised of multiple functionaries, departments, logics, rationalities and interests. Such a broad definition of the state allows to trace its porosity to explain transgressions, leakages and zones of contention that dismantle its rigid definition.

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Samson uses waste picker, which is not necessarily derogatory, I use the term waste worker to refer to those who labour on waste at Deonar. To differentiate from scrap dealers and other waste pickers, they are not municipal waste workers but are informal self-employed workers who collect and segregate discarded materials at the dump. Postcolonial scholars have critically revealed the discursive construction of the term slums that is ubiquitously used to imply dense locations with auto-constructed housing, underserviced infrastructures, poor health indicators and high crime rates. Planning paradigms, politically mediated narratives and bureaucratic artefacts come together to label autoconstructed settlements into a slum, often laden with negative connotations. In Shivaji Nagar, the term bustee is used colloquially by residents who live there but I have used the term slum when linking to broader academic scholarship on housing and, at times, as a shorthand.

Fieldwork at the margins The fieldwork for this book was conducted over 11 months between 2016 and 2017 around the Deonar dump site and in the neighbouring settlements of Shivaji Nagar. The research was designed to situate the politics of waste within the local community by taking into consideration factors like the historical development of the site, the cultural diversity and perceptions of the respondents. My research is ethnographically informed in the pursuit of which I trace the practices, activities and interactions between different actors. I interviewed and observed waste workers, scrap dealers, social workers and other residents of Shivaji Nagar. The communication took place at events organised by the NGOs12 – Apnalaya and Stree Mukti Sanghatana – in private spaces of homes, tea stalls or on the streets. All the interviews except of public figures have been anonymised for safeguarding privacy. 12

There were three NGOs working for waste workers at Deonar. In addition to the above two, the third NGO was called Force. However, I worked closely only with Apnalaya and Stree Mukti Sanghatana for this research.

Introduction

The ethnography – of and at – the margins also informs the contradictory practices of the state through which power relations are propagated. Encounters with representatives of the state explain how the state is perceived and negotiated by the people. Through this ethnographic research I attempt to find an empirical articulation that addresses the heterogeneity of urban practices at the peripheries. My efforts emerge out of still existing fault lines located in the Western scholarship that studies the South through the gaze of concepts produced in the North. The larger question driving the research is based on inequality. I ask how processes of exclusion work in a city whereby certain people, places and communities are marginalised while others continue to enjoy rights and privileges. Finding answers behind these geographies of exclusion is a daunting task for this book project but it continues to shape my research endeavours. The book begins its journey to dislocate singular stories and binaries by locating itself at the most unwanted place in a city, a dumping site. The way waste becomes imbricated in social and political processes of the city emerges through the accounts of its uneven distribution across locations, class, gender, castes and citizenship. It is at these moments of encounter that boundaries are produced in culturally specific contexts during which waste is constituted as unwanted, associating people with metonyms of dirt and filth. Through the book I argue that the periphery, in this case, the dump with its social geography, can act as a site of critical enquiry. Bhan (2016) has rightly offered a broad concept of the periphery which is produced via global socio-political systems, knowledge production and, even in places, within the peripheries. I take inspiration from the approach proposed by Das and Poole (2004) which allows for conversions and diversions by accommodating ‘both/and’ logic (p. 142). Moreover, “being able to navigate the margins of things is a disciplinary rite of passage, reiterated through fieldwork of ‘improper’ objects and in peripheral places” (p. 140). This logic advocates epistemological freedom from the trap of singular categorisations and opens up spaces to accommodate the messy politics of the margins. Investigating the abject places in the city can tell us about possible urban futures.

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I approach the field through a social constructivist field of enquiry that understands reality (people, institutions, events) as part of an ongoing process which is locally situated and not a phenomenon existing in isolation. The nature of the research reflects an interpretative and critical paradigm which explores how people assign meanings to waste, how waste workers perceive their identities, and broadly, how relationships of power are produced and reproduced. The focus is to bring to the forefront the inequalities and dominant practices of the state and the community. Along with the motivation to reveal power inequalities, the book is also a political project to contribute to the “vocabulary of southern urban practice” (Bhan, 2019, p. 640). Traditional critical scholarship offers only homogenous categorisations of studying how urban spaces are shaped. The Western critical perspectives draw from Marxist notions of class struggle to critique neoliberal dispossession (Banerjee-Guha, 2010) but they limit our understanding to universal notions of liberal democracy, sovereignty and social movements. For instance, Manuel Castells’s reflection on urban social movement, which he draws from a historical materialist approach, fails to help explain the realities of global South. Castells (1977) defines urban social movements as only those collective struggles which can lead to social change.13 Political struggles should be able to change existing social structures in order to overthrow power hierarchies in society. Such assumptions tend to be parochial because they only identify political struggles which are collective and ignore other forms of resistance. Moreover, it is assumed that radical change can be only be brought about by overthrowing structures, which may not be the case, as illustrated by Bayat (2010). He shows that quiet forms of resistance can coexist within the larger structures while still opposing them. While there may or may not be visible forms of resistance, the everyday actions of urban inhabitants must be analysed using a broader lens that provides

13

Manuel Castell’s understanding of social movements harps on the idea that that social structures express themselves in urban space, and cities reflect these social structures (see McKeown, 1980).

Introduction

space for capturing diverse practices. Academic scholarship that narrates such singular narratives in the study of power relations tends to compartmentalise struggles over identity and citizenship into legal–illegal, formal–informal forms which are blind to colour, gender, caste, ethnicity etc. Robinson (2002) concurs that narrow categorisations of cities based on Western ideas of globalisation have had an impact in restricting how they are studied; and that these cities have “fallen off the map” (p. 546). They do not fit into the Western neoliberal imagination of the city, neither do they fall into the hierarchy of global cities. These localities are made invisible except for occasional references in the policy and development initiatives. Concepts from the North are imposed over the empirical realities of the South and in this process the South is essentialised. The attempt here is not to stretch the EuroAmerican perspectives onto Southern urbanism but to generate theory from the South in order to decolonise knowledge production. To break through the binaries of the global North and third-world cities we need theoretical engagement from the peripheries. The margins offer fertile sites to study the urban past, present and future, and so do the dumping sites. Efforts to decolonise urban geography must begin from the margins, such as Deonar, which can offer a pluriverse (Yiftachel, 2020) or encounters with assemblages of actors, logics and regimes.

Aim of the book The overarching aim of the book is to capture ‘how’ and ‘why’ stateled transformation of city spaces generates unequal urban experiences and interrogate how the margins of the city are shaped through waste. The book draws from critical spatial theories and political ecology approaches to trace the urbanisation of waste in the city of Mumbai. The book has three primary aims; the first is to analyse how spaces are reconfigured through the discourse of waste and how these practices (re)produce exclusionary spaces. The second aim is to capture the different meanings and imaginations of waste as perceived by various actors. Lastly, the study connects the politics of waste to world-class

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city making and the ongoing nationwide restructuring efforts in waste management. Cities, particularly in the global South, are critical sites where pervasive logics of development, planning, legality, slums, waste and value are contested and defied. The book is not narrowly focused on waste and waste management as such but on how the urban fabric is organised around it. Waste scholars have theorised the environmental, material dimensions, transversal meanings and value struggles of waste while studies in the global South, particularly in India, have focused on specific waste sectors like recycling, informal labour, political economy, caste or its socio-materiality. On the other hand, substantial insights exist on slums, informality and graduated citizenship but none of them have intersected with the co-existence of a dump and its consequences for waste workers as well as slum dwellers. While the social discrimination of the broader category of government-employed sanitation workers in India is well documented, an in-depth study mapping the everyday practices of the waste worker community has not sufficiently addressed the heterogeneity of its political actions. Literature around the working conditions of waste workers and conflicts with private contractors tends to homogenise them. Informality has not been sufficiently addressed in a way that does justice to the diverse forms of sociality and power relations emerging at the apparent death of a landfill. This study goes beyond the spatial precincts of neighbourhood waste processing and reveals the production of exclusionary geographies in Mumbai. Studying the city from the dump can reveal how binaries of clean–dirty, inside–outside, waste–value etc. are produced.

Chapter scheme Chapter 1 lays out the privatisation debates in the neoliberal era of reforms in India, which began in the 1990s and traces subsequent waves of modernisation in the Solid Waste Management department of Mumbai. The second section of the chapter traces the historical past of the Deonar dump to contextualise how it emerged over the decades. Politics at Deonar is intertwined with the history of the land and resettlement of

Introduction

people in its immediate vicinity. Recent literature reveals that the designated slum was actually a planned government resettlement colony. In fact, the entire area where the so-called slum and dump currently stand emerged from the same marshy land. Based on reviews of existing studies on Shivaji Nagar and slums in the global South, the chapter illustrates how political discourses are constructed in a way that transformed Deonar and Shivaji Nagar into the margins of Mumbai. The first section of Chapter 2 delves into different conceptions of waste and reflects on the practice of disposal. The later part of the chapter zooms into the material recovery process by detailing what a regular day at the Deonar dump looked like (prior to the fire). The section begins by contrasting official typologies of discarded materials recognised by the Municipal Corporation with the local terminologies used by waste workers. By doing this, I highlight the nuances of material segregation by the informal waste economy in contrast to the homogenous labels assigned to waste materials by the state. The technical know-how for segregating waste is central to the political economy of waste because it determines the economic valuation and categorisation of the materials as they are fed back into the production process. It explores why some materials are more valuable than others in the informal recycling economy and for whom. Chapter 3 reveals the politicisation of the fire by critically juxtaposing reactions of actors like the middle class vis-à-vis the dump. Waste, as a category, and the dump as a city space become visible only when the metabolic detritus of the entire city threatens to return to private spaces through smoke and toxic particulate materials. It analyses how narratives of blame were constructed in the public domain which found resonance in the High Court. The chapter illustrates how a nexus of actors – the middle class, High Court and the Municipal Corporation – constructed narratives which lay the foundation for blaming and criminalising the waste workers for starting the fire. Public access was banned which predominantly affected the waste workers who were made ‘illegal’ and ‘disposable’. Additional security measures included a barbed wire wall, CCTVs, watch towers and surveillance by security guards. Official narratives of the expected appearance of a dump aligned with the

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neoliberal worlding efforts and middle-class codes of civility in Mumbai seeking to produce a global city. Chapter 4 shifts from the broader city-scale narratives to the localised struggles of the waste workers in the aftermath of the entry ban at Deonar. It traces stories narrated by waste workers around a newly repaired wall built by the state to prevent trespassers. The chapter examines how state-led production of space which seeks to redraw the boundaries of the dump disrupts everyday practices. The cancellation of photo-passes and violence by the security guards reproduces uncertainty around access to the dump. Various moments in the chapter illuminate the slippery boundaries between the formal–informal which form the basis for critiquing spatial theories by critical urban geographers. The state assumes a strong and weak role based on its interest while the practices of the informal community to subvert their displacement open up new avenues for negotiations. Chapter 5 follows on from the previous chapter to zoom into the nuances of collective protests and individual strategies engaged in by waste workers. The aim of this chapter is to examine their strategies for negotiations with actors like the local political leaders, social workers and security guards. Lack of opportunities and quotidian pressures for basic necessities force them into parallel arrangements within the existing system. Over a period of time, when their requests for institutional redressal were actively ignored, they began entering into negotiations through political networks, contacts and bribes to gain access into the dump. More importantly I show how the more powerful members of the waste workers association exclude their own community members by using their privileged positions to access waste. The chapter makes two important arguments, the first being that the political terrain of claiming livelihoods is shaped by the differentiated violence of the everyday, and secondly, the waste workers seek to resume access to the dump for a continuation of their everyday life. The epilogue links the research with larger debates of development in the city. I make three substantive arguments; first that social and material relations in space are entangled in power relations and therefore to understand exclusion we must pay attention to the nexus or coalition

Introduction

of actors that establish dominant discourses in the city. Second, cultural attitudes towards waste including middle-class discourses and caste shape spaces in the city. Critical urban theory should incorporate local histories and everyday practices to explain urban change. I argue that urban transformation of spaces is not limited to neoliberal worlding efforts but these are compounded with cultural politics around disposal that must be foregrounded to understand modern waste disposal systems. With fuzzy boundaries and its transgressions, the dump becomes a crucial interface where the politics of the city unfold through displacement of unwanted populations, association of caste, culture and state violence.

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McFarlane, C. (2019). The politics of urban sanitation. In C. Lemanski (Ed), Citizenship and Infrastructure (pp. 43–63). Routledge. https://doi .org/10.4324/9781351176156-4 McFarlane, C., Desai, R., & Graham, S. (2012). Everyday geographies of sanitation: politics and experience in Mumbai’s informal settlements. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1–26. McKeown, K. (1980). The urban sociology of Manuel Castells: A critical examination of the central concepts. The Economic and Social Review, 11(4), 257–280. Millar, K. M. (2018). Reclaiming the discarded: Life and labor on Rio’s garbage dump. Duke University Press. Moore, J. W. (2000). Sugar and the expansion of the early modern world-economy. Commodity frontiers, ecological transformation, and industrialization. Review, 23(3), 409–433. Moore, S. A. (2009). The excess of modernity: Garbage politics in Oaxaca, Mexico. Professional Geographer, 61(4), 426–437. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/00330120903143375 Nayak, B. B. (2018, October 3). Taloja villagers up in arms over proposed BMC dump . Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ci ty/navi-mumbai/taloja-villagers-up-in-arms-over-proposed-bmcdump/articleshow/66047117.cms Newell, P. (2005). Race, class and the global politics of environmental inequality. Global Environmental Politics, 5(3), 70–94. https://doi.org/ 10.1162/1526380054794835 Nijman, J. (2000). The paradigmatic city. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00189 Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jbsgw Rathore, G. J. S. (2019). Circulating waste, circulating bodies? A critical review of e-waste trade. Geoforum, September, 1–3. https://doi.org/1 0.1016/j.geoforum.2019.12.005 Reddy, R. N. (2016). Reimagining e-waste circuits: calculation, mobile policies, and the move to urban mining in Global South cities. Urban Geography, 37(1), 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1046 710

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Chapter 1 Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

The modernisation of waste infrastructure in Mumbai is situated at the intersection of nation-wide shifts in waste policy and the ongoing urban development reforms in Mumbai. In India, the most debated shift in national waste policy has been towards capital-intensive Waste to Energy (WTE) plants which have had adverse social and spatial implications on informal waste economy. WTE units were introduced as a technological upgradation to substitute fossil fuels for electricity generation while at the same time eliminating waste and generating revenue through the sale of electricity. The new waste energy nexus (de Bercegol & Gowda, 2019) contributed befittingly to the aspirations of making Mumbai a world-class city. Waste technologies developed in the West, as de Bercegol and Gowda (2019) argue, are seen as modern solutions that align with the aesthetic ideals of a modern city. Juxtaposed against this are vibrant informal recycling systems which are commonly seen as traditional, unorganised and chaotic. The collective imagination of an aesthetic global city combined with pro-market developments in the waste sector have shifted social and spatial relations between the state, private players and urban populations. While neoliberal urban reforms are dominant factors, they are not the only processes driving social and spatial marginalisation of communities. Under-representation of social groups due to colonial histories or religio-ethnic biases play a significant role in shaping intersectional experiences of displace-

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ment and social exclusion. Mumbai shares similarities with many Indian cities in the dispossession of informal workers who face double displacement, on one hand through infrastructural development in the city which forces them to take up waste work at their resettled location and, on the other, the privatisation of waste services and the introduction of technology-intensive waste infrastructures subject people to uneven market competition. To resituate the contestations around Deonar it is important to trace the waves of modernisation in waste management policies and the contradictory representations of Deonar prevalent in Mumbai’s planning documents. Doing this will provide the necessary context for analysing the ongoing contentions between actors involved in handling waste work. This chapter is divided into two parts. It begins by providing a background of Deonar’s spatial history by tracing shifts in land use and zoning regulations. By illustrating the intertwined history of Deonar and Shivaji Nagar, it explains how the community of waste workers came to inhabit the area. The second part addresses policy shifts in solid waste management in India by providing a background of waste management reforms post-90s. New forms of contested claims on waste have surfaced with the introduction of decentralisation and public-private partnerships. Value struggles over waste are taking place amongst actors at multiple sites of waste flows in the city. Towards the end of the chapter, the discussion threads together the neoliberal spatial restructuring in Mumbai and examines how the governance of Deonar changed as a result of waste policy reforms. It contextualises the importance of waste management in the process of world-class city making.

History of Deonar: Contradictory representations and development plans Mumbai comprises of seven islands which were formerly traditional fishing villages. The land around the islands was reclaimed from the sea to form the city of Mumbai. The area under the administration of Bri-

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

hanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) spans over 437.71 sq km with the island city covering an area of 68.71 sq km and 369 sq km comprising the suburbs. The remaining land in the city belongs to different institutions like the Mumbai Port Trust, Forest Department etc. which add up to 603.40 sq km of the Greater Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Mumbai, being a coastal city, is comprised of tidal land, mud flats, swamps, mangrove zones and creeks. Most of these have been ‘reclaimed’ or filled to make more land to house the city’s dense population. The city now generates around 6,661 metric tonnes per day (MT/day) of waste but in the period 2016–17 Mumbai officially generated 9,083 MT/day.1 Out of the three existing landfills, Mulund and Deonar are both due for closure, with only Kanjurmarg landfill being functional. At the time of the fire, Deonar, being the largest dump in terms of the area, received approximately 60% of total waste. The land use of Deonar has changed with the passing of government regimes and city development plans. Deonar is situated in the M-East Ward of Mumbai (see Figure 2 below). The current site on which the mountain of garbage stands did not have strict geophysical boundaries to differentiate it from the slums in its vicinity. In 1927 the low-lying marshy land was converted to a garbage dump by the colonial administration when its adjoining areas were still fishing villages. New immigrants kept settling on the marshes mushrooming on the garbage-filled areas. The huge swamp filled with garbage merged into the sea on one side, while extending to the present-day Lotus Colony and Baiganwadi towards the landward side.

1

See reports by Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (2017 and 2019).

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Figure 2: Location of the area of study M-East Ward in Mumbai.

Source: ArcGIS 2009, prepared by author.

In the 2000s, the Corporation started demarcating the dump to safeguard government land from encroachment as the surrounding areas were inhabited through self-built housing settlements. Lisa Björkman (2015) has written extensively about Shivaji Nagar and contends that the dump should be understood in relation to the politicosocial formation of the neighbouring slums. Her analysis reveals that the dumping area comprising the present-day auto-constructed housing were represented as ‘marshy land’ in the first development plan in 1964. A later Report on the Development Plan released by the Planning Committee (BMC) in 1966 had marked the area as a ‘garbage dump’. The report stated that Deonar was a reclamation and the garbage (which was only 1,500 tonnes in the early 1960s) was “intended for reclaiming low-lying lands at Deonar” (Government of Maharashtra 1964 as cited in Björkman, 2015, p. 65).

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

The 1966 Development Plan acknowledged that the dump would soon be closed because the area around it was zoned for industries. From being called a marsh land to a garbage dump to a reclamation shows that the planners imagined different land uses for Deonar. Björkman (2015) records that within two years of the approval of the 1966 Development Plan, a part of the land was leased out for residential purposes to a private electricity provider. Further, the area was populated as a planned rehabilitation colony. However, the planned built form of Shivaji Nagar contradicts its current status as an illegal slum. Over the years its status grew as an ‘illegal’ slum in government records, perceived as an unplanned and encroached zone struggling between legal–illegal, planned–unplanned, and formal–informal status. The area was inhabited in waves, and more land was reclaimed as the inflow of migrants from villages and other parts of the city kept increasing. Urban renewal displaced large populations, pushing them to the peripheries (Banerjee-Guha, 2010). By the 1970s the neighbouring areas soon turned into a residential area as infrastructural projects in the city displaced many who ended up being rehabilitated here (from the Janata colony and more during slum removal initiatives under the Emergency regime of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975). People built temporary structures using fresh soil over old garbage which had filled the swamps over the last decades. They started settling in, renting or building houses with the help of gatekeepers and brokers. The 1990s witnessed neoliberal reforms in India which shaped the planning and governance of cities. A vision document to develop Mumbai into a world-class city (Graham et al., 2013) was developed in 2003 to boost economic growth by upgrading slums, improving infrastructure and services. The Vision Mumbai report (2003), prepared by McKinsey & Company along with the organisation Bombay First, acted as a blueprint for the government of Maharashtra to introduce development projects in the city. The report drew comparisons with cities like Shanghai, Singapore, London and New York and suggested the need to increase the land area in the city by 50–70% by increasing the Floor Space Index (FSI) and relaxing environmental regulations. The recommendations were well received by the policy experts and city planners

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after which coalitions were forged with the real estate market and international funding agencies for land development. Slum land with autoconstructed dwellings came within the purview of rehabilitation and redevelopment schemes so that more land could be freed. Land values and rents in the city soared up and soon the state became “an entrepreneur” (Bhide, 2017, p. 78) to generate FSI. The Mckinsey report encouraged infrastructural projects through public-private partnerships and recommended rehabilitation and resettlement as a solution for the city’s urban poor. Development in Mumbai comprised of social projects such as the redevelopment of slums, sanitation projects (such as the Slum Sanitation Programme, Swachh Mumbai Prabodhan Abhiyan) and water provisions (Sujal Mumbai). The initial precedence given to solid waste management (SWM) in the report was minimal as compared to the emphasis on acquiring more land by eradicating slums. It allowed private real estate developers to use the slum land through extra FSI (development rights) to construct buildings to resettle the slum dwellers and sell the gained built area in the market. This scheme shifted the government’s responsibility of resettling slum dwellers to the market. Björkman argues that such contradictions in the written land-use plan for Deonar indicates that land rights were contested by various actors and multiple claims were made on it. The contradictory representation of the dump as marshy land or a garbage dump facilitated its conversion for the recent manipulation of the No Development Zone (NDZ) in the developmental plan of 2034. The BMC released the new Draft Development Plan 2034 in 2015 but it received strong criticism from the public for errors and faulty projections. The plan was then revised with considerable modifications and called the Revised Draft Development Plan (RDDP) which was notified to the public in 2018. Important modifications in the RDDP include an increase in FSI area, removal of the NDZ and amending the existing rules for construction in the Development Control and Promotion Regulations (DCPR 2034). These changes in the NDZ concern the dumping ground. As per the previous Development Control Regulations (Development Plan 1991) the Deonar dump site was categorised as an NDZ (see Figure 1 in Introduction) where no commercial construction ac-

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

tivity was allowed. Additionally, due to its coastal location it was also protected by a Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) notification. The previous development plan had demarcated two categories of land where no construction activity was allowed, one being the Natural Areas including the CRZ2 and second, the NDZ, which allowed only a limited use of low FSI in those areas. The NDZ as it was defined in the DP 1991 was altered significantly in the new RDDP to make more land available for development. The new DP 2034 states that: As per the Report of RDDP 2034, the 1991 plan had demarcated environmentally sensitive lands such as marshy lands along the creek, hilly areas, agricultural lands, high tide areas and barren lands and some lands under primary activity as No Development Zone (NDZ). NDZ also included potentially developable lands kept in abeyance for future development. (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, 2015, p. 44) The RDDP looks at all such land parcels under NDZ as a means of assisting the city to overcome its land deficits by unlocking more land for affordable housing, public open space, institutional areas and public amenities. It states that “...Erstwhile NDZ lands, those which do not fall in NA [Natural Areas], with unauthorized protected occupants have been termed as Special Development Zone I (SDZ I) land” (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, 2015, p. 41). It is evident that the definition of NDZ has been changed using the DP 2034 to suit the needs of 2

CRZ Notification came into force in 1991 by the Ministry of Environment and Forest which categorises the coastal stretches into three critical zones. This is done to regulate activities in the coastal cities to protect coastal ecosystems, with CRZ I being the most environmentally sensitive area lying between the high tide line and low tide line; CRZ II includes the land area from the high tide line to 500 m on the landward side along the sea front; and CRZ III includes areas between 200 m from the high tide line on the landward side from the seafront and 100 m along tidal influenced water bodies or the width of the creek (whichever is less) and this is the area which is also marked as NDZs for environmental protection purposes.

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development by scrapping the very category of NDZ and marking it as a reserved land for future development.

Policy shifts towards a management approach to waste The central government launched large-scale urban renewal projects like the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission by inviting private market players to provide high-tech solutions for solving infrastructural deficiencies. Institutional change to accommodate the neoliberal reforms had already been initiated in 1992 through legislation that called for a restructuring of governance to incentivise the free market. In 1992, the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA) implemented the decentralisation of power, demarcating the role of urban local bodies (ULBs), in creating a framework for local governments to provide adequate representation. Municipal councils were created for smaller urban areas and municipal corporations for the larger cities so as to ensure strong and active local level institutions. Modifications were made to existing colonial town planning rules to redefine the schemes of development and planning in the country. Within the functional domain of 74th CAA, legislation was passed relating to planning, infrastructure amenities like water, sanitation, health provisions and land-use regulations to encourage improvement of these services. All basic services were brought into the private domain of the market. Decentralisation and democratisation were considered part of the neoliberal political tradition which aimed to achieve accountability, transparency, efficiency and equity in the scenario of the market taking over all sectors (Baud & de Wit, 2008). The opening up of service provisioning to the private sector had variegated impacts particularly in water, electricity and the waste sector of municipal corporations. Neoliberal modes of governance pushed for increased participation of the private sector through ‘risk-minimising’ public-private partnerships (PPPs) which resulted in institutional restructuring of resource allocation to the municipalities and local bodies while shifting public goods and services into the category of commodities (Gandy, 2004;

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

Heynen et al., 2006). Scholars show that neoliberal institutions have rearticulated and reduced modern problems to incentive-based markets leading to ‘de-politicisation-through-economisation’ of social issues (Madra & Adaman, 2014). Focused on engineered solutions, Ong argues that neoliberalism is “a new relationship between government and knowledge through which robust state interventions are cast as non-political technical solutions to a host of social problematizations” (Ong, 2011, p. 21). Increased consumption and the generation of huge amounts of waste in Indian cities placed pressure on existing state capacity to provide a complete range of waste services to residents. In the waste sector, it was only in the late 2000s that disposal-related humongous projects were taken by city corporations which flourished under the flag of public-private partnerships. In Mumbai’s waste sector, decentralisation was the first move by the city’s Corporation to provide opportunities for PPPs to spread. The Corporation’s waste department began by outsourcing smaller projects for segregation, collection and transportation. A report states that “the private sector in India has discovered SWM as a market, which has led to a considerable increase in SWM firms offering the full spectrum of services required” (Dube et al., 2010, p. 7). Privatisation in the waste sector is more recent as compared to other service sectors. Broadly, three waves of privatisation can be identified in SWM in India. The first was in the late 1990s which saw an increase in small private enterprises engaging in the collection and composting of waste; thereafter, multiple policy changes were undertaken to transform to an ‘integrated SWM’ model. The second phase began in the 2000s when big firms and consultants, both national and international, entered the market to experiment with disposal technologies. The third wave can be identified with the current ongoing changes as companies are placing emphasis on the idea of a circular economy where they still remain important service providers for waste disposal from household collection to disposal and recycling stages. These companies sometimes work in partnership with so-called developed countries like Germany, Singapore or Japan, to import waste disposal technologies such as WTE.

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In 1996, an activist filed a landmark Public Interest Litigation (PIL) (Almitra Patel vs Union of India, 2000) that positively resulted in the firstever policy on waste called the Municipal Solid Waste (Management and Handling) Rules (2000) ordered by the Supreme Court. The judgement, amongst other things, allocated the responsibility of waste management to the urban local bodies and urged them to find solutions, suggesting PPP as a possible way forward. In the next years, suffering criticism and pitfalls in adoption by state institutions, the rules were revised to a new notification of Solid Waste Management Rules3 (2016). As part of the National Urban Sanitation Policy, the Government of India released a toolkit on PPP in SWM as a guide for all states and union

3

The Municipal Solid Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000 were published under the notification of the Government of India by the Ministry of Environment and Forests to provide directives to every municipal authority responsible for collection, segregation, storage, transportation, processing and disposal of municipal solid wastes. The Ministry of Environment and Forests revamped the old Solid Waste Management Rules while the MoUD prepared a draft manual on Municipal Solid Waste Management to support cities and towns on planning and implementing a proper Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) system in line with the new SWM Rules. Addressing the issue of waste segregation at the dump site, the new rules mandated the segregation of waste at its source in order to recover, reuse and recycle waste more efficiently. This change in policy also provided a direction for better waste collection as the institutional generators, market associations, event organisers and hotels and restaurants were made directly responsible for segregating and sorting the waste and its management in partnership with local bodies. The MSWM 2016 gave power to the local bodies across India to decide the user fees. Municipal authorities could now levy user fees for collection, disposal and processing waste from bulk generators. As per the rules, the generators were mandated to pay a ‘User Fee’ to the waste collector and a ‘Spot Fine’ for littering and non-segregation, the cost of which could be decided by the local bodies. These new regulations were applicable beyond municipal areas and included urban agglomerations, census towns, notified industrial townships, areas under the control of Indian Railways, airports and special economic zones. The rules also addressed the issues of the integration of waste pickers and kabadiwalas from the informal sector to the formal sector by the state government; however, no significant directives were placed within the regulations.

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

territories to follow. Urban hygiene and sanitation became the central focus for upcoming policy shifts in urban and rural infrastructure planning. The epidemic plague of 1995 in Surat had already stressed the need for a strong sanitation plan for the country. As a result of recommendations from the Ministry of Environment and Forests, the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) in 1999 and the famous Almitra Patel PIL, the national government decided to ease regulations and welcome private players in outsourcing waste management in cities. The initial focus was on metropolitan cities like New Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. The improvement of services in many privatised models was not as expected and has led to labour displacement, refusal to pay user charges by residents, and tensions between private and public agents. Privatisation turned into a tool to attract the private sector rather than to serve the needs of the majority of the population. Social scientists have provided multiple explanations for PPP failure such as bad contracts, little experience, lack of monitoring, collusion amongst contractors, and influencing public officials and corruption. Studies on solid waste management by Baud and Dhanalakshmi (2007) reveal that the government was more willing to work with large-scale private sector companies rather than the small-sector enterprises. Alternately, Chaturvedi and Gidwani (2011) critically argue that the waste sector was not completely public in the first place. Unlike other public services which were distinctly ‘public’, i.e. owned by the state, waste was managed by private informal systems. Waste workers have ‘de-facto’ rights over waste so the formal privatisation process did not involve reallocation from public to private but was a “reallocation of resources from the informal to the formal private sector” (Luthra, 2020, p. 1376). Technological upgradation was preferred as the means to involve private sector participation. The following years experienced a slump in sanitation policies as subsequent governments focused on other welfare programmes. In a highly politicised environment, the Swachh Bharat Mission was launched in October 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to improve hygiene, sanitation and waste management in both urban and rural areas. It aimed to achieve a vision of ‘Clean India’ by 2019 by improving

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sanitation and the quality of life through community involvement at individual and institutional levels, encouraging new technologies. New administrative roles were created; legislation was passed to promote a renewed interest in advocating ideas of cleanliness and hygiene throughout the nation. Though the law holds the municipalities and ULBs responsible for waste management services, in India a varied range of actors have historically been involved in this work. The Indian society based on cultural notions of waste, purity and pollution, entrusted polluting jobs such as picking garbage or cleaning night soil to the lower and marginalised castes. As a result, over the years, community arrangements have emerged to provide waste related services to the middle and elite classes residing in central areas of the city while waste workers inhabit the peripheries. The third wave of reforms in the waste sector in India has introduced a new form of ‘accumulation by displacement’ through the introduction of WTE plants.

Value in waste Waste to Energy promises to solve India’s waste crisis but its foundation rests on problematic grounds, both in terms of policy and implementation. A rich scope of publications advocating WTE is available for the Indian context but they offer uncritical promotion of technology. For a critical analysis it is necessary to go beyond these texts and trace how the political discourse of WTE was shaped in India as it stands today. The knowledge production and articulation of this knowledge rested solely with engineers, economists, planners and bureaucrats. The official narratives undermined impacts on public health and lacked critical thinking which reduced it into a mere technocratic exercise. The ideology of WTE relied on Western imported notions of development and neoliberal models of governance of waste. This is evident in the corpus of scientific publications, policy briefs and environmental status reports generated by scientists and bureaucrats who were supported by the government to conduct research on the feasibility of WTEs in India.

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

Developments in national waste management policy in India can be roughly traced to the period after the 2000s. The first-ever consolidated national policy on waste, MSW Rules 2000, had proposed an integrated approach to SWM which promoted use of scientific technologies in disposing waste. Municipal bodies of large cities started adapting different incineration technologies like Refuse Driven Fuel etc. Calls for integrated SWM were rooted in an emphasis on cost-effective and risk-based management approaches (Sharholy et al., 2008). By the late 2000s, engineers and scientists were framing waste as a threat to India’s development. Research institutes began research on cost-based models and emission reduction models of waste management. Waste disposal was acknowledged as the biggest challenge. Following this, numerous observations were made that called for treating waste as a resource and not as a problem. A solution-based approach was identified, labelled and established by the scientific and planning community that set the precedent for WTE approaches that the country would later adapt. In the case of Mumbai, Bhada and Themelis (2008) carried out an economic analysis to determine if the city could build its first-ever WTE facility. They stated that a WTE plant was not only feasible but necessary for Mumbai as it would reduce air pollution and bring additional revenues through carbon credit trading. The shift to WTE was seen as an upgrade towards more sustainable forms of waste management. Below I discuss a report by the Planning Commission released in 2014 which was fundamental to India’s experiment with WTE. Other parallel developments at this point also include the release of national SWM Rules 2000 which were under review for amendments and later released as SWM Rules 2016. In the same time frame, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy released its guidelines to recover energy from industrial and agricultural waste for inclusion in the 12th Five Year Plan. In the following year (2014) the Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Campaign) was launched with the aim of improving sanitation in infrastructure across the country. With budget allocation from the Swachh Bharat Campaign in the form of financial assistance to PPPs, capital was pumped in to open new channels for

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capitalising on waste and extracting as much value as possible (Tripathy, 2018). The Government of India formally introduced WTE through the Planning Commission which became a basis for building large-scale energy recovery facilities in India. Under this, a special task force led by Dr K Kasturirangan was launched by the Planning Commission of India in 2013 to assess the feasibility of WTE and set up the initial institutional, legal and regulatory framework for its implementation. Country-wide funding support was provided to scientists in premier engineering institutes such as the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, Mumbai (NEERI) for research collaboration to conduct studies on different models for WTE. The task force, in their report Task Force on Waste to Energy (2014), stated the impact of dumping in open areas, scarcity of land, public health and reduction in greenhouse emissions as the rationale behind WTE technology in India. The public health aspect was only nominally acknowledged. Dominant narratives of recognising waste as a resource became ubiquitous with possible ‘sustainable solutions’ to the waste challenge. WTE was justified as a scientific path that could ensure India’s progress from a developing to a developed country. The commentary by scientists and policymakers in the report advocate WTE as a technological fix that can help shape modern world-class cities. References were made to the USA, EU and Malaysia to justify the import of WTE technologies from the West. It is not surprising that the technocratic possibility of managing waste is linked to parochial visions of development coming from the global North. I point towards two contradictory processes seen in the WTE scenario in India that have directly impacted the WTE scene in Mumbai and other cities. The first point is that these government reports highlighted the importance of the informal recycling economy (as an argument of integrated SWM), but at the same time they recommended WTE as the only route to sustainability. As a matter of interpretation this indicates that WTEs and recycling can work in tandem and co-exist without adversely impacting the informal waste economy. This stands in contradiction because WTE and informal waste picking are seen to compete

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

for common waste streams. Complete control over the waste management chain is required for a WTE plant which displaces the informal recyclers and collectors. Therefore, the suggestion for a simultaneous existence of informal workers and WTE is a matter of contention which is visible in contestations around WTEs projects across cities (Demaria & Schindler, 2016; Ribeiro-Broomhead & Tangri, 2021). The inclusion of informal workers is only used as rhetoric to address demands for an integrated system by NGOs and activist organisations. This shows a narrow understanding of sustainability which is focused on implementing capital-intensive projects at the cost of the wellbeing of waste workers. The second zone of contention is that WTEs require stable composition of waste streams, i.e. materials with high calorific value and low moisture content. The composition of waste from Indian households that reaches the dump is mixed, meaning that it contains a mix of compostable kitchen waste, plastics and metals amongst others. There are mixed reviews on the applicability of WTE. Scholars like Annepu (2012) have argued that Indian solid waste is not suitable for incineration whereas others (Nixon et al., 2017; Randhawa et al., 2020) argue otherwise. For example, a brief review of newspaper articles, briefs by think tanks or activists will show that the Okhla (New Delhi) incineration plant is a failed project as it faced severe opposition by neighbouring communities and had to close down because the required amount of high calorific materials could not be supplied. In the task force’s report, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has argued that the plant is a success. However, it was eventually shut down because of protests by residents over pollution and reports of ambiguous land transfers. The discourse around WTE reveals the fragmentation within the expert community which is not acknowledged openly on government platforms while WTE continues to dominate discussions on sustainability in waste management. In a first step towards WTE, the state had asserted complete control not only over waste but also the dump and its practices. At Deonar, closure of the dump was the initial point of conflict between waste workers and the BMC. Ambiguity on re-entry to the dump for waste workers

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continued as the confirmation of a WTE facility came much later in 2016. Meanwhile BMC continued dumping waste but not allowing informal workers access to the dump. Soon after the fire in 2016 a newspaper article by an engineering professor elucidated the benefits of WTE in Mumbai, thereby initiating discussions around WTE as a possible solution to Mumbai’s crisis (Pandit, 2016). The BMC has recruited a private firm, Chennai MSW Pvt Ltd, to construct and operate a WTE plant that will use 600 MT of garbage to generate 25 MW of energy which will be sold in the open market.

Governance of Deonar The privatisation of waste services has led to tensions between the municipal government, the private contractor and the state. In a recent article, Luthra (2020) critiques existing scholarship on privatisation in the waste sector for not analysing the reasons behind specific policy models which were adopted in India. He argues that cost efficiency was the primary logic behind restructuring waste management services but these transitions are not free of conflicts. Luthra points to the gaps in academic accounts of transition to PPPs as they fail to address conflicting and contradictory developments. Here I describe the anxieties around transitions from the informal to formal corporate privatisation of waste disposal at Deonar. Mismanagement of private contracts can be relegated to various reasons like corruption, suspicious land transfers, lack of political will, or complex bureaucratic procedures etc. Undertaking an ambitious project, the BMC on 30 October 2009, assigned the bid for partial closure and maintenance of the existing dump site at Deonar under the Design, Build, Own, Operate and Transfer model to Tatva Global. The duration of the contract was 25 years. However, the Corporation and the company entered into conflicts and controversies leading to termination of the contract. Lease of land was the primary reason for contention between the BMC and the contractor. The state government refused to permit the BMC to lease the land of the dump to the private contractor. Repeated institutional requests

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

and letters to the state government by the BMC failed to solve the deadlock. For whatever reasons, the unwillingness of the state government resulted in loss of capital and interest on the part of the contractor to complete the work at the site. Under these circumstances, the BMC decided to begin the process of terminating the contract. In 2011, the private company alleged that BMC failed to follow the terms of the contract relating to the lease of land and was holding back payments for their services. In return, the BMC blamed the contractor for not constructing a garbage processing plant on the Deonar land as per the terms of the contract when the deal was made in 2009. BMC’s non-response to the company’s claims forced Tatva to appeal to the Court, and in return, the BMC ordered a pre-termination notice to Tatva Global against which it again went to the Court. Finally, the contract ended on 31 January 2016, the very week when the first big fire erupted at the dump. It should be noted that this was also the time the dump was changing hands. The BMC sent out a notice to terminate its contract with Tatva Global Environment on 22 January 2016, five days before the fire. As reported by a newspaper, the contractor charged the BMC for losses that the company had incurred during firefighting, which amounted to Rs 36.91 crore (USD 4.9 million) as dues for early termination of the contract. Since the termination was effective from 31 January, it was the contractor who was responsible for any mishaps at the site, and he was made responsible for the fire (Hindustan Times, 2016). In return, the BMC sued the company by returning a notice and demanding more than Rs 1,000 crore (USD 133.7 million). The BMC took complete control over the dump. In November 2016, the BMC invited tenders from private companies to set up a WTE by 2020 but only one company showed an interest. Repeated calls inviting companies failed to get companies on board. Private consultants cited conservative bidding rules as a hindrance for private interest because the BMC had mandated that the contractor will be responsible for clearing existing waste from the site before setting up the plant. The unknown risks associated with years of dumped garbage prevented a competitive bidding process from taking place. Controversies around the fire were additional factors which deterred private interest. Finally,

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the BMC recruited a private firm, Chennai MSW Pvt Ltd, to construct and operate its ambitious WTE plant. The Municipal Corporation’s ambitions to gain value from waste remain challenged by ambiguity in private partnerships. Mulund, another dump in Mumbai, also followed a similar trajectory of controversies of faulty contracts, and pressures from neighbouring middle-class residents and political parties wanting to close it. During an interview, Mr Kirkire, an SWM officer in the BMC, shared their plans to invite private firms to close down the Mulund dumping ground which would require engaging in the bidding process and selecting the best bidder to provide the service. “How do you plan to close the Mulund dump”? I asked. The officer explained: Bio-mining will be a good option for us; waste will be dug up and removed from that site to another site. It uses micro-organisms to extract organic, recyclable and metals from old waste so the total waste of 6,000 tonnes has to be broken down and transferred to a processing site where the extraction will take place. We will generate gas and energy from it, which will be for the contractor to sell. We will also reclaim some land, around 60 acres from the garbage and make the dump toxic-free and green again. We made a committee of experts from IIT [Indian Institute of Technology] and NEERI [National Environmental Engineering Research Institute] with the key officials from BMC. There is also an expert in public-private partnerships who helps us prepare the proposal. The experts visited the site to conduct tests and determine if bio-mining is feasible. After that, we called for bids and will select the one with the lowest costs. The land will be used for public purposes, since the value of the dump land and its surrounding areas is low we will make some public facilities like parks, utilities, parking garage or a golf course (personal communication, 14 January 2017). Following floating of the tender for Deonar, when no bidder showed interest, revised terms and conditions were provided, making the contract flexible to make it more attractive for the bidder. The BMC has floated the tender for this work thrice each year since 2015. The Corpo-

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

ration also provided compensation for the preparation of proposals to encourage competition during the bidding process and proposed concessions to share the risks involved in the work. Interestingly, such compensation did not interest any bidders until 2018. While case-specific reasons for failure of PPPs remain another topic for future research, I show the disjunctions between the national aspirations of WTEs and the messy entanglements of the local state and private contractors. The conflicting relations between the actors reveals that even though the neoliberal economy attaches value to waste, complex institutional politics challenge its translation into large-scale extraction projects. Along similar lines Swyngedouw (2004) rightly argues that privatisation takes place through ambiguities, non-transparent decision-making and favouring private profits, granting piecemeal improvements. Another challenge to the dominant infrastructural upgradation of waste disposal is conflict between the waste workers and the Municipal Corporation. The vision of a scientific dump as conceived by the experts failed to include the waste workers at different points of waste management. Luthra (2015) with his study on New Delhi succinctly shows that it is not only the waste pickers at the landfills who are affected but the entire chain of informal recyclers is prone to be displaced by proposals to upgrade waste disposal. At Deonar, the contestation between the waste workers and the municipality has not yet consolidated directly around WTE. The official confirmation of starting the WTE facility there came only later in 2016. Till then, it was the closure of the dump which surfaced as the initial point of conflict between waste workers and the BMC. The social cost of the development process falls unevenly on the waste workers and these groups are rendered as unwanted in the city’s waste management. Their institutional under-representation is compounded by social attitudes towards lower castes who work with waste.

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The waste of informal economy Waste management in Indian cities is run by a highly structured informal ‘infraeconomy’ as Gidwani (2015) calls it. Most of the segregation, plastic recycling and repurposing is done by informal workers with minimum governmental support. Waste as discarded material, a res derelict (Cavé, 2014, p. 818) and as a public service continues to meander across ambiguous domains of the economy, for example, Cavé shows that a certain aspect of the waste chain, like sweeping, is categorised as a public good while door-to-door collection of garbage is based on a user fee, making it a private good. Waste and its economy cannot be neatly categorised and works across the spectrum of the formal and informal. Generating money from a public commodity remains contested because of ambiguous ownership and the changing forms of waste. The waste recycling chain is complex with multiple segregation units, recovery mechanisms and multi-sited exchange points amongst actors. Once discarded from households, waste travels from a private to a public domain. Though there are legal provisions which allocate the responsibility for providing waste management services to the ULB, there are no clear boundaries on who has the ownership of waste once it is discarded by a household. This is a reason for conflicting claims to waste once it enters the public stream as informal and formal actors make contested claims over the value of discarded objects. The recycling industry comprises of waste pickers, scrap merchants, itinerant buyers and recycling centres. There is also a category of the kabadiwala (itinerant buyer) along with waste pickers who collects old reusable items from houses and streets, which are then segregated and sold to the scrap dealers (for details see Chapter 2). After further finer classification materials such as newspapers, plastics, glass, containers, metal parts are sold to the recycling units. At each stage materials are sold and resold at increasing values, thereby forming a value chain and demand for recyclables (Agarwal et al., 2005). Experts say that up to 56% material recovery is done by the informal economy in India (Annepu, 2012).

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

The state institutions have increasingly, but only nominally, recognised the contribution of the informal sector. In the policies much is written about the roles and performance of the formal sector, i.e. the private companies, and public participation in decentralised waste management is addressed sufficiently. For instance, the Bye-Laws 2006 by the BMC clearly list the responsibilities and duties of the community and local representatives for an integrated SWM. It was only recently, in 2014 that the BMC Deputy Municipal Commissioner expressed the need to have a revenue model in place to earn income from the informal recycling units. Except for Pune or Indore (Chintan, 2011) where waste workers are included in the formal waste system, most municipal corporations in India have only tacitly allowed informal workers because it reduces the burden on landfills and fills in for BMC’s failure to collect only segregated waste. Ambiguities over ownership of waste remain the reason for multiple claims on materials. Since the 2000s, the contribution of the waste workers stands disrupted alongside the increasing role of the private sector. “There is no legal basis for them to make a lawful claim regarding access to waste since its management is the responsibility of municipal authorities” (Demaria & Schindler, 2016). The waste workers, who work in the neighbourhood and at the dump, are being encouraged by the government to organise themselves and compete for contracts for waste segregation work in housing societies and offices. Recent government efforts towards privatisation at the neighbourhood level have witnessed a formalisation of the informal economy by outsourcing door-to-door segregation services. Implemented in cities like New Delhi and Mumbai, the new contract models require waste workers outside formal systems to form registered organisations who then compete for municipal contracts. In order to decentralise waste management, Mumbai’s Municipal Corporation has constructed 35 dry waste collection centres which employ waste workers through NGOs. Waste workers are recognised at the doorstep collection and segregation stage and not at the landfill stage for cities like Delhi and Nagpur. Differential inclusion between the centre and periphery of the same city space brings out the disparities in the city planning and governance by

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the policymakers. Privatisation of services by the Municipal Corporation has shrunk waste workers’ workspace, reduced earnings and has fragmented the informal sector. As per an audit report released by CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India), only 17% of the states sampled have acknowledged the role of ragpickers (Chintan, 2011). Even if they do, the majority of the states do not show significant intention or interest to regulate waste picking. In contrast to this, policies are increasingly being pushed to include the waste workers under the massive campaign of Swachh Bharat whose influence is limited to paperwork. Their economic role has been incorporated in the recent policy guideline for implementing SWM Rules 2016 which instructs ULBs to “Facilitate formation of Self Help Groups, provide identity cards and thereafter encourage integration in solid waste management including door to door collection of waste” (Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, 2016, p. 170). Through the formalisation process, the waste pickers are not only expected to be organised but also regulated and to learn how to work in controlled environments. The process of formalisation requires them to work in ways which are different from their previous working environment. There is also a strict verification process where they have to submit documents of identity proof and sign written contracts. This is a method to prevent the workers from being labelled as ‘untrustworthy’, ‘unregistered’ and ‘unverified’ which leaves them susceptible to criminalisation. Deonar’s waste workers did not see much improvement in their circumstances irrespective of NGOs actively contending for their rights. The BMC planned to bring in WTE, but it remained quiet on the inclusion of informal waste segregators, collectors and recyclers that form the waste economy at Deonar. Waste workers are seen as a threat to the WTE because they remove recyclables from the waste stream. While WTE seeks to make waste vanish by energy recovery, the waste workers bring the matter back (making waste visible) into the stream of materials. The state of Maharashtra also made provisions for the inclusion of waste pickers in 2002; the Chintan report (2011) traces the official order which makes it compulsory for local governing bodies to aid in

Finding value in Mumbai’s waste: Trends and shifts in waste governance

organising waste workers. The order states that the informal workers must “be organized with the help of the non-government organisations and register a cooperative. The local self-government should take an initiative to get these cooperatives registered. Registered rag pickers organisations should be allotted the work of collecting waste in the city parts/wards with the help of non-government organizations” (Chintan, 2011, p. 10). In 2001 the BMC provided waste workers with ID cards (photopasses) to allow them to work inside the dump. Out of some 1,500 waste pickers switching in and out of the profession at Deonar, around 500 regular workers were issued a ‘photo-pass’ as per the orders from the BMC by three NGOs in the neighbourhood (Apnalaya, Stree Mukti Sanghatana and Force). This system of issuing cards was done to protect and validate the identity of the waste pickers if they are ever questioned or caught by the authorities. Since then, the BMC has failed to successfully incorporate the informal sector into the system. Instead, it outsourced the work of issuing ID cards to an NGO through which it steered clear of any responsibility of recognising them as formal sanitation employees which requires providing a secured employment and minimum wages to the workers. By diverting from its duty of securing the workers to the NGO the BMC clamped down on any opportunity for legitimisation of the informal workers as part of the formal system. The ID then becomes a tool to manage urban population (Sundaram, 2017) to control the flow of people into the dump. The disciplining of the informal sector by the state is analysed in detail in the second part of the book (Chapters 4 & 5) through the state’s practices of controlling the dump. The current chapter reveals the inexperience of the state with large PPP projects and shows that the usual PPP model and logic do not seem to work in the case of Deonar. Formal and informal systems now exist in contradiction with each other, neither of them being able to overtake the other completely. Another aspect of note is that the SWM contracts are immediately renegotiated after being awarded to private agents as governments lack bargaining power and do not effectively negotiate. Bayliss and Kessler contend that “once a firm wins a contract, it can use

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its control over information and analysis, as well as the improbability that government will cancel the concession, to lobby for major changes” (Bayliss & Kessler, 2006, pp. 15–16). The chapter brings out why and how Deonar’s presence is so crucial in the development discourse of the city and how its identity is arbitrarily managed on paper through land-use change. Close links with infrastructural development, regulations by the state and manipulating land-use patterns is established which carves an arena where the politics of waste unfolds. The value in land and waste is increasingly being realised by the state. The middle class contributes to the dominant discourse by insisting on its identity as citizens and the need to cater for a certain vision and lifestyle in the city. These factors shape the fractured ways in which the informal sector is treated by the larger society. The next chapter now elaborates on the routine functioning of the dump and its affiliated recycling practices.

References Agarwal, A., Singhmar, A., Kulshrestha, M., & Mittal, A. K. (2005). Municipal solid waste recycling and associated markets in Delhi, India. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 44(1), 73–90. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.resconrec.2004.09.007 Almitra Patel vs Union of India. (2000). 2SCC 0679 at 686 (Supreme Court of India). Annepu, R. K. (2012). Sustainable solid waste management in India [Columbia University]. http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/wtert /sofos/Sustainable Solid Waste Management in India_Final.pdf Banerjee-Guha, S. (2010). Accumulation by dispossession: Transformative cities in the new global order. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Baud, I., & Dhanalakshmi, R. (2007). Governance in urban environmental management: Comparing accountability and performance in multi-stakeholder arrangements in South India. Cities, 24(2), 133–147. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2006.11.003

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Baud, I. S., & de Wit, J. (2008). New forms of urban governance in India: Shifts, models, networks and contestations. Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135 /9788132101390 Bayliss, K., & Kessler, T. (2006). Can privatisation and commercialisation of public services help achieve the MDGs? An assessment (Working Papers, Issue 22). United Nations Development Programme. https://econp apers.repec.org/RePEc:ipc:wpaper:22 Bhada, P., & Themelis, N. J. (2008, May). Potential for the first WTE facility in Mumbai (Bombay) India. Proceedings of 16th Annual North American Waste-to-Energy Conference. https://doi.org/10.1115/NAWTE C16-1930 Bhide, A. (2017). Colonising the slum changing trajectories of state–market violence in Mumbai. Economic & Political Weekly EPW February, 18(7), 75–82. Björkman, L. (2015). Pipe politics, contested waters: Embedded infrastructures of millennial Mumbai. Duke University Press. Cavé, J. (2014). Who owns urban waste? Appropriation conflicts in emerging countries. Waste Management and Research. https://doi.or g/10.1177/0734242X14540978 Chaturvedi, B., & Gidwani, V. (2011). The right to waste. In W. Ahmed, A. Kundu, & R. Peet (Eds.), India‘s new economic policy - a critical analysis (pp. 125–157). Routledge. Chintan. (2011). Failing the grade: How cities across India are breaking the rules, ignoring the informal recycling sector and unable to make the grade. https://www.chintan-india.org/documents/research_and_re ports/chintan-report-failing-the-grade.pdf de Bercegol, R., & Gowda, S. (2019). A new waste and energy nexus? Rethinking the modernisation of waste services in Delhi. Urban Studies, 56(11), 2297–2314. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018770592 Demaria, F., & Schindler, S. (2016). Contesting urban metabolism: struggles over waste-to-energy in Delhi, India. Antipode, 48(2), 293–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12191 Dube, R., Nandan, M. V., & Gudipudi, M. R. (2010). Sustainable municipal solid waste management in Indian cities – Challenges and opportunities. www.gtz.de

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Gandy, M. (2004). Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city. City, 8(3), 363–379. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360481042 000313509 Gidwani, V. (2015). The work of waste: Inside India’s infra-economy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40(4), 575–595. htt ps://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12094 Graham, S., Desai, R., & McFarlane, C. (2013). Water wars in Mumbai. Public Culture, 25(1 69), 115–141. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-189 0486 Heynen, N., Kaika, M., & Swyngedouw, E. (2006). In the nature of cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism. Routledge. h ttps://doi.org/10.4324/9780203027523 Hindustan Times. (2016, January 30). Maharashtra CM orders probe into Deonar fire. https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai/mahara shtra-cm orders-probe-into-deonar-fire/story-g3tJwMq2hdQ8OnJRjRnjBK.html Luthra, A. (2015). Modernity ’ s garbage: Struggles over municipal solid waste in urban India. Johns Hopkins University. Luthra, A. (2020). Efficiency in waste collection markets: Changing relationships between firms, informal workers, and the state in urban India. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(7), 1375–1394. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20913011 Madra, Y. M., & Adaman, F. (2014). Neoliberal reason and its forms: Depoliticisation through economisation. Antipode, 46(3), 691–716. http s://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12065 Maharashtra Pollution Control Board. (2017). Annual report on implementation of solid waste management rules, 2016. https://www.mpcb.gov.i n/sites/default/files/solid-waste/Annual_Report_MSW_2016_17_12 092017_0.pdf Maharashtra Pollution Control Board. (2019). Annual report on solid waste management rules, 2016. https://www.mpcb.gov.in/sites/default/file s/solid-waste/msw_annual_report_2019_202003082020.pdf McKinsey. (2003). Mumbai first: Vision Mumbai, transforming Mumbai into a world-class city.

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Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India. (2016). Solid waste management rules, 2016. https://cpcb.nic.in/ municipal-solid-waste-rules/ Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India. (2000). Municipal solid wastes (management and handling) rules 2000. Gazette of India. Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India (2016). Swachh Bharat Mission municipal solid waste management manual, 2016. www.swachhbharaturban.gov.in Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. (2015). Report of the Planning Committee on the Draft Development Plan 2034. http://www.udri.org/w p-content/uploads/2017/03/English-Report.pdf/ Nixon, J. D., Dey, P. K., & Ghosh, S. K. (2017). Energy recovery from waste in India: An evidence-based analysis. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments, 21, 23–32. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10 .1016/j.seta.2017.04.003 Ong, A. (2011). Introduction: The art of being global. In A. Ong & A. Roy (Eds.), Worlding cities: Asian experiments and the art of being global (pp. 1–26). Blackwell Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1002/978144 4346800 Pandit, A. (2016, March 6). Fixing Mumbai: Electricity from waste. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/Fixing -Mumbai-Electricity-from-waste/article14308409.ece Randhawa, P., Marshall, F., Kushwaha, P. K., & Desai, P. (2020). Pathways for sustainable urban waste management and reduced environmental health risks in India: Winners, losers, and alternatives to waste to energy in Delhi. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities (Vol. 2, p. 14). https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frsc.2020.00014 Ribeiro-Broomhead, J., & Tangri, N. (2021). Zero waste and economic recovery: The job creation potential of zero waste solutions. https://zerowast eworld.org/wp-content/uploads/Jobs-Report-ENGLISH-2.pdf Sharholy, M., Ahmad, K., Mahmood, G., & Trivedi, R. C. (2008). Municipal solid waste management in Indian cities – A review. Waste Management, 28(2), 459–467. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016 /j.wasman.2007.02.008

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Sundaram, R. (2017). The postcolonial city in India. From planning to information? Techniques & Culture. Revue Semestrielle d’anthropologie Des Techniques, n. 67. Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social power and the urbanization of water: Flows of power (G. Clark, G. Andrew, & C. Peach, Eds.). Oxford University Press. Task Force on Waste to Energy. (2014). Report of the Task Force on Waste to Energy: Vol. I. http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/re p_wte1205.pdf Tripathy, U. (2018). A 21 st century vision on waste to energy in India: A win-win strategy for energy security and Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission). In 8th Regional 3R Forum in Asia and the Pacific.

Chapter 2 Waste in the city Mumbai sends everything to the khadi [dump]. We do not pick faaltu kachra [useless waste] at Deonar, it is only saaf kachra [clean waste] that we collect. (Arjina, waste worker)

Everyday acts of waste disposal are organised around identifying, classifying, categorising and displacing materials. Disposal is a socio-spatial act that requires social interaction with one’s surroundings. It incorporates the construction of meanings about materials and spaces. The decision about what can be disposed and where is a political one which employs constructing boundaries and defining thresholds. Gille (2007) describes everyday situations through which regular waste is generated. An object is labelled as waste when it is used up or broken. Some objects are considered to be waste because they fail to fulfil the human need for which they were produced, for example, defective products. Or, objects might be in a functional condition but people do not find utility in them, either they are out of fashion or have lost their aesthetic appeal. But Gille argues that these are very simplistic ways of categorising things as waste. Objects can be treated differently across cultures, time and space. Different cultural norms have been established to define the right place for things that get defined as waste. Society employs cultural attributes associated with the category of waste to label certain spaces and people as unwanted. In order to capture the many meanings of the

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term, Gille calls for understanding waste as a liminal object, i.e. a thing which is always in a state of transition without a singular path to finality. The concept of liminality is useful for a socio-spatial understanding of waste because it allows one to map the processes, spaces and things that are in the making. The idea of disposing or discarding emanates from a binary thinking between waste and value which confirms that disposing of the unwanted can help restore order. By disposing of what does not hold utility we reaffirm the value of whatever remains with us, and, in the process, as human beings we reassert our control over our surroundings. The act of discarding what is old and making space for new consumption is portrayed as progress. Disposal should be understood beyond being a routinised act of throwing objects in a dustbin. Hetherington (2004), critiquing binary and rudimentary categorisation of materials, argues that disposal is an act of placing absences (of things that threaten order around us). He warns that waste and disposal are not the same: disposal is how a society accounts for their acts of excluding what it does not need, not just things but people and meanings. Waste in a material sense has the effect of leaving a trace of its absence even when it is discarded. Gregson (2011) in her work on ship-breaking provides interesting insights which argue for locating the acts of disposal in material politics. Taking a socio-material approach she says, the process of discarding and demolishing takes place through corporeal experiences through which a “reconfiguration of past materialisations takes place in the present day” (Gregson, 2011, p. 141). The scope of work emerging from a socio-material perspective has illuminated how infrastructures like conduits, materials, bodies, and practices of assembly, repair, or demolition can help understand the many lives of waste materials. Both cultural and socio-material scholarly accounts provoke us to critically look at the assumed categories of waste and study how these categories are constructed and by whom. In order to go beyond the elementary labels of waste assigned to materials, it is important to trace the political and economic exchanges that shape its afterlives. This chapter is inspired by the political economy of the informal recycling sector but

Waste in the city

relies on socio-political aspects to address the situated politics behind the classification and categorisation of waste materials at Deonar. This descriptive chapter draws on empirical insights on the process of disposal from the perspective of informal waste workers at Mumbai’s Deonar dumping ground. It relies on data gathered during conversations with waste workers, scrap dealers, small traders and bustee residents in 2016–17 to sketch a picture of the functioning of the dump. By reconstructing a regular working day in the lives of the waste workers, the first section elaborates how uneven waste generation (and consumption) in the city creates struggles at the dump. Referring to the political economy of recycling, I show the contrast between the official categories of waste and the many sub-categories used by the informal economy. The chapter argues that the classification of waste by the informal economy complicates the neat official categorisation of the formal sector which shapes the politics around waste disposal. This is followed by the second section that traces indigenous waste segregation techniques of identifying, sorting and collecting materials. In an attempt to map various encounters with the city’s waste, the chapter throws light on how actors decide which materials are of value, for whom and at what times. It investigates the meanings of waste as it is transformed into a higher-value commodity during informal recycling processes.

Mumbai’s waste network In the period 2016–17 when the fieldwork for this study was underway, Mumbai1 was generating 9,083 metric tonnes per day (MT/day) (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, 2017). Deonar officially received waste between 3,200-4,500 MT/day. At the time, Mulund and Deonar were due for closure; Mulund officially stopped receiving waste in 2018 but the closure operations remain unfinished to date. As of 2021,

1

The city is divided into 24 wards for administrative purposes.

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Deonar officially receives 2,000 MT/day of waste (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, 2021) which has reduced since 2016 after the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation mandated segregation of waste from residential households. There are severe inconsistencies in the official waste generation data provided by the BMC across different reports. During the fieldwork, BMC engineers, civil society activists and waste workers confirmed (off the record) that the amount of waste Deonar received was much higher than the officially quoted figures. Figure 3 below is a schematic list of the important actors in the waste chain. The figure contours the broad stages of waste disposal from collection of waste to its journey to the dump and beyond. Materials rendered waste have to pass through multiple spaces comprising of numerous informal intermediaries and actors in the chain.

Figure 3: A generic schematic diagram of the waste chain in Mumbai.

Source: Prepared by the author.

Waste in the city

The key generators in the waste chain are households and bulk generators like hotels, residential colonies, institutions and commercial markets. In India the urban local bodies are mandated to provide waste management services to keep the city clean, hence the BMC, which is the Municipal Corporation of Great Mumbai, is responsible for the collection, transport, disposal and treatment of waste in the city. I use the term waste only as a schematic starting point for tracing the materials discarded by households. There are different arrangements for the collection and disposal of household rubbish in Mumbai which are discussed below.

1.

Collection – private to public domain

Collection of waste in Mumbai takes place in the early hours of the day. The process begins by the collection of garbage bags from households and public spaces by the BMC workers. The household waste can be collected either from doorsteps of individual houses, i.e. within the premises of residential societies, or from public spaces (usually from buildings). The sanitation workers,2 as they are called, visit residential localities, commercial areas and local markets in BMC’s green coloured waste collection vehicle. In 2017 the Corporation experimented with door-to-door garbage collection (Venkatraman, 2017) but for a long time informal workers have filled in the gaps in service provision by the BMC. A well-developed network of informal workers, who operate at

2

Sanitation workers are employed directly or indirectly by the Municipal Corporation. During an interview, an official from BMC’s SWM department (personal communication, 15 September 2016) shared that there were around 30,000 sanitation workers who work with the BMC for the collection of waste and sweeping of the streets. However, around 5,000 of them are considered ‘voluntary’ workers and are paid an honorarium by the local NGOs. They hustle by collecting recyclables on the streets and in community bins. They are not permanent employees and therefore work as informal workers. In Mumbai, a union of the workers called Kachra Vahtuk Shramik Sang has demanded the BMC to make all the sanitation workers permanent employees.

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the neighbourhood level across the city, are paid a nominal fee by households in exchange for door-to-door collection of garbage. The waste pickers earn money by reclaiming valuables from the bags of disposed waste and discard the remaining waste in community bins or collection spots provided by the BMC. Disputes around waste are observed as soon as garbage bags are thrown out from the private spaces of homes into the public domain. The conflicts which took place over ownership of waste became visible during my field visit to a gated community in the M-east ward. I was accompanied by BMC’s Junior Overseer, Mr Talwe, who was demonstrating the efficiency of waste collection in his ward when a group of women waste workers approached him. They requested that he allow them to pick garbage from the residential gated community. The women complained that the drivers of BMC’s compactor trucks would not allow them to touch the garbage thrown from the gated community. Mr Talwe responded by saying that “this is private garbage so you cannot have it; it belongs to the BMC sanitation workers because they collect it from the residential households…” (personal communication, 27 December 2016). Once a household throws waste outside of their private threshold into the public space there are multiple claims over it due to the obscure ownership of waste. Waste pickers collect rubbish from residential societies and open markets through negotiation of territories. They compete with other waste pickers (and BMC’s permanent as well as temporary sanitation workers) to consolidate arrangements with gated communities in order to access their garbage. In the hierarchy of actors, the most banal and dirty tasks are handled by the informal workers. At times, the residential associations do not allow workers to segregate waste on their premises even if they have space to do so due to social taboo. The spatial distancing of thrown away garbage by making it out of sight and out of mind dominates social behaviour around waste management in India. Municipal disposal imbibes the idea of management by making materials present or absent from existing spaces and establishing a make-believe narrative that it is possible to completely eliminate waste materials by spatially shuffling them across spaces.

Waste in the city

Kabadiwala – the neighbourhood waste collectors There are other kinds of buyers called kabadiwalas within the hierarchy of informal waste recycling in the city. The kabadiwala translates as itinerant buyers or small traders who function at the neighbourhood level. They do not collect daily kitchen waste (which is also called wet waste) like the waste workers do but only recyclables. They are present in most of the city’s neighbourhoods. They make weekly rounds to buy rejected, unusable items from households. The households, on the other hand, categorise refuse or old objects (like broken furniture/electronics) based on what can or cannot be sold to the kabadiwalas. The kabadiwala gives money to the households and buys these things which they can further sell to scrap dealers for a profit. Generally, they buy things that can be reused and repaired. They may share similarities with scrap dealers at the dumping ground but differ in dealing with a specialised range and functionality of the objects which are sold to them. This system has been working in tandem with regular waste management systems in India for years. In an increasingly less common barter system the kabadiwalas used to pay money to households in exchange for high-value recyclables or exchange utensils for old clothes. Most consumer items such as computers, parts of mobile phones, refrigerator parts, microwaves, burners, wires and cables are picked up by sanitation workers or kabadiwalas who recycle them in different ways. More and more recyclables are mined out by informal workers during the transport of waste to the dump by identifying their value and retrieving items for repair. Apart from the above-mentioned arrangements in the primary stages of waste collection, there are many NGOs who partner with the Municipal Corporation and are active stakeholders in the management of waste. In various parts of Mumbai, particularly big housing complexes and offices, waste collection has been outsourced to women selfhelp groups or waste pickers cooperatives. These groups operate as informal worker collectives which work on short precarious contracts and are not permanently employed either by the BMC or the NGO. They carry out doorstep waste collection and get paid for their services. Vermicomposting, in some cases, is also a service provided by such

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organisations. The waste materials segregated by BMC’s sanitation workers, kabadiwala and local street ragpickers are all sold to scrap dealers across the city. Salvaged materials in the recycling centres are processed for further use in the commodity market. There are complex material streams of specific objects like electronic items which are dismantled and the parts travel to different areas of the city, and at times to the factories outside the state. Plastics, wood, metals, or electronics which still hold a potential value are sold to the recycling companies by the scrap merchants. The remaining unwanted matter is left to decay at the dump which might decompose and flow as leachate (wastewater) into the nearby mangrove sea creeks. The presence of multiple actors and arrangements mentioned above illustrates the complex structure of the waste economy that functions through an ambiguous formal and informal domain.

2.

Journey to the dump

Waste is transported in green BMC vehicles (see Figure 4 below) which carry out around 3,746 trips/day in the city (as per 2016 data obtained from the SWM department, BMC). For the administrative wards which are at a considerable distance from the nearest dump the waste is first collected temporarily at intermediary transfer stations officially called Refuse Transfer Stations. Mumbai has four such stations located in Mahalakshmi (capacity of 900 MT/day), Versova (315 MT/day), Gorai (450 MT/day) and Kurla (700 MT/day). There are special vehicles for dry waste collection which take the waste to dry waste collection centres where NGOs or waste picker collectives are officially assigned the task of eliminating the dry waste. The vehicles which are owned by BMC and/or private contractors are taken to the dump by drivers. The drivers can be direct employees of the BMC when the vehicles are also owned by the Corporation, or they can be temporary workers employed by contractors who own the garbage vehicles.

Waste in the city

Figure 4: Showing the green compactor vehicles used by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation for collection of waste in Mumbai. The location in the picture is Shanti Nagar with the Deonar dump in the background.

Source: photograph by author.

A senior municipal engineer at the SWM department confirmed that Deonar received two broad categories of municipal solid waste, i.e. household waste3 which is primarily comprised of kitchen waste, and commercial waste that comes from sources like vegetable markets, supermarkets, street sweeping, commercial establishments and small household industries. In terms of types, the official categories of waste generated in Mumbai are biodegradable food waste, vegetable waste and recyclables, i.e. paper, plastic, metals and glasses, inert matter and 3

The Corporation is trying to encourage residential households to segregate and compost their waste so that only dry waste can be transported and dumped to protect the receiving capacity of the dumping ground.

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debris or silt. The mixed waste is divided into organic/wet and dry which consists of plastics,4 packaging materials, bags, wires, glass, tube lights, synthetic materials, storage boxes, textiles, rubber and wood. Debris from construction sites containing concrete, boulders, metals and rods is also found illegally dumped with household garbage at Deonar. Observing the BMC’s failure to address the containment of the fire at the dump, the Bombay High Court banned further construction in the city to pressurise the BMC into implementing proper disposal for construction debris. The dump earlier received hazardous hospital waste until a biomedical waste incinerator5 was installed by a private company for treating biomedical waste. The incinerator was set up in 2009 based on the BOOT6 model (PPP) with the support of the Municipal Corporation in Annabhau Sathe Nagar which is an informal slum settlement near Shivaji Nagar. BMC engineers, planners and regulators classify waste on the basis of its composition (percentage of compostable/biodegradable, recyclable and other materials in waste by weight), calorific value (lower and higher), moisture content, and C/N (carbon to nitrogen) ratio. Metropolitan cities are advised by state pollution regulatory agencies to carry out a waste characterisation exercise with the help of scientific organisations to adequately assess, manage and plan the implementation of technologies like WTE (windrow composting, Refuse Driven Fuel). Waste scholars have noted that the ratio of components within

4 5

6

The plastics are from packaging for consumer items like electronics, food and water bottles. The incinerator is an addition to the other polluting industries present in M-east ward and has been vehemently opposed by residents of Annabhau Sathe Nagar. Other kinds of waste like industrial, sewerage and wastewater are separately treated by the corporation for which specific regulations exist. The BOOT (Build-Own-Operate-Transfer) is a type of public-private partnership which is being used by governments to build and operate large infrastructures by inviting the private sector to share the costs, risks and management of public service provisioning. A concession period of 15–25 years is given after which it is transferred to the state (public ownership) through a single organisation. Sharing of profit is possible through multiple arrangements.

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the mixed waste characterises what is typically known as urban waste in India. “Low and middle-income countries have a high percentage of organic matter in the urban waste stream, ranging from 40 to 85% of the total” (Hoornweg & Bhada, 2012, p. 17). Waste composition is affected by numerous factors such as the economic status of a society, attitudes, lifestyle choices and cultural practices. The character of waste changes along with the transformation of the economy and the life and culture of the community. The composition of the waste thrown away reveals the cultural attitudes of people evident through a society’s distancing itself from materials considered polluting. For instance, contact with menstrual blood is highly tabooed in India society and most of it is handled by low caste members of the society. Dumps such as Deonar receive huge quantities of non-biodegradable sanitary waste mixed with household waste. Irrespective of scientific evidence of threats from such waste, segregating sanitary waste is neither mandated by the BMC, nor do the households engage in separating or reducing the generation of hazardous sanitary waste. Menstrual waste is rarely discussed in the public domain and consequently there is a severe lack of official data regarding the collection and disposal of menstrual waste in Mumbai. According to data provided by Down to Earth, India produces 12.3 billion disposable sanitary napkins as waste every year (Malaviya, 2019) and yet it lacks dedicated regulations around its disposal. At Deonar, an individual waste worker sifts through 100 kg of sanitary pads on a daily basis (Kotak, 2018) as a result of ambiguous official categorisation of materials and failure in implementing national regulations on hazardous waste disposal.

3.

At the dump

Based on a collection of verbal accounts with the workers I have sketched a typical workflow at the dump though there can be other alternative arrangements for the passage of different materials. On any given day the entrance of the dump is guarded by a security personnel official and overseer (a BMC designation). The weight of the incoming rubbish is recorded via a weighing machine by the monitoring staff

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from the contractor (recruited for treating waste at the dump) and a supervisor from the BMC. Inside the dump the BMC vehicles offload the waste carried from different wards of the city at fixed loops.7 Fresh garbage is compressed with the help of bulldozers driven by private contractors. During this time the waste workers segregate items from the freshly arrived heaps of waste and carry their collections into the peripheries where the makeshift tents and godowns (warehouses) of the scrap dealers are located. From here, the materials identified as valuable for the market are sent to the recycling centres via multiple sellers in the informal chain. At the dumping ground there are two major stages of informal segregation. The initial step includes removal of dry valuable waste from the wet materials. The second step requires classifying them further at the kaatawala (scrap dealer). For the first step, the incoming bags holding the garbage are torn with a sickle-like iron rod and spread out to dry. The workers simultaneously pick each item with the sickle and start dividing it into different heaps. Bhangaar, as the valuable segregated heap of materials is colloquially called, appears like an assortment of recyclables until it is ready to travel to the scrap dealer for further extraction. At this moment, waste transforms into something valuable, the materiality of the garbage acquires or loses value depending on its perceived value by the informal workers. The remaining wet waste is left to get pressed down by bulldozers. All the recyclable materials are packed in gunny bags or discarded large plastics lying around in the dump, and they are transferred to the scrap dealer shops with the help of the same waste vehicles. To make it cost-effective the waste workers collectively contribute to the amount to be paid to the driver. Around 7

Loops are unloading platforms which are numbered and marked by BMC engineers for dumping of garbage. A single loop is typically used for a month for dumping of waste. These numbers are used colloquially by the waste pickers to know the location of garbage trucks unloading. The numbers which have emerged out of a highly technical process are used as locational reference points in daily conversations amongst the informal workers. Knowing the exact location is critical to extracting maximum value from incoming heaps of garbage.

Waste in the city

six to ten waste workers come together to pack their collections, and mark them by tying a piece of cloth of their choice to identify their individual collection. The truck drivers and waste workers mutually agree to pay the government officials and security guards a ‘hafta’ (translates as weekly payment) for allowing them to uninterruptedly pass through the security controls at the entrance. The waste vehicles carry filled bags of plastics and reach the scrap shops (kaata) located on the edge of the bustee. Meanwhile, the group of waste workers who had sent their materials walk their way out to the scrap dealers using shortcuts through the slip roads (alternate routes) that they themselves have created. These slip roads are at times shortcuts to the bustee that has been auto-constructed using a trail of gunny sacks to safely navigate the terrain. Numerous small scrap dealers establishments are lined up in a row outside the dump occupying Road No. 15 on one side and Rafique Nagar on the other. All transactions are carried out in public space where materials are weighed, resegregated, extracted and sold.

Encountering the city at Deonar Waste varies in character, form and quantity depending on the place of generation. It exhibits a class-based attribute in cities as it is based on the socio-economic affiliations of an individual or a household: it is a class-bound flow. Mumbai being a highly gentrified city is spatially segregated with pockets of affluent neighbourhoods surrounded by densely packed slums. The violence of inequality in the city unfolds at the dump in the form of clashes and scuffles over limited resources. A striking observation was that this gentrified socio-spatial distribution of the city is reflected at the dump and manifests in a form of competition in accessing garbage trucks coming from affluent neighbourhoods. The waste from affluent areas is valued more because the waste generated by socio-economically wealthy areas yields higher returns than those generated by squatter settlements. Waste workers shared that it is common

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to find luxury items or expensive food packaging from economically rich neighbourhoods. The composition of waste generated across administrative wards informs us about the social and spatial structure of these areas, as to whether they are industrial, residential or are undergoing construction. The administrative wards feeding the Deonar dump elicit certain spatial characteristics, for example, wards A, B, C lie in the southern part of the city and are considered to have been resided in by socio-economically better-off communities, A and B are highly commercial whereas C and D are predominantly residential. Standing out from these are M/E and M/W wards which show condensed patches of industries like fertiliser factories, refineries and residential areas with both bustees and gated communities. M/E is also the ward hosting the Deonar dump and Shivaji Nagar settlements. According to waste workers I interviewed the waste generated from each ward elicits dominant characteristics. For example, the famous A ward which proudly hosts the Gateway of India (a 20th -century historic monument) is a busy ward with tourism, high numbers of commercial activities and renowned offices and headquarters; but at the same time, there are numerous hotels and food chains to supplement its workforce. So the waste generated in this ward has a mix of food from local shops to five star hotels, plastics discarded by tourists, supermarket refuse, paper and electronic waste from offices etc. Though the wards may show a dominant mix of certain thrown away materials there is a lack of concrete official data on its composition. But for those working at the dump the composition of garbage is all that matters. A waste worker once exclaimed, “The trucks carrying waste from five star hotels are also treated in a five-star way at the dump” (personal communication, 19 September 2016). Claims to the refuse are made by actors including drivers of garbage vehicles, helpers, scrap dealers, ragpickers, security guards and BMC employees who want to extract maximum value from garbage heaps. Interviews with waste workers revealed their detailed knowledge about the strategies of mapping waste inside the dump. Even before the vehicles dumped their load the waste workers knew its composition. Two main strategies are

Waste in the city

used to identify the spatial source of waste (i.e. its ward source) for maximum value recovery. The first one is the ‘visual’ appearance of the waste and the second is through direct information obtained from the drivers of waste vehicles. By merely glimpsing through the material appearance of garbage the waste workers decide whether they should sort through a pile of garbage or not. Some claimed that they could guess the source ward by looking at the mix of garbage it generates. They can map these areas of the city onto the dump by identifying waste from economically richer areas like Colaba, Bandra; and places like hotels which throw out a rich composition of garbage. Here the value of waste is directly representative of the social composition of spaces from where it originates. Its value is enumerated based on its past associations and spatial origin. The categorisation of saleable materials takes place through the visuals of garbage (its appearance, size, colour) that invite particular modes of segregation practices. With a brief skimming through the garbage, the waste workers assess the possible neighbourhood or administrative ward from where it might have been generated. Their profession is dependent on the finer skills of segregation. The waste workers need to, as they rightly said, ‘judge a book by its cover’ for maximising their earnings. The second approach used by them to access the most valuable pile of garbage within the shortest time is by striking deals with drivers of waste vehicles. They work with fixed drivers who share information about the estimated time of incoming garbage vehicles and the location of its unloading. The loops are fixed by the BMC engineers so there are dedicated loops that receive vehicles from the affluent wards. Before bringing in a vehicle, the drivers inform the workers about the exact loop number allotted to them so that the workers can reach there before their colleagues to extract materials of high value. The waste workers pay money to the drivers for sharing this information but at times exchange of information takes place on the basis of trust and goodwill. However, getting access to high-value waste is not straightforward and is entangled in power geometries. Inside the dump, an indigenously adjudicated hierarchy determines who can collect what and where. Not everyone can collect waste from all the incoming trucks

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unless they have contributed to the necessary transaction of networks, information and money. On the lowest rung are individual waste workers who work alone while the other end is occupied by petty entrepreneurs who hire waste workers in small groups of 10–15 persons. Previously working as waste workers, they were able to climb up the hierarchy by political contacts, bribes and business acumen. Waste workers and scrap dealers who are economically well-off or enjoy the political support of the local political parties are able to the compete for the contents of a garbage vehicle so that they have sole access to it. All the recyclables in that vehicle would then belong to them and no one else can segregate items from those heaps. The profit from such waste can go up to $265 (INR 20,000) per vehicle so they further recruit people to sort the rubbish and in this way a highly organised system is set into motion. Influential waste workers have access to multiple vehicles and make arrangements to sort waste by employing others to work for them. Working arrangements mimic hierarchical relationships like those of a contractor hiring labourers to work for them. The chain becomes variegated at this level; those who cannot afford to buy entire vehicles’ waste earn money by working for the powerful waste workers who in turn accumulate more profits when they sell recovered items to a scrap dealer. In some cases, waste workers double as scrap dealers who own small shops. The scrap dealers themselves visit the dump to buy the entire contents of garbage vehicles from certain rich wards and hire waste workers to work for them. Doing this ensures them a constant supply of raw materials and establishes a reliable supply of labour. The hierarchy enables only a handful of waste workers to act as leaders, some of whom are infamous as part of a waste mafia. These powerful gang leaders extract money, often through dadagiri8 (coercion), from waste workers by allowing them to segregate waste from high-value heaps. These multifarious informal arrangements reveal the mobility and elusive boundaries of waste picking and scrap dealing. 8

Dadagiri is a Hindi term for an intimidating, bullying or coercive form of behaviour. This behaviour is exhibited by people who were previously waste pickers and have moved up to being a scrap dealer or by existing powerful workers.

Waste in the city

Apart from exclusive rights over vehicles there is another heap of waste that is treated like an open access commons. It is interesting to know that the waste workers have a term to refer to waste which is available to everyone, it is called ‘faaltu kachra’ which translates into (an oxymoronic) ‘useless waste’, emphasising non-value within the corpus of what is already called waste. In other words, it highlights the presence of valuable materials within the stream which have been labelled as useless/refuse by other social groups, including powerful waste workers. This hierarchy thrives on political affiliation, patronage and power position. Not everyone can make arrangements with the drivers, only those who can offer money or personally know the drivers are the ones to access this waste. Noor, a waste worker who picks recyclables from the common heaps, explained to me: I do not have money to buy an entire truck so I work on faltu kachra which gets me enough for survival. We have contacts with the driver; we pay him for two things: the first is to ensure that only we get access to the entire gaadi [vehicle] and second is to get past the checks by the Corporation at the exit point. The driver cooperates with us and keeps us informed. I, along with four of my friends, pay a total of Rs.500/trip for the entire gaadi and Rs.100/trip for the driver to pay to the security at the gate so that when the gaadi is weighed on exit, the security guard takes care of it. When gaadi comes and exits they have to be weighed for government records; it has to be empty during exit. But when it has our maal (recyclables) the security manipulates the records. The driver keeps us updated. At other instances, we see the vehicle number plates and get to know from which ward is the vehicle coming from. We prepare accordingly and whatever remains after paying to these people is our earnings for the day (personal communication, 30 January 2017). Temporality of access is crucial for accruing maximum profits from the materials and prevents the waste workers from working with decomposing materials that rot over time. Left-over food from hotels and restaurants is preciously valued, as another woman worker, Tamija, mentioned:

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We have to be quick. Hotel waste comes only at night because they dispose of everything after closing the business. These vehicles carrying organic waste leave a trail of dirty water on their way to the dump. They have so much left-over food that all our meals at work are taken care of. The drivers are nice, they let us take as much food as we want (personal communication, 30 January 2017). Waste from hotels, restaurants, jewellers, clothing markets or small industries are the types of waste to be the most coveted. The residues from poorer slums have hardly any claims made on them because they are low in calorific value. Interestingly, the waste workers constructed images of the city through their encounters with waste within the dump. Deonar became a space where they symbolically met residents of the city and visited wards that they perhaps never visited in real life. They make mental images about the lifestyle of residents, their economic status, whether there are hotels or restaurants in those areas. One of the respondents, Rahia, a female waste picker working 12 years at the dump, mentioned how she is intimately acquainted with the lives of these rich people in the city; she says: Trust me I know what they eat, what they wear and what they use at home. We get everything at the dump from clothes, mobile phones, house decorating items [emphasis by respondent]. I even have some expensive bags and utensils which rich women use (personal communication, 3 March 2017). While saying this, she also highlights the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ pointing to the significant inequality between those that live in ‘Bambai’ (indicating the rich southern parts of Mumbai) from those like her who live at the margins. The earnings of the waste workers are dependent on the quality and quantity of valuable waste items collected over limited working hours, so in order to avoid toiling under harsh conditions they strategise their choice of vehicles and materials. The selection of vehicles is based on taking risks, social relations with other actors and their past experiences. It is not always that their speculation yields high-value recy-

Waste in the city

clables, sometimes they earn less and continue working under precarious conditions. These informal arrangements are both fixed and temporary at the same time. The coalitions between actors were dynamic and subject to political networks and social interactions in the everyday life at the bustee. Some waste workers specialised in collecting only certain genres of materials like wood or coconut coir. For instance, I came across Shakuntala who collected ash remnants from Hindu cremation grounds and washed them with chemicals to recover traces of gold that had been donated to the dead. Bhola Jaiswal, on the other hand, had a peculiar preference for collecting recyclables. During an interview he shared that he only collected zips from bags at the dump. On inquiring further, he explained that he was from a higher caste and the zips were less polluting for him than any wet waste like kitchen trash. For the same reason, unlike other waste workers who stored their day’s collections inside their homes, Bhola avoided bringing polluting materials inside his house. The zips were made of metals which he could easily store outside the private sphere of his house. On most days he worked as a freelance construction labourer. Whenever his contract ended he was forced to work at the dump as the family ran short of money for rent and food. Waste is treated as a scarce resource, and the kind of materials the waste workers obtain determine how much money they would earn. Knowledge of sorting and segregation acquired during work governs daily transactions and economic decisions at the dump. These competitive arrangements generate differential experiences for the waste workers where some are more privileged than others, or economically better placed for negotiations. The power hierarchies reproduce spaces of negotiation and struggles to appropriate waste. For the waste workers of Deonar, Mumbai’s waste has significantly changed over the last few years. The waste stream contains less valuables than their earlier generation claimed to find at the dump. The amount of plastics (which can be sold at good prices) had increased but there has been a decline in wood and metal goods. While market prices and inflation has increased, the waste workers complained that they spend greater numbers of working hours to find enough valuables to

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pay for a day’s meal. According to the waste workers two factors had exacerbated the already difficult working conditions; firstly, the degree of segregation had increased at the household level, and secondly, consumption of packaged products had changed the components of the waste stream. The waste that reaches the dumping ground has decreasing amounts of valuables because of waste segregation prior to reaching the dump. The waste that reaches them has already been extracted or ‘mined’ upstream for valuable components. Waste workers shared that their earnings are dependent on whatever has been overlooked or left behind by other waste pickers in the city. They also complained that lately the hotel waste from these areas is being redirected to the Kanjurmarg dumping ground, another scientific landfill where informal segregation is not allowed. For them this highly secured facility burns the waste which is a misuse of materials with which they could have secured a livelihood.

The political economy of recycling The edge of the dump is dotted by scrap dealers, vendors and middlemen who sit there with weighing scales and bundles of recyclables. As one turns at the corner of Road No. 15 in Shivaji Nagar, multiple piles of rubbish lined at the foot of the wall of the dump appear on the left (see Figure 5 below), while on the right one can see the scrap shops filled with heaps of materials strewn around. On a closer look it becomes clear that these heaps are comprised of similar looking assortment9 of a certain material. There are some large godowns for recyclables that act as a temporary resting place for the recyclables during which they are prepared for their value-laden afterlives.

9

I use the term assortment because even if they look similar in colour or quality they have variations in quality. This reflects an initial step in the process of further refining of the materials from each heap, after which it is sent to the big scrap merchants in Mandala. The recycling chains are also located in other parts of the city (like Dharavi) and some in neighbouring states.

Waste in the city

Figure 5: Heaps of recovered materials by waste workers lined in front of scrap shops in Rafique Nagar (II).

Source: photograph by author.

The sale of recyclables from the waste workers to the scrap dealers can take place in two ways based on the level of categorisation done by the waste worker. Either the scrap dealers buy bhangaar or a further segregated assortment of high-value materials. The scrap dealers who buy bhangaar, i.e. mixed waste from the waste pickers, bear higher economic market risks than those who buy bundles of distinctly segregated goods. In the earlier case, the waste workers are paid a fixed rate because the scrap dealer buys a mix of recyclables without knowing what

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its components are. Their estimation of the bhangaar’s value is based on a brief inspection. Once a scrap dealer is satisfied with the bhangaar that a waste worker brings him, he starts buying without always examining its quality. This mix may have proportions of high calorific value recyclables while at times they run into a loss when the quality of collected waste is poor. It all depends on the ratio of recyclables present in the mix, remnants of wet waste or other substances also get carried from the dump in these mixes. During the study I interviewed Munna, a scrap dealer who explained the local economy of recyclable materials. The earnings of the waste pickers who sell finely segregated materials is determined by the current market prices as the scrap dealers pay them a price based on daily market fluctuations. The scrap dealers decide these rates depending on the rates they received from the bigger scrap merchants in Mandala (a huge scrap market of traders and small enterprises in M-east ward). The scale of the scrap shops can vary based on the quantities of materials they can store. Some store the recyclables in their establishment which can be as small as 5 sq m while others may have godowns spread over a 60 sq m area. The classified bundles are accumulated for a few weeks and months to reach a considerable amount so that the costs of transportation get covered. On average a scrap shop can accumulate up to 300–400 kg per day and earn ranging from $80–$265 (INR 6,000–20,000/day). Munna says, “Here in our Shivaji Nagar shops, we collect recyclables over a number of days or weeks. This depends on the cost for vehicles should be covered to send it to Mandala”. He accumulates mostly plastic bhangaar for three to four days. During this time, he gets it further sorted into finer categories by employing more labour at the godown for which he pays $4–$5 per day (INR 300–400/day). He explained that women are paid less because they often came late due to housework and did not lift heavy materials. According to him, men were preferred in the occupation as they can expend more labour. The preference translates into discrimination when it becomes a common practice to recruit more men in working at scrap shops and refuse women seeking work. It highlights the disadvantaged position of women who manage the house-

Waste in the city

hold and simultaneously earn for the family but get paid less. Disadvantaged gender power relations weaken the bargaining power of women in waste picking and as there are more women than men working inside the dump, they face a competitive disadvantage. Munna relies on ten to 15 waste workers for his daily supply. When a waste worker sells a mix of waste Munna would pay him or her according to the market rate. To illustrate an example, Munna buys 10 kg of bhangaar from waste workers at INR 2/kg.10 He employs some workers at his shop who further categorise and refine it, increasing its value. The more refined categories of materials the more money Munna can get from the Mandala trader. So Munna sells these sub-categories at INR 6/kg thereby making a profit of INR 4/kg out of which he also has to pay rent for his shop, provide wages to the workers and pay for the truck to transport it to Mandala. On any normal day, the assortment of bhangaar that Munna receives has a resale value ranging from INR 1–100/kg. Sometimes waste workers who have knowledge about the precise categories of materials required by the market tend to refine the bhangaar themselves. If a waste worker sells sorted plastic to the scrap dealer, the dealer would have to pay more to the waste worker like INR 15/kg and sell to the Mandala trader at INR 16/- and making a profit of only INR 1/kg. Changes in the market rates affect the demand for certain objects as waste workers choose what is more valuable for them. With power differences between petty scrap dealers and waste pickers, trust and reliability are also observed in their exchanges. During hard times the waste workers borrow money from scrap dealers in the form of loans or advanced payments as a social and economic security system. A scrap dealer, Taukeer from Rafique Nagar, mentioned, “if someone who sells us the products asks for money in his or her difficult times we give it like an advance payment without charging any interest rate” (personal communication, 16 December 2016). Most of the scrap dealers have worked as a waste worker at an earlier stage of their lives.

10

$1 corresponds to approximately INR 74 as per December 2021 rates.

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These relations are stable yet volatile, as instances of quibbles and haggling are not uncommon. Another challenge for scrap dealers is storage space in a space-crunched city like Mumbai (see Figure 6 below). The scrap dealers are often harassed by the police who impose fines on the scrap dealers if they see recyclables kept outside on the road or around shops. Munna said “The BMC officials come to fine us. They have a monthly target for extracting fines. Even if they see any minor item kept outside they impose fines. I try to remove everything from the road here (pointing to the street). Imposing a fine is normal, that is their work”.

Figure 6: Scrap dealer’s shop in Rafique Nagar (II).

Source: photograph by author.

At Rafique Nagar, temporary tarpaulin tents have been pulled up by scrap dealers where the selling and buying of materials take place. At the end of the day the make-shift tarpaulins are taken down and the place is left empty.

Waste in the city

The scrap dealers do not directly sell recyclables to larger companies and the items have to pass through middlemen sellers as they are unable to provide a legitimate bill or sufficient quantities of an exclusive category of supplies. The companies which work through the formal trading system are out of reach for those lower in the recycling chain. At Mandala, there are a large number of godowns and small factories with grinding machines. Each category of segregated plastic is then put into the machine to be shredded into smaller pieces. The next step is making these pieces into granules through chemical treatment for which most of the materials are sent to large factories across the city. There are certain specialised materials like paper or certain electronic parts which are even sent to neighbouring states for recycling.

The technical know-how of sight and touch To an outsider the bhangaar may seem like a random collection of things. The mix however comprises of carefully collected items like kaanch (glass), fugga (polythene), metals like iron, copper, alloys, panni (thin plastic bags, usually milk sachets). The plastic bottles are called teri. Other kinds of plastics are also collected which are further categorised as ‘kala’ or ‘kadak’ or ‘paani’ depending on its texture and strength. There are around 100 sub-categories11 that waste workers and scrap dealers know about. Waste workers handle a minimum of 8–20 categories while the petty scrap traders work with 80–90 sub-types. The separation, classification and categorisation of materials is dependent on the hardness, colour and texture of the objects. The informal economy has developed common terminologies for the trade which are commonly used during the daily transactions of waste pickers and the scrap dealers. Transparent plastics, such as water bottles which are commonly called by a popular brand name, Bisleri, have more value than other 11

This number is an estimate based on oral accounts by the respondents with the scrap dealers and waste workers during the period of fieldwork.

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materials. Metals are recovered in indirect ways as metal is often found mixed as alloys whereas pure metals are extracted from items like wires and cables. The profession of waste picking requires sensorial skills to identify the weight, thickness, elasticity and colour of goods. The livelihood of waste pickers and scrap dealers are dependent on this acquired skill of sight, touch and smell, which they learn hands-on from colleagues, friends or parents. By knocking and tapping on the plastic bottles the waste workers use sound to determine the monetary worth of objects. Handy skills are important to decide the price and value of assorted items. The ability to classify materials in the shortest period of time is essential. The less time taken for high quality piles, the higher the amounts and profits. By building a knowledge base and skill set around material categories, the informal waste economy has established itself within the interstices of the formal system that failed to address the gaps in recycling value chains. Categorisation of waste by the state is generic and not as specialised as the informal economy. The nuanced sub-categories of the informal workers depict the complex evolution of a highly organised informal sector. Segregation is a challenge for municipalities due to the social avoidance to segregate waste, weak enforcement of municipal regulations and ill-equipped collection infrastructure. The municipality collects either mixed waste or separate wet and dry waste from the households, but in the end they are all mixed in the BMC garbage12 trucks. Contrastingly, for the informal economy specialised classifications are of primary importance. The informal economy’s art of fine segregation disturbs simplistic official categories defined by the state (dry, wet, bio and non-biodegradable) for managing garbage, making this profession exclusive and at the same time distancing it away from the formal and technical systems of the state. It is interesting to note that the categories for the waste pickers are further nuanced from those broad categories of the Municipal Corporation.

12

Since 2018 the BMC is procuring garbage compactors that have separate compartments for both dry and wet waste.

Waste in the city

Table 1: A broad comparison of categorisation of waste by government and waste pickers Categories of waste by government

Categories of waste by waste pickers

Wet waste – kitchen waste

Geela kachra– kitchen waste

Dry waste – recyclables, paper, metals Organic dry – wood cloth

Paper, Teri (plastic water bottle), kaanch (glass), fugga (polythene), metals like iron, copper, alloys panni (milk or thin plastic bags)

Debris

Lokhand– iron rods, aluminium, raabit – construction materials

Source: compiled by author

During interviews I observed that officials at the ward level and central department of SWM, irrespective of being engineers, were not completely aware of the highly sophisticated classifications of waste by the waste pickers. The disjuncture between the knowledge of the state and the waste workers on the materiality of the waste had enabled informal economies to flourish as municipalities failed to erase garbage from public spaces. In Mumbai, the BMC has only recently started engaging with categories of waste when it decided to invite investment for setting up a Waste to Energy plant. A WTE needs a consistent stream of input materials. Wet waste is not considered optimal for energy recovery and it uses the dry waste which has energy recovering materials. The emerging waste regimes (Gidwani & Corwin, 2017) supported by the corporate capital are now entering the complex and obscure domain of the informal sector. The difference in categorisation indicates the contradictions between the knowledge of waste workers and the knowledge of the state experts. The two realms contradict each other at multiple fronts, revealing a gap between the real value chains of the informal economy and the official categories employed for ‘management’ of waste by the Municipal Corporation. Waste is a constructed category and depends on who is defining it, where and when something is classified as waste.

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Socio-spatial distribution of waste: Caste, class and the city Unlike other infrastructures like water or electricity, waste often carries remnants of its previous user. Waste flows from the private to public domain. Unlike water, which is provided from common sources by the state to the inhabitants through a distribution network, this chapter illustrates how waste flows from private to public in the form of a collection network. This chapter has illustrated that garbage mirrors the socio-spatial arrangements through which the city functions. The characteristics of waste from respective neighbourhoods tell us about the inhabitants and their everyday practices. It reveals the lifestyle and attitude of people and their role in constituting the waste of a city. Waste is heavily dependent on the social and material conditions that shape its social value at certain times and in certain spaces, while some waste materials decompose others change forms and are extracted for value in the different streams they flow in. The circulation of waste and the values people assign to its materiality as shown in each stage of its movement, from the household to the dump, followed by the afterlives it takes at the dump, reveal how different groups attach value to materials in different spaces. The nature of the materials that comprise the waste stream, such as packaging materials and plastics, are not only material manifestations depicting the consumption culture of a city, but these materials also represent the way the city has been socio-spatially structured. It is at sites like dustbins and the dump that the socio-economic relations with waste reveal themselves. The theatrics of the unequal and gentrified growth of Mumbai and struggle over city spaces play out on the terrain of the dump site. For Indian society, cultural perception underlies the material reproduction of what is defined as waste. Cultural politics around dirt and pollution arrange themselves in complicated ways within the political economy of informal recycling. Cultural constructions of what constitutes ‘waste’ complicate its economic constructions by the market. As a cultural construct, waste demonstrates features of intimacy and residues of its past material and social lives by taking on the attributes of its generator the moment it becomes a dis-

Waste in the city

card for its user. The case of Bhola who picks only zips suggests that people find ways to safeguard their caste – based on understanding of waste (based on ideas of purity and pollution of materials). Bhola belonged to a high caste Hindu community in Bihar, which explains his unique choice of recyclable material. Waste work, for him, was by its nature polluting and associated with a low caste. Brahminical notions of purity and pollution are practised by maintaining the purity of one’s caste status manifested via physical avoidance of wet waste. Here practices of pollution and purity converge with the pressures of surviving in the city by visiting the dump. Even though Bhola works at a garbage dump he tries to maintain his ritual purity through the choice of material he picks. The reason he offered for not venturing near the loops where other waste workers access fresh waste was to avoid wet waste which he said could defile him or make him sick. He considers ‘wet’ waste more dangerous and contaminated than ‘dry’. Anthropological literature suggests that wetness is considered more polluting or dangerous because of its past association with its creator. For example, nails, hair, bodily excretions were perceived to have bodily traces and distance was maintained from them (Douglas, 2001). It should be mentioned that caste-based puritypollution practices persist in urban life, for that matter even amongst waste workers. This is also because in contemporary times, caste-based notions on pollution overlap in complex ways with modern concerns for hygiene and sanitation which explain Bhola’s combined fear of sickness and defilement from wet waste. In India, cleaning activities like sweeping streets and manual cleaning of excrement from toilets have been carried out by the lower caste groups like the Dalits or the Untouchables. Untouchability is rooted in ideas of pollution and purity based on the Varna system which divides the Hindu society into four hierarchically arranged orders with the Brahmins being in the top dominating position and the Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra being the lowest; the lowest community of people called the Untouchables were not even considered part of the Varna system. There is a strong cultural and social stigma associated with working with polluting substances such as waste, refuse, excreta etc.

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which is traditionally considered defiling in the caste system. The underlying idea behind waste work is that certain materials are polluting and should be dealt with by someone else lower in the caste hierarchy. Modern waste regimes with their environmental ideologies of reduce and recycle have not been able to dismantle caste relations completely. Caste-based norms and beliefs, even if invisible, find innovative ways to manifest themselves through waste and waste work. The evidence presented here illustrates that cultural manifestations of caste continue to exist within the city and co-exists with the modern recycling economy. In a promising empirical work, Kaveri Gill (2012) observes that the informal recycling economy is aligned along the caste hierarchy and most workers belong to low caste groups. She also found that caste identity is politicised so that certain groups can maintain a monopoly over the market. Traditionally forced into occupational discrimination, the low caste Khatiks in Delhi’s Mundka scrap market have come to dominate the trade and restrict entry of new comers through informal associations (Gill, 2012). As scrap dealers they share a collective feeling of being superior to the people working with bodily fluids, or excreta such as sweepers (Bhangi) or manual scavengers (mehtar, Balmiki). Moving away from a singular case of the social mobility of the lower caste, Thorat (2002) explains that the reason for exploitation of Dalits remains intact because of the continued belief in the sanctity of the caste system in the modern day. People are placed hierarchically along the axis of the waste management chain in India. In the hierarchy of the informal waste network, plastic traders in recycling markets are economically better off than those working as foot soldiers of the system like the waste pickers or sweepers who are mostly Dalits. The existing social hierarchies make it difficult for structural changes to improve working conditions and liberate those communities from oppression and exploitation. It is no coincidence that even in the modern government waste management systems this practice continues and propagates the discrimination of communities. Caste has been integral to sanitation politics in India, which is one of the reasons why open defecation and manual scavenging cannot be explained by determinants like poverty and illiteracy; one has to dig into the existing forms of caste discrimination.

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By simplifying and generalising categories of waste, neoliberal urbanisation standardises consumption and excretion into mere technical categories. Moore rightly says that waste then: …is not interrogated, but rather a given object of municipal management. In this way, waste tends to be construed positively as an unexamined remainder – an object that exists in space – and that is somewhat external to society. As a manageable object, waste is open to technical and, in the case of some governance literature, institutional solutions (Moore, 2012, p.7). The BMC has come up with technical solutions without accounting for informal or indigenous ways in which different groups perceive and deal with garbage. The attempts to contain, avoid, or discard waste using technology only creates a hierarchy of materials but fails to remove it completely; waste still lingers with extended social lives as it continues to both support and pollute the lives of the marginalised who live on it. As Fredericks rightly points out “Garbage disposal requires not just places that are discardable, but also disposable people to accomplish the task” (Fredericks, 2014, p.534). This analysis requires us to go beyond a simple managerial view of waste i.e. waste is interpreted in the eyes of the beholder. This is because things are made/un-made waste through a process of wasting which is a highly political process. Such representations deal with why and how waste is perceived and represented and, how knowledge is produced and how discourses are mobilised to deal with waste. Society tends to put waste in its place to maintain order and Gille acknowledges this by stating that society always has a “cultural, political, and moral inclination to resolve waste’s liminality” (Gille, 2007, p. 34) and what results from this are the struggles around waste. I argue that the liminality of waste creates ambiguity around its claims. It creates a contested terrain, i.e. a tension between its cultural avoidance on one hand and appropriation of its monetary value by the market. Enmeshed across these domains are the informal workers who add value and co-create lifeworlds through their labour. The flows of waste in Mumbai, with its spatial connotations bearing heavily on its afterlives, also reorder

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people and places as it shifts the burden of unwanted materials onto unwanted bodies across geographies. The state, as I will demonstrate in the following chapters, engages in territorialising and controlling the flows of waste at the dump. Official management or altering flows of waste also implies a control over processes, materials and practices, and this has consequences for deciding how the city is organised and planned. To control waste is to control the city’s metabolism. Delving into the politics of waste, this chapter unpacks how materials are politically transformed into categories and governed differently. The perception around waste and its affiliate conceptions are not fixed, it is spatially contingent and is attributed different values by different actors. Therefore, the boundaries of formal and informal are traversed across in ways that makes it problematic to use these categories narrowly. Waste geographies, i.e. the relations between space and waste cannot be seen separately but help explain the dominant logic and forces driving the socio-political networks that are continually urbanising the city landscape. An analysis of waste should incorporate shifts in urban space to examine the social and material relations in space and go beyond taken for granted categories that are called waste.

References Douglas, M. (2001). Purity and danger: An analysis of concept of pollution and taboo. Routledge. Fredericks, R. (2014). Vital infrastructures of trash in Dakar. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 34(3), 532–548. https:/ /doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-2826085 Gidwani, V., & Corwin, J. (2017). Governance of waste. Review of Environment and Development, LII(31), 44–54. Gill, K. (2012). Of poverty and plastic: Scavenging and scrap trading entrepreneurs in India’s urban informal economy. Oxford University press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198060864.001.0001 Gille, Z. (2007). From the cult of waste to the trash heap of history: The politics of waste in socialist and postsocialist Hungary. Indiana University Press.

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Gregson, N. (2011). Performativity, corporeality and the politics of ship disposal. Journal of Cultural Economy, 4(2), 137–156. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/17530350.2011.563067 Hetherington, K. (2004). Secondhandedness: Consumption, disposal, and absent presence. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(1), 157–173. https://doi.org/10.1068/d315t Hoornweg, D., & Bhada, P. (2012). What a waste. A global review of solid waste management. Urban Development Series Knowledge Papers. h ttps://doi.org/10.1111/febs.13058 Kotak, Y. (2018, February 16). 45% Menstrual waste in India disposed of with routine waste, data shows. Hindustan Times. https://www.hin dustantimes.com/mumbai-news/45-menstrual-waste-in-india-dis posed-of-with-routine-waste-data-shows/story-c9VAHWxMsXMr ZWXDcIk7wL.html Malaviya, S. (2019, February 26). The mammoth task of managing menstrual waste in India. Down to Earth. Moore, S. A. (2012). Garbage matters: Concepts in new geographies of waste. Progress in Human Geography, 36(6), 780–799. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0309132512437077 Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. (2017). Environment status report 2016-17. https://portal.mcgm.gov.in/irj/go/km/d ocs/documents/HomePage Data/Quick Links/Eco Housing/ English_ESR201617.pdf Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. (2021). Executive summary of proposed development of 600 TPD waste-to-energy (WTE) project to generate about 4 MW of power at Deonar, Mumbai. https://mpcb.gov.in /sites/default/files/public_hearing/exe_summary/2021-02/exesum maryenglishDeonar15022021.pdf Thorat, S. (2002). Dalit discrimination in the 1990s: Oppression and denial. Economic and Political Weekly, 37(6), 572–578. https://www.epw. in/journal/2002/06/special-articles/oppression-and-denial.html Venkatraman, T. (2017, August 27). Soon, get your garbage picked up at your doorstep if you live in these five Mumbai wards. Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/soon-get-

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your-garbage-picked-up-at-your-doorstep-if-you-live-in-these-fiv e-mumbai-wards/story-6xrPrZ56wlcaCh5jn8ETAI.html

Chapter 3 The middle class and the miscreants

At the dawn of 28 January 2016, the news of a dump fire in Mumbai quickly spread on Twitter when a few residents from the neighbourhood posted pictures of smoke and fog from their high-rises. Overnight, neighbourhoods located as far as 20 km away were enveloped in smoke. Panic struck when people realised that they were breathing toxic smoke from the burning garbage. News channels and political parties raised an alarm and questioned the responsible authorities, i.e. the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the government. Over the next few days, residents living in the immediate neighbourhoods of the dump such as Chembur, Govandi, Mankhurd and Navi Mumbai complained of respiratory difficulties, eye irritation and foul smells as the city recorded shocking levels of air pollution. The Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Fadnavis, addressed the seriousness of the situation in multiple tweets only two days after the fire. He wrote, “BMC Commissioner informs that smoke at Deonar is substantially under control. I’ve asked CP [Commissioner of Police], Mumbai to enquire into the possibility of sabotage” (Fadnavis, 2016). Various political parties in the city cashed in on the public agitation for the upcoming Municipal Corporation elections. The political leader of the opposition questioned the Chief Minister through his tweet, “Fire at Deonar Dumping Ground is causing grave problems to the residents of the area. Immediate action should be taken” (Azmi Asim, 2016). Discussing the reasons that led to the fire at the dump, national and city politicians blamed the poor coordination between the

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municipality and the state government. The Samajwadi Party1 corporator (municipal councillor) from Shivaji Nagar held the BMC officials responsible for failing to install CCTV cameras at the dump even after multiple requests. Shaikh asserted during a newspaper interview “had they listened it would have been easy to identify the culprits behind the mishap…stern action should be taken against the erring civic officials for ignoring the subject that has now become a major issue” (Tiwari, 2016). In the blame game that ensued, the BMC blamed the contractor for failing to set up a waste treatment plant. In return, the contractor blamed the administration for not limiting the amount of waste reaching Deonar, failing to initiate a lease agreement for the waste treatment plant and not making timely payments to the company. Without the lease for use of government land, the private company was unable to set up a processing plant to treat waste at the site. Initial rumours in the neighbourhood alleged that the private contractor had started the fire as he was fighting a legal battle with the corporation. As the state authorities suspected arson, a First Information Report (FIR) against unknown persons was filed by the BMC at the local police station to initiate the hunt for identifying the culprits. This led to the arrest of three minors by the police on suspicion of starting the fire. They were later released as their crime could not be established. Irrespective of the arrests and preventative measures undertaken by the BMC, more fires broke out from trapped methane under the buried waste. The fire on 14 February 2016 was controlled within hours of its ignition, but fresh fires two weeks later brought the city residents and NGOs on the streets to protest again (First Post, 2016). The residents, primarily from the gated communities, came out to protest in big numbers wearing black masks and holding banners, demanding action against the responsible culprits. Newspapers reported that protesters expressed anger and shock over the ‘failure’ of the civic administration in handling the situation,

1

The electoral ward of Shivaji Nagar has been represented by the Samajwadi Party in the BMC elections since 2007. They have held a strong support base amongst the north Indian migrants and Muslim voters who have either migrated or have been resettled in the neighbourhood.

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and demanded the site to be shut down. The state’s pollution regulators, the Pollution Control Board, sent prosecution notices to BMC engineers under the Air (Prevention and Control) Act, 1981 directing them to follow the pollution norms in relation to the dumping ground. The Chief Minister finally announced scientific closure and plans for a WTE plant at Deonar and proposed a new sanitary landfill at Taloja, located outside the precincts of the city. The High Court rebuked the government for encouraging uncontrolled real estate development in the city without assessing its impact on waste generation. It imposed a ban on new constructions thereby directly affecting BMC’s revenues such as assessment tax and premiums for construction rights. Following the ban, the BMC took a number of actions to secure the dump and protect the site from so-called ‘anti-social elements’ as ordered by the court. The above events hint towards a regulatory and institutional gap where the public-private partnership appears to have failed in implementing the necessary waste treatment infrastructure. In the following sections, I elaborate and discuss how civil society activism around pollution exudes class-based politics, and contributes to the circulation of narratives of blame and exclusion of the urban poor. This is followed by a discussion on how the waste pickers were labelled as “miscreants” and criminalised by a nexus of the BMC, High Court and media narratives.

We pay taxes, give us clean air! We pay taxes, as rightful, law-abiding citizens we deserve clean air, it is our fundamental right. Chembur is becoming a dumping ground, anything that is unwanted in the city is brought here (Mr Vallabh Wagde, accountant, personal communication, 17 November 2016). The statement was made by a resident of a gated community in Chembur who was leading the civil society protests. Most of the residents belonged to the neighbouring gated communities who mobilised themselves and organised a public meeting to discuss strategies to approach the state authorities. Even though high consumption and lack of proper

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segregation of waste was at the centre of Mumbai’s waste crisis, the meetings of the affluent classes made no deliberations on reducing or segregating it. A group called the ‘Smoke affected residents forum’2 was constituted to seek respite from not only air pollution from the dump but also from various polluting industries and medical waste incineration plants built in the neighbourhood. Residents called for a protest march to Azad Maidan (a public square in Mumbai where demonstrations take place). A ‘memorandum of failure’ of the authorities was collectively submitted to various ministries and state pollution regulators by the residents. Petitions filed by the civil society representatives primarily targeted the Municipal Corporation for poor governance. With more resources at their disposal, the middle class3 and affluent social groups used material technologies like mobile phones, internet, social media, banners and posters to create pressure on the authorities. The middle-class groups are able to drive the discourse of managing city spaces through access to the media and the higher echelons of the bureaucracy. Leveraging their privileged position, they reproduce a discourse which gets echoed in the legal and administrative wings of the state (Bhan, 2016; Ghertner, 2011). The protests by the civil society revealed an elitist characteristic as middle-class groups of the population were at the forefront of the mo-

2 3

Contrastingly, I did not find any such forum amongst the resettled residents of Shivaji Nagar who regularly suffered from pollution. The emergence of the Indian middle class has been widely debated and studied (Fernandes, 2006; Schindler, 2014). Scholars (Jodhka & Prakash, 2011) have noted that the Indian middle class is a social group comprising privileged elites whose emergence has had an exclusionary impact on the marginal groups. Their class formation is associated with the nurturing of a consumption society and an increase in new economic opportunities in India. Though as a class category the group is extremely heterogeneous they share certain social and cultural capital which is shaped by their material realities. The category of ‘civil’ society is closely related and sometimes equated with the middle class. Many scholars (Chatterjee, 2004) have contested the term but I use it as a broad category which can be distinctly distinguished from the institutions of the market and state.

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bilisation. To assert their demands these residents positioned themselves as ‘deserving’ citizens as they paid taxes and enjoyed access to a range of municipal services. Constructing themselves as rightful citizens established those failing to pay taxes as the ‘other’ – as law-breakers and less deserving of public services provided by the state. Citizenship claims based exclusively on class identity legitimises those in the formal domain while delegitimising those in the unrecognised informal sector. The attempts to reassert class boundaries through narratives of pollution delineate a cultural category of morally deserving citizens, of those with voices while concomitantly designating most of the urban poor as a threat to the city. Such processes of spatial cleansing have become increasingly associated with urban aesthetics and the rise of the new middle class. Scholars like Chakrabarty (1992) and Kaviraj (1997) have illustrated processes of spatial purification as historically present in the form of caste and class segregation in India. While there is nothing structurally new about the emerging middle class (Fernandes, 2004), there are emergent tendencies in the use of discourses for the construction of an exclusive middle-class identity. I interviewed the civil society activist, Mr Rajkumar Sharma, one afternoon at his Chembur residence. Mr Sharma had filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) on the Deonar dump and started an Advanced Locality Management (ALM)4 in his neighbourhood. Commenting on the BMC, he stated: The BMC has created this monster [referring to the dump]. I had filed a PIL a year before the fire. The people living in this area complained of stench, breathing problems and diseases. When the private company took over, we were hopeful that the stench and the situation would get better; it did, but for a short period. We formed a committee and started writing to the corporation, but our complaints fell on deaf ears. For a long time, the BMC ignored the complaints about the stench, after which they proposed to spray ‘odour-suppressing herbal deodor-

4

ALM is a citizen-government partnership programme initiated by the BMC which aims to address urban civic issues through citizen involvement.

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ant’ to curb it. Following this, there were multiple issues of fire which they promised to address by setting up a waste treatment facility. The dump is a threat to the air traffic route, it is a time bomb (personal communication, December 17, 2016). An online forum called Mumbai Pollution was created by Mr Sharma as a platform to mobilise public opinion. The online petition proposed three possible causes for the fires; the first was assigned to waste workers burning garbage as they extracted metals; the second was internal combustion amongst dumped materials; and lastly, wilful burning by the authorities to create space for more garbage. The petition made a demand on behalf of the citizens of Mumbai that the dump should be shifted since it is located close to residential areas, hospitals and schools. Such petitions claim to speak for all the citizens of Mumbai but most of the urban poor do not have the resources to utilise online spaces for redressal. The voices of the privileged and economically welloff social groups dominate civil society narrative in the city. Lamenting the loss of trust in the city’s waste managers, Baliga (2017) reported that “a group of 100 Chembur residents have turned into a band of ‘social cops’ or vigilantes…” [emphasis in original] who informed the nearby schools and hospitals through social media as soon as they spotted smoke emerging from the dump. Garbage fires and their toxicants were not new to the slum dwellers of Shivaji Nagar who have been living with waste frequently leaking into their private spheres. Lack of affordable housing and resettlement projects have forced communities to settle in squalid conditions and conduct life in public spaces. The living conditions of Shivaji Nagar residents failed to attract the attention of the middle classes or the corporation. It is not coincidental that certain communities, who perhaps generate the least amount of waste, tend to get affected the most (Bullard, 1990). A local resident, Dr Himanshu, stated “Deonar has become a business, even the BMC sees gold in garbage. There is the mafia, scrap dealers and the BMC, everyone is doing business. Be it good business or bad business, everyone is motivated to make money” (personal communication, 9 August 2016). Himanshu’s comments reflect the

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narrative of the middle class that disassociates itself from the lower classes working with waste, and the bureaucrats who, in this case, are considered corrupt. The middle class distances itself from waste, both within the boundaries of the home and the city. Ownership of waste is relinquished by the middle class as soon as their refuse has crossed the boundaries of their private domain and becomes public. Waste, for them, should be out of sight because its presence and visibility brings disruptions to their everyday functions. Waste, at this temporal and spatial moment, stands as out of sight and out of mind, perceived at a point of no return. If the metabolic detritus does return, it causes frenzy and anxiety as seen in the case of the fire. In Mumbai it is common for households to discard e-waste or recyclables either through a kabadiwala (neighbourhood itinerant buyer) or domestic help (labourers, maids) who could sell those items or keep it for personal use. The middle class uses informal labour to ensure that they effectively make waste invisible from private spaces. Harriss recognises that the working poor or the subaltern “lack the advantage of protection through regulation by the state of their terms of employment or occupation” (Harriss, 2006, p. 447). Waste helps to maintain the social differences by keeping the working poor in their place by othering them to prevent any transgressions. The middle class makes moral claims to citizenship by advocating a civic culture which is based on the class-based, socio-spatial segregation and imagination of a city. Social attitudes towards garbage offer insights into how the elites reproduce structural boundaries not only through intimate household practices of waste disposal but also by casting their own modernist notions of cleanliness to significantly influence the use of public spaces. The perceptions of the middle class in the form of aesthetics, order or disorder, nuisance and dirt find a way into the terminologies, documents and definitions of the state institutions. The re-emergence of waste in the public and private sphere of the city and the lives of its residents is perceived as a symbol of non-progress and an indicator of state failure (Fredericks, 2014). Efforts by the socio-economically better-off communities, such as playing the social cop, imitating the fire brigade, or spreading

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awareness are carried out to depict themselves as legitimate citizens (Baviskar, 2003). Leela Fernandes (2004) argues along the lines of Doreen Massey that social relations have a spatial form. The liberalising or restructuring of space has not only led to the process of some groups being excluded from certain locations, but it has led to sanitised visions of development which are free from the urban poor, slums, waste workers, street vendors etc. Deonar is actively produced as a marginal space through the material discards of Mumbaikars. These processes get actualised through state and civil society institutions and produce an underclass who are at the margins. She further illustrates that the middle class aligns with the state in urban restructuring leading to gentrification and a kind of spatial purification by domesticating public spaces. Their imagination of a city is one without dumping yards and free from pollution. Their concern with an ordered, hygienic environment comes from anxieties around optics of the ugliness of their own refuse. The everyday practices of these social groups revolve around ‘distancing’ or ‘avoidance’ of garbage that shape their lived experiences of the city. As Baviskar argues, the ‘ugliness of production’ (Baviskar, 2002, para. 12) must be removed from the city, and the active bourgeois middle class in India since the 2000s has resorted to exclusive forms of cultural citizenship generating exclusionary spaces based on their codes of civility and aspirations. Fernandes has aptly referred to this as a ‘politics of forgetting’ which refers to a “political-discursive process in which specific marginalised social groups are rendered invisible within the dominant national political culture” (Fernandes, 2004, p. 2,416). Unlike the waste workers, who due to lack of housing and employment are forced to claim citizenship through waste, the middle class exercises the freedom to expel and distance itself from waste as much as it can and claim rights to do so on the basis of paying taxes to the state. Social scientists have produced a valuable set of literature on the new emerging middle class, but most of them have portrayed the middle class as relatively homogenous. For instance, Partha Chatterjee distinguishes between two citizen groups, one is the ‘political society’ or the urban poor who are governed as subjects, and the ‘civil society’

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which refers to “a small section of culturally equipped citizens” (Chatterjee, 2004) treated not as subjects to be governed but as communities with rights acknowledged by the law. Urban politics, he argues, has been influenced by the civil society who are able to empower themselves by claiming formal means of citizenship (as the ‘citizens’ or ‘public’ for whom the city is meant to exist). While Chatterjee traces the origins of a civil society to colonial modernity and rights-based democratic politics, Fernandes (2004) links the emergence of the social group with the consumer culture of economic liberalisation. The middle class in India, according to Fernandes, asserts its special status through a cultural citizenship deeply embedded in the neoliberal spatial restructuring of cities dominated by globalised visions of living. However, the middle class in India cannot be defined as a homogenous social group bound by strict economic brackets and instead should be seen as an “aspirational social construct” (Holwitt, 2020, p. 139) characterised by a class and social capital. Fadaee (2014) identifies three broad categories of scholarship in the middle class based on cultural identity, everyday practices and shared indifference to the poor. As a social group it has highly porous boundaries and the sub-groups within might share varied lifestyles, aspirations and imaginations even though they might be loosely referred as the middle class. Fadaee, based on empirical work amongst NGO activists in India, introduces a “critical activist milieu” to identify a social group who are “neither consumerist nor indifferent to the marginalised” (Fadaee, 2014, p. 442). In India, this group of activists/environmentalists have been active in filing PILs in court and raised concerns on the burning of toxic compounds and contamination of the environment. However, they do not necessarily always speak for the urban poor, instead, they contest on behalf of an ‘abstract’ or biased notion of citizenship (Anjaria, 2009) that is exclusionary in nature. The middle class has developed new ways of seeing itself and the others (Chatterjee, 2004) by pursuing contentious politics for recognition through democratic politics. Broadly referred to as civil society, scholars note that the middle class organise themselves to achieve certain ends like a slum-free zone or a nuisance-free residential society (Ghertner, 2011). In the last decade, Mumbai witnessed the emergence

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of numerous civic groups and community-based organisations seeking to keep the city clean. A form of ‘bourgeoise environmentalism’ (Baviskar, 2002) can be observed in the legal wings of the state which reproduces the spatial and social fragmentation of the urban poor. Post 1990s, decentralisation models in urban service provision have tried to include the civil society as an active part of the decision-making process, but these efforts are limited to only a section of the population (Baud & Nainan, 2008; Baud & Wit, 2009). When the technocratic solutions of the state failed to solve problems such as sanitation, water, or low-cost housing then the new middle class floated a discourse of poor governance. “The failure of the state to control the city, as perceived in particular by middle- and upper-class residents has fostered a variety of socio-political and cultural responses” (Shatkin, 2011, p. 82). The middle class has resorted to grassroots activism that redefines citizenship and access to the city. The civil society politics in India is taking an environmental turn and projects are launched to displace the poor and clean the city of hawkers and pavement dwellers through the judiciary and use of legal tools like Public Interest Litigation. This has given rise to paralegal arrangements by the poor (Anjaria, 2006, 2009) to continue claiming spaces and services through urbanisation practices from below, such as occupancy urbanism (Benjamin, 2008). New coalitions have emerged as populist political parties made themselves accessible to the low-income populations which enabled them to function in the grey zone through patronage and client relations while establishing vote banks. There are multiple social and historical entanglements that shape urban spaces; some of these practices in the context of Deonar will be analysed in the next chapter.

Public Interest Litigation Public Interest Litigations (PILs) are judicial mechanisms filed in a court of law to provide legal representation to the poor to safeguard their fundamental rights. PILs eventually became a legal remedy in cases where the larger public or a section of the public was in danger.

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Under a PIL the court could hold the government responsible for failing to perform its duties while invoking Article 21 of the Constitution of India (Right to Life) to expand and protect the rights of citizens. Most of the PILs filed in cities are related to the wellbeing of people, threats to livelihood, harmful effects of an industry on the environment, urban infrastructures like transport, access to water or solid waste management. Bhan (2016) in his study on slum evictions in New Delhi finds that a wide range of rights claims have emerged from PIL hearings as Indian courts have progressively broadened their interpretation of the right to life. In contrast to the 1980s, in the 1990s the right to life was invoked in PILs to protect a certain way of living, consumption and even leisure. Bhan notes that when the courts in New Delhi considered PILs on shifting polluting industries outside the city, they declared that the ‘right to live in pollution-free environments’ assumed priority over the ‘right to livelihood’. But in the subsequent rulings the development of the city assumed priority over the right to livelihood of pavement and slum dwellers. Resonating with Ghertner’s (2011) observations on poor neighbourhood evictions, the poor are increasingly made synonymous with nuisance and encroachers through legal discourses. Courts have been ruling in favour of the PILs which has led to the eviction of hawkers, slum demolitions and closure of polluting facilities etc. In Mumbai, PILs and writ petitions have been filed since 2009 by civil activists to highlight BMC’s failure to comply with the national MSW Rules. Mr Sharma’s PIL was a continuation of these past efforts by the civil society to pressurise the Municipal Corporation to follow national policies prescribed for managing waste. The Bombay High Court in their response to the PIL stated that: Recent incidents of fire at Deonar show that that the fundamental right under Article 21 [Right to Life] is completely violated. In fact, the failure to abide by and committing the breach of the MSW Rules may itself amount to violation of the right to live in a pollution free environment (Rajkumar Sharma vs Shri. Pandurang Patil, 2016, p. 5).

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Further, the Court’s order stated: If no drastic steps are taken by the authorities, the citizens residing in the city will be exposed to grave danger of pollution. The situation poses a serious threat to the commercial capital of India which is to be converted into a ‘smart city’ (Rajkumar Sharma vs Shri. Pandurang Patil, 2016, p. 14). The court’s response to the PIL endorses the right to clean air claimed by the middle class. The court’s invocation of the Right to Life under Article 21 of the Constitution of India for the citizens of Mumbai shows the court’s evaluation of citizen wellbeing as part of their fundamental rights. The court’s statement acknowledges the health risks to citizens but remains indifferent to the perpetual toxic exposure that the dump has had on the communities of Shivaji Nagar. A study by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) shows that the inhabitants suffer from acute respiratory diseases and have the highest infant mortality rate in the city (TISS, 2015). However, the civil society and the courts have been indifferent about the livelihood and dependencies of waste workers at the dump. The waste workers have been continually exposed to severe levels of toxicity from the city’s waste but the High Court’s PIL ruling to close the dump now posed a threat to their livelihood. The waste worker community found no mention either in the PILs by civil activists nor in the High Court’s response to those PILs. The court and civil society’s silence on the right to livelihood of the waste workers created a space for othering of the community in the absence of legal recognition. This raises a question on who can be called citizens, and whose lives are more valuable. The High Court’s order to immediately seal off the area reveals a very flat and homogenous understanding of the social space of the dump. The court, while instructing the BMC to secure the dump and practise scientific waste management practices, fails to secure the livelihood of more than 1,500 waste workers and scrap dealers. The decisions of the High Court to secure the dump were made without any provisions for the huge numbers of informal workers working at and around the dump. It did not consider the repercussions of its own orders on the slum and waste workers, knowing that the security

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measures it suggested could deprive the community of their livelihood. Official and legal documents employ the term ‘public’ in their decisions but it is questionable to what extent the poor get represented under this umbrella term. There is a danger in generalising the definition of public and using the PIL as a tool to voice the concerns of the educated and affluent elites in the city at the expense of vulnerable social groups. The nexus of class-based discursive processes and the interpretation of law have produced exclusive claims to citizenship while maintaining existing social hierarchies (Ghertner, 2011). The invisibility of the slum is reified. I argue that the silence of the courts and indifference of the civic activists are critical in reproducing a ‘politics of forgetting’. As established in the previous chapter, Deonar and Shivaji Nagar’s entangled histories of marginalisation are not only exacerbated but their marginal status is maintained by the parallel processes of forgetting and stigmatisation in official discourses. The spatial implication of social exclusion feeds into the perception of Deonar by depriving it of any other representation other than as a nuisance for the city.

Accreting narratives of suspicion In the PIL hearing, the High Court directed the Maharashtra State Government to “nominate any Officer not below the rank of a Deputy Commissioner of Police who will be in-charge of the protection of the Deonar site from the anti-social elements” (Rajkumar Sharma vs Shri. Pandurang Patil, 2016, p. 21). The BMC’s suspicion that the fire was started by ‘miscreants’ changed to a narrative which blamed waste workers, including scrap dealers, for starting the fire to recover metals. This supposition of possible miscreants found an audience amongst the middle class and bureaucrats who demanded investigation into the reasons for the fire and action taken to hold individuals or groups accountable. An FIR against ‘unknown persons’ was filed by the BMC. An FIR of this kind predetermines the possibility of crime against persons based on suspicion and the accused parties have to prove their innocence.

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The BMC initiated a repair of the existing, damaged wall around the dump, deployed security forces and installed security infrastructures such as fencing, CCTVs and watch towers. The police started their investigation to identify the miscreants and made a number of arrests. The BMC repeatedly reproduced and legitimised the narrative of miscreants through institutional documents such as Compliance Reports, exchange of reports between various departments within the BMC, reports of the monitoring committee5 and in regular updates to the High Court on the status of Deonar. According to a status report by the SWM department (procured during fieldwork December 2016) 150 private security assistants were deployed at the dump to counter the presence of anti-social elements. The report also mentions that any unauthorised person entering the dump found by security assistants while patrolling shall be handed over to the police. The references made to miscreants in the reports necessitated the need to protect the dump from public access which prevented the waste workers and anyone else from accessing the dump. In an internal document procured during fieldwork titled the ‘Compliance Report’, the SWM department held that “some miscreants have again damaged the wall at some places for which security dept. of MCGM [Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai] had filed FIR in the local police station” (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, 2016). The term ‘miscreant’ was repeatedly used in official communications between the departments and other institutions. Reproducing the domain of the miscreants repeatedly over an extended period of time after the fire produced a believable ‘truth’ about their existence. It produced the idea of a criminal who needed to be punished. The reports established their violation of the ban and misdemeanour to deter security efforts by the BMC even when the miscreants had not been identified. The entire community of waste workers was held responsible for the fire by the authorities. Those accused and arrested were “charged

5

In the PIL hearing the High Court had ordered the formation of a monitoring committee which was headed by a retired civil servant and included representatives from the civil society, environmental experts and a Deputy Police Commissioner.

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with negligence and causing damage to public property among other charges” (Sinha, 2016). Ten suspects were kept in custodial arrest for three months after which seven were released on bail with fines while evidence was found against the remaining three scrap dealer who were claimed to be waste mafias. The official reason stated by the police for the arrest was that the scrap dealers did not have authorised licences to conduct business. The police claimed to have detained only scrap dealers, but from verbal accounts, I gathered that those arrested included the waste workers. The process of criminalisation is evident if we further examine the legal clause under which they were charged. The police had charged them with section 436 of the Indian Penal Code which is as follows: Section 436. Mischief by fire or explosive substance with intent to destroy house, etc.- Whoever commits mischief by fire or any explosive substance, intending to cause, or knowing it to be likely that he will thereby cause, the destruction of any building which is ordinarily used as a place of worship or as a human dwelling or as a place for the custody of property, shall be punished with 1[imprisonment for life], or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine (The Indian Penal Code, Act XLV of 1860). Unlike the conditions set out in the above clause, the dump is neither a place of worship nor human dwelling nor private property. In addition, newspaper reports (Niranjankumar, 2016) stated that the police did not find any evidence of sabotage in their inquiry. Under the pretext of ‘security’ and ‘preventative’ action, what began was a process of criminalisation of the waste workers. In a report prepared for the audit wing of the Government of India, the BMC revealed its plans to allot the waste pickers “a specific area of Deonar Dumping Ground whereby responsibility of fire can be fixed to them” (BMC report procured during fieldwork February 2017). Though the allotment plan never materialised, it set a formal provision to allow the waste pickers to work but in a way that holds them responsible in case of further mishaps. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India conducted an audit of SWM in Mumbai

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and pointed out that the fires at the dump took place due to over-loading of the dump with high quantities of materials and the lack of firefighting equipment available at the site. Despite BMC’s shortcomings in handling waste, collated suspicions from the authorities and the police went on to establish the waste workers as amongst the miscreants starting the fire. The BMC treated the waste workers as illegal entrants into the dumping ground and rejected their pleas to work there. The waste workers’ intimacy with waste was invoked in official documents to identify people to take accountability for the mishaps but these very intimacies with waste work failed to get them included in deciding the future of Deonar. For instance, the High Court had nominated citizen representatives to be included in the monitoring committee constituted for maintenance of the dump but no member of the waste worker community was included. The narrative of possible ‘miscreants’ created the demand for punishment of those responsible. Anyone with access to the dump and acquaintance with its terrain could be suspected of causing sabotage. The waste workers therefore became primary targets of police investigation as they not only work and live near the dump but have been essentially dependent on it. Waste work as a social relationship entails working with polluting materials which makes communities easy targets of blame and state violence. The spatial and social position of the waste workers vis-à-vis the dump are entangled in the larger history of the city (see Chapter 1) whereby larger processes of spatial segregation, displacement and resettlement of vulnerable communities such as Qureshis has forced many to depend on the dump. In contrast, the middle classes living in the same administrative ward were never blamed nor suspected of having any association with the dump. From informal conversations I gathered that eight of those arrested lived in the closest dwelling structures near the dump. Contractor (2012) has elaborated on the poor living conditions of squatters closest to the dump. As people become socially mobile they tend to move further away from the dump and towards the city. Contractor notes that as the migrant settlers in Shivaji Nagar gained social mobility they would be relocated further away from the dump into rehabilitated clusters of Lotus Colony which

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were considered respectable and attributed a higher social status. The clusters farther away from the dump had relatively better housing structures and access to public utilities. People staying closest to the dump were easy targets in the 1992 ethno-religious riots (Contractor, 2012). In other words, the spatial positioning of the waste workers to sources of waste is determined by various structural inequalities existing in the larger fabric of the city. Social processes like caste discrimination, social stigma, political hostility towards religious minorities and lack of affordable housing has pushed the socio-economically disadvantaged groups to work and live near the dump. The officials labelled the waste workers as nuisance creators based on the biased social perception of the people living in slums, assuming they would have possibly started the fire. The waste workers and scrap dealers were easy targets for the state to bring them into the moral and legal discourse of blame because their suspicion did not stem from evidence but the stereotypes and negative connotations ubiquitous with the slum and, in general, with the urban poor. Shivaji Nagar had particularly become infamous over the years for a communal vote bank, riots and crime in the city. The (re)creation of Shivaji Nagar as a Muslim slum took place after the 1992 national riots.6 Threatened by xenophobic politics, more Muslims migrated to the area to find refuge during the riots and many stayed. The concentration of Muslim households in the area led to a ‘territorial stigmatization’ (Wacquant, 2008) of the neighbourhood, in fact the neighbourhood came under scrutiny for hosting terror activities. This spatialisation of identities (Björkman, 2015; Contractor, 2017) was facilitated by ethnic politics that created vote banks and bureaucratic ignorance due to the ‘illegal’ status of Shivaji Nagar. The undesirability of living near a dump and moral logics became linked to the identities of the inhabitants. The everyday reality of the slum dwellers oscillates between securing access to basic services and protecting themselves from the prying eyes of the state which holds the capability to demolish and displace them at any 6

See Hansen (2001) for a detailed study on ethno-religious politics and violence in Mumbai.

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point in time. The ideas of citizenship stand contested at the periphery of the city which further excludes them from asserting claims to the city. In this case, the codes of civility, illegality, informality and morality becomes the basis for being targeted by the state (or its affiliate institutions). For instance, later in October 2016 when the accusations against the waste workers could not be proven and they were released by the police, the ban on their entry to the refuse dump still continued. A politics of blame unfolds by reproducing exclusionary spaces and identities, and reinforces the inequalities already present in the fabric of the society. The narratives of blame support the state’s attempts to secure the area from public access to start the process of closing the dump. The BMC announced plans for an upcoming WTE plant at Deonar under a public-private partnership (PPP) which could solve Mumbai’s waste problem.

Revocation of access The association of identity with spatial forms of ordering is not new and determines who can be present where and when. Following the fire-related arrests came the ban which was implemented with the help of laws from the criminal procedure code which deal with acts related to intentions of causing damage to property or place. The Municipal Corporation urged the state to announce the dump as a restricted zone for anyone except the authorised persons on duty. To this end, the BMC issued a notification after a series of internal meetings to declare the dump as ‘prohibited’.7

7

There is a board outside the entrance of the Deonar dumping ground which says ‘Prohibited Area’. However, the eligibility for the waste workers to enter the dump is not formally ‘written’ anywhere but because of efforts by a local NGO to provide protection to the waste workers the BMC had offered them photo-passes (ID) which they were required to present if any security guard questioned them as a regulatory check.

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Section 144 of CrPC (Criminal Procedure Code) was imposed barring public mobility, a law implemented in apprehension of nuisance or riots. The Chief Engineer of SWM was instructed by the Municipal Corporation to maintain a strict vigil and prevent anyone8 from entering the dump. The BMC cancelled the work permits (photo IDs) which it had previously issued to the waste workers. The Municipal Corporation justified their decision based on the High Court orders to secure the site to eliminate environmental pollution and reduce the health risks of citizens. The ways in which the BMC enacted this directive of the High Court had severe implications for the 1,500 waste pickers. Though the restriction prevented anyone from entering the site except authorised officials, the waste workers were most adversely impacted. Further, the BMC revoked working permits, i.e. photo-passes (ID cards) issued through the local NGOs. The IDs became invalid before the expiry of their regular validity of a one-year period. Cancellation of work permits de-legitimised the presence of waste workers inside the dump. In one of the interviews in a newspaper, an official from the corporation’s waste management department stated, “I can’t afford another fire, as of today I will not let anyone allowed as it is prohibited area”. When asked about the livelihood of the waste workers and impact on informal recycling he said, “I want to evolve a foolproof system but till the inquiry completes and the new system comes into action I will not change the restrictions I have announced” (Dhupkar, 2016). Under the pretext of suspicion, sabotage and unchecked entry at the dump, the BMC cancelled entry permission; however, there was no integration or regulation for waste activities except for prohibiting waste pickers.

8

A multitude of people enter the dumping ground like vendors, contractors, scrap dealers or local slum residents who sometimes pick fire wood. Local residents revealed that young boys frequent the dump as a place for drinking, smoking or evening walks. There are also stories of mafia and dealers who smuggle out oil from the dumpers; therefore, a large range of people used the dumping ground.

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Figure 7: An example of a photo-pass (an ID card) issued to waste workers by the local NGO on behalf of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

Source: photograph by author.

The purpose for issuing the ID cards was to provide waste workers with official recognition of their identity and security to work at the dump. The cancellation of the card questioned the credibility of the ID which the entire waste worker community had been relying on. An official from the local NGO told me “the cards were issued many years ago and there has been no check on who is entering the ground and who is not. We have heard cases where people have entered with fake identity cards” (NGO representative, personal communication, 17 February 2017). The BMC ended up questioning the credibility of its own document. The idea that the ID card system was not foolproof was accepted

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by the BMC. The very announcement of the ban seemed like ‘showing off’ in the view of Mansi Shinde of the local NGO, Stree Mukti Sanghatana (SMS). In an interview she said: The ID card is a mere formality to comply with MSW Rules, 2000. It was issued [by the BMC] to exert its authority and take things into control as a response to the hue and cry of the other citizens. If goons are entering and conducting illegal activities at the dump, they are definitely not doing it by entering through the ID card (personal communication, 8 January 2017). The validity of the ID card which was issued by the SWM department in 2001 was itself not considered reliable by the same department. Neither did the annual renewal of the card prevent any mishaps at the dump or protect the livelihood of the waste workers. With the exception of this paper document, the BMC did not show a keen interest in regulating the informal sector or integrating them; they merely allowed waste workers to work in the dump and turned a blind eye to their demands. The government operated in a fuzzy relationship with waste workers where on paper it acknowledged them but failed to ensure that they were formally recognised as equal stakeholders in the SWM system in the city. The relationship between the BMC and waste workers falls into grey space, where waste workers are partially acknowledged yet considered illegal and a nuisance along with the scrap dealers. The scrap dealers are mostly seen as running a business and money-lenders who are engaged in illegal activities. Since 2001, i.e. the year when ID cards were first issued, there have been no improvements in the status of waste workers. The BMC failed to ensure the safety of the waste workers. Promises of incorporating the waste workers in formal waste treatment plans were made by the private contractor in the initial phases of the project at Deonar but eventually this was completely forgotten in the battles between the government and the company. The BMC officials who were responsible for issuing alternative ID cards were transferred to another department. The inconsistencies in planning and the inexperience of working with PPPs of the solid waste management department also reflected in its poli-

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cies towards the informal sector. The ban, however, did not prevent the waste workers from accessing the dump through negotiations with the security guards or by jumping over the wall. This chapter provides a kaleidoscope of politics around the dump through the strategies in which the BMC tried to justify its actions by blaming the private company and the waste workers while the court order acted in favour of the citizens by condemning the Municipal Corporation. The apparent pro-people decision of the court was employed as rationality by the corporation and state police to make the dump ‘secure’. The ban on the waste workers that initially seemed like a temporary safety measure turned into a long-term ban which was operationalised by imposing law from the criminal law code in India and by creating uncertainties around the status of the dumping ground. These uncertainties were related to fragmented information regarding the ban and closure of the site which fuelled rumours, speculation and had political ramifications amongst the waste community. The silences of the state functionaries, including the government, the Municipal Corporation and the court kept the status of the dumping ground in limbo till the government made stringent decisions about the dump. The unpredictability of gaining access to the dump pushed workers to contest and negotiate in ways which were violent and placed them in unwanted arbitrary coalitions to hedge survival risks. In this chapter I suggest that construction of the miscreant/s is crucial to recognise and record governable subjects, to draw them out from the zone of the unknown and imaginary. In a Foucauldian sense, governing subjects in a judicious way is necessary to make spaces governable, i.e. to rescue the dump from the domain of the informal and illegal to the controlled and disciplined. Done under the pretext of maintaining order, various technologies are employed by powerful actors for social cleansing of such spaces to re-engineer them into controlled fortresses. The construction of labels for the waste workers identifying them as miscreants is directed towards whole communities even though a handful of individuals might be held responsible at the forefront. Rendering certain communities unwanted by adjudicating them as a threat to the city, followed by security strategies to manage these

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populations, paves the way for a cleansed and protected space for potential developmental or value-extractive projects like WTE. Selecting a group, particularly those of the poor, to embody blame enables the state to displace those populations through spatial regulation. The process of spatial cleansing in cities has been discussed by Anjaria (2006) in the case of hawkers and street vendors. The making of governable subjects and spaces should not be simply read as formalisation of informal spaces as it lays bare, a) the power dynamics of who can dictate practices in a certain space, and b) mechanisms through which exclusionary processes are reproduced. Roy (2005, 2009) rightly argues that the formal and informal are not separate domains but are mutually constituted, therefore making it crucial to also examine how the contested space of the dump is reproduced. The next chapter investigates the contestations around the building of a barbed wall around the dumping site and political strategies by the waste workers.

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being global. Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/97814443 46800.ch3 Sinha, A. (2016, April 16). Probe finds scrap dealers responsible for fire in Mumbai’s Deonar. NDTV. https://www.ndtv.com/mumbai-new s/probe-finds-scrap-dealers-responsible-for-fire-in-mumbais-deo nar-1396239 Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). (2015). Social economic conditions and vulnerabilties: A report of the baseline survey of M (East) Ward, Mumbai. https://idl-bnc-idrc.dspacedirect.org/handle/10625/56487 Tiwari, D. (2016, February 1). 3 minors started Deonar blaze. Mumbai Mirror. https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/crime/3-m inors-started-deonar-blaze/articleshow/50801010.cms Wacquant, L. (2008). The militarization of urban marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian metropolis. International Political Sociology, 2(1), 56–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00037.x

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Chapter 4 Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

When I visited the waste dump in Deonar in 2016 a boundary wall of 2.5 km was being built to separate the site from the city. Remnants of the previous compound wall stood around the dump, intermittently damaged. The old wall was being repaired with an increase in its height and the addition of barbed wire. The inchworm expansion of settlements towards the waste mounds led the Municipal Corporation to build a wall as a marker of their territorial boundary. The dump and the inhabited areas of the bustee were reclaimed out of a contiguous stretch of mangrove marshes. It was only in 2009 that the dump was first enclosed; the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) appointed a contractor to manage the waste and build a boundary wall. Back then, the reason behind securing the dump was to prevent encroachment of the government-owned1 dump by the slums. During an interview, a BMC representative from the Solid Waste Department revealed the official view behind the security measures: The slum was born out of the dumping land itself. Over the years these slums increased square by square. Earlier the dump was not demarcated because it was too old and no one bothered. After Independence, it grew as people started building shanties on the garbage layers by putting more soil on top. You know why people settled there

1

The land of the Deonar dump is officially owned by the collector i.e. the Maharashtra state and leased to the BMC for managing waste.

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– because it is an economy. It is a big business. Ragpickers and scrap dealers came and started doing business. By the time we realised that government land is being encroached upon we could salvage only around 132 hectares. We decided that enough is enough: we need to secure our land. We need a boundary to demarcate our area. We will not let any more government land get encroached, so we decided to build the wall and also prepared a project for scientific closure and setting up waste treatment there. We are trying to protect the land we have (Mr Kamle, SWM, Engineer, personal communication, 28 November 2016). The task of building the wall was assigned to a private contractor but construction work on the wall was staggered and the contractor failed to complete it within the set timeframe. Residents narrated2 that the local mafia frequently pulled down parts of the wall to illegally dispose of construction waste and the contractor could not finish its construction. The BMC officials, however, attributed the delays to the Coastal Regulation Zone clearances3 which were not granted to the private contractor to allow the construction to be completed. At this point the waste workers continued working at the dump because the wall was not intended to curb their access but to curb encroachments. In fact, in 2001 the waste workers had secured access to the dump through a ‘photo-pass’ (ID cards) issued by the BMC at the behest of advocacy by NGOs. Since then the ID photo-pass was renewed every year through the local NGOs. It acted as a working permit and gave the waste workers a legitimate identity to collect waste. Post-fire, following orders of the High Court on tightening the security at the dump, the BMC cancelled the photopasses and instructed the NGOs against their renewal.

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There were rumours in the slum about gangs and criminal mafias recruiting waste workers to work under them. The waste mafia buy recyclables from the waste workers at a low price but are also involved in illegal or criminal activities. For construction in CRZ areas, permissions are required from the Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority without which construction cannot commence.

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

When the fire took place, the unfinished wall became a matter of contention for the BMC as it highlighted its failure in securing the site. Opposition parties used the uncompleted boundary in their interest to question the efficiency of the ruling government running the BMC. They argued that the absence of a wall eventually led to the fire incident as the site was misused by trespassers. In a juridical hearing (see Chapter 3) on a PIL, the High Court and a civil activist asserted that the unfinished wall was a major dereliction by the contractor. The SWM department of the BMC was held accountable for neglecting the security of the dump and risking the lives of the citizens of Mumbai. The event marked a turn in the governance of the waste dump. Acting on High Court orders, the repair of the unfinished wall began promptly a month after the fire in March 2016. The cost of the wall was estimated at an amount of Rs 1.27 Crore (0.17 million dollars) by the BMC and its construction and repair was outsourced to a contractor. The repair of the wall was an essential part of the overall security measures taken by the BMC to prevent trespassers. The fire attracted attention to the poor governance of the dump. Criticism from the civil society activists and pressure from the political parties over the failure of the BMC in public forums and the media accelerated the bureaucratic clearances required for its construction. Unlike the previous wall, this time the boundary wall was installed with protective features to prevent trespassing. The wall also served a dual purpose for the BMC. Any private company would demand a secured site before constructing the WTE plant so the wall would be an added feature which the BMC could use to invite bidders for the project. Walling and enclosures are a key spatial feature of neoliberal planning which requires zoning, private control, guarded and walled spaces – Special Economic Zone (SEZ) being a case in point. Real estate companies and private firms demand exclusive control over spaces due to high capital investments and such control is often facilitated and provided to them by the state. The Deonar fire was symbolically employed in public discourse to justify the need for BMC‘s renewed spatial and metabolic control, not only over the discarded materials of the city but also over land. The first step for inviting private companies to build the WTE plant was to

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prepare a bid proposal that would contain all the necessary scientific, technical and bureaucratic requirements to build the plant. The bid proposal as it is called can be considered as a representation of the dump by BMC’s engineers4 and bureaucrats along with the private consultants who would be the future potential partners to the BMC for Mumbai’s waste governance. In the bidding proposal5 prepared by Tata Consultancy, amongst other features, the wall was pitched as an essential utility feature already built by the BMC to secure the future plant. The project bidding proposal stated: The boundary wall spans for a length of 2250m approximately. The boundary wall is required to protect the facility from the stray animals, rag pickers and trespassers. The columns are built at every 4m. The brick wall is 230mm thick. Capping is also provided at top to keep away rainwater from face of the wall. Height of the wall is taken 3.5m above average GL [ground level] considering rag picker issue. (Tata Consulting Engineers Limited, 2016, p. 131) The above statement confirms the widespread belief that waste workers pose threats to the infrastructure of the city; the isolated case of the fire is not solely responsible for their criminalisation. The wall reflects the everyday perception that people working with waste cause problems, projects their presence as a perceived threat, and asserts that their movement needs to be controlled to maintain order at the dump. Official documents commonly refer to waste workers as a nuisance, equating them with stray animals and trespassers. It is not only a lack of 4

5

A municipal corporation has various organs but the engineers are its foot soldiers. The BMC is comprised of a large number of engineers who are responsible for infrastructural services like sanitation, electricity, public heath, water supply etc. The bureaucrats are decision-makers who occupy higher positions in the hierarchy. The proposal is viewed as a representation of a government document because it was prepared in accordance with the guidelines of the BMC and it was also accepted by the BMC later. This allows me some leeway to extend the concept of the wall as conceived by both the state and the private company.

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

recognition that the waste workers face in the official plans; they are seen as unwanted and their existence is acknowledged with disdain. Through official narratives of establishing them as nuisance their exclusion gets embedded in the infrastructural planning and governance of the city. For the BMC, the wall helped to opiate the middle class, comfort the opposing politicians and allowed a systemic disengagement between the dump and the waste workers’ livelihood. A physical boundary represents the mental and social perception of othering by drawing borders that entail a process of distancing or separation similar to segregation through enclaves or enclosures (Caldeira, 2000). It (re)constructs binaries – such as between the legal and illegal, or the public and private. The binary thinking of decision-makers is reflected in the perception of waste workers as nuisance which prevents unbiased integration of the informal workers in official discourses. While the authorities are inclined towards experimenting with modernist technologies, waste workers are posited as threats to the formal waste systems. Their informal status combined with the social stigma of contamination and poverty amplifies their status as a nuisance for modern waste systems. The above statement underlines the ‘ragpicker issue’ which is seen as a threat to the scientific planning of the dump. Here, I borrow from Henri Lefebvre’s perspective on the production of space which is critical in understanding how the state’s vision of the dump interacts with the lived experiences of the waste workers. Lefebvre suggests looking at the production of space through three dialectically connected moments: i.e. conceived (representations of space), perceived (representational spaces) and lived (spatial practices) dimensions of space to reveal the contradictions in society. The conceived space is the knowledge of space produced by scientists, architects and artists through codes, visuals, plans, or infrastructural systems which form the dominant space as it comes from a position of power and knowledge production. Contradictions arise between the use of space, i.e. appropriation by inhabitants and the domination over space by powerful groups who define what it should be. Social space, Lefebvre says, is simultaneously a “field of action” and a “basis of action” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 191, emphasis in original). As part of the conceived space, the idea of

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city spaces, i.e. their structure and logical organisation, are formulated long before the approved development plans or engineered proposals are released to the public. The process is initiated through bureaucratic processes called the ‘invitation of tenders’, ‘expression of interest’, ‘detailed project reports (DPR)’ by the engineers at BMC. The possibilities and potential of infrastructures to be built are decided through an interactive process by the BMC and private players who negotiate to finalise contracts and, in the process, modify and shape imageries of the dump. The codified visualisation, or in a Lefebvrian sense conceived space, is produced institutionally through illustrations by engineers, plans, and proposals by consultants to fulfil tender requirements. Urban governance, planning and renewal involve materialising the imagination of the planners and engineers through circuits of decision-makers and private agents, shaping up institutional discourses around spatial transformation. These plans and proposals then get sanctioned and are implemented by private consultants. The design representations of state-built infrastructures tend to miss out the layers of socio-spatial complexities when they travel from maps to the lived spaces of the users. The image of the dump is conceived by decision-makers, i.e. state functionaries such as bureaucrats, planners and also private consultants with whom the state works in camaraderie to carve out the spaces of the city. The material associations between the waste workers and the dump fail to get recognised in the engineered visions of how a scientifically upgraded Deonar with its WTE should look like. The references to waste workers in the written documents of the state and affiliated institutions designate them as unwanted for the governance regimes. These semiotic representations are employed to not only keep waste workers away from accessing waste but these logics of order are used to justify their exclusion from other public spaces of the city achieved through demolition of slums, or removal of the informal vendors. Using infrastructural projects such as WTE plants or the construction of roads and bridges, the state (re)produces the city spaces in a way that reasserts its dominance over the city.

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

Contradictions arise when the ideologies of those in power are imposed and challenged by the lived experiences of those inhabiting these spaces. For instance, the less visible tacit permissions given to the waste workers to access waste at the dump are swept away by these highly visible security infrastructures that establish an active presence of the state. Lefebvre rightly calls the space of planners and architects as “dominant space” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39) because these representations of space (or conceived space) are symbols of power in contrast to the ‘appropriated’ or reclaimed space of the inhabitants. The plans and proposals by the state and its acquaintances give material form to the ideologies and expositions of powerful state agents who exert influence over the design of the city. The depictions of the engineers tend to decontextualise and depoliticise the space by rendering the dump as a techno-managerial material space. The materiality of space shapes and is shaped by power geometries that define social relations in that space. Struggles over resources, be it land or waste, have been exacerbated under the current capital system of production. Ribot and Peluso (2003) argue that “some people and institutions control resource access while others must maintain their access through those who have control” (p. 154). People and institutions form social relations at various social positions around a means of access, for example, a conflicting or cooperating arrangement to manage or use a resource. Along these lines, Burte and Kamath (2010) have argued that the state plays a strategic “weak or strong” role in the process of using planning as a tool to “structurally reorganize space” (2010, p. 72). The BMC seeks new ways of reasserting its territorial control through a range of spectacular infrastructures like the wall, CCTV and security guards. The prohibition at the site prevents anyone from entering the dump, and by placing surveillance technologies all around the boundary wall the corporation asserts its continuous presence at the site. The BMC not only asserts territorial control using the technologies of surveillance and exclusion but also reconfigures the practices at the dump. The assortment of security technologies such as the wall topped with barbed wire, its height, the ‘prohibited’ sign on the notice board,

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the security camera installations and watch towers have transformed the physical space into a contested built structure. But, the reorientation of space is not merely a material practice, it takes place through social practices and in return also shapes them. Informality provides the needed flexibility through which the state can calibrate its role while working across the formal—informal spectrum of social relations. The state uses the fire as an opportunity to shift gears from its weak stance towards reasserting its authority by erasure of all tacit arrangements with the local informal waste economy. The envisioned waste infrastructure seeks a cleansing of space from its existing informal political economy so that the space can be rebooted for the efficient circulation of capital. The apparent territorialisation of space is oriented towards inviting capital-intensive investments like the WTE for which the designated space needs to be measured, secured and cleansed of possible threats to value generation. Following the triadic understanding of Lefebvrian space, conceived space includes the marking of the physical and material space of the state using a boundary wall and fence to control flows of people, materials and practices. In other words, territories are politically constructed by those in power by controlling how inhabitants use that space. What is important here is not how representations are codified by the dominant players but how the representations produce inequality and at the same time how they are negotiated when they unfold in lived spaces. Scholars from postcolonial urban theory contend that the focus of enquiry should shift from studying state spaces to the heterogeneous political practices of people that shape urban life. Simone and Rao (2012) have called for a rereading of the practices of marginalised citizens not as ‘victims’ but as active agents who negotiate and at times also reproduce existing power hierarchies. Acts of territorialisation by the state are further imbricated with internalisation of social marginalisation by the slum dwellers. Similarly, in the case of waste workers, their construction as miscreants forces them to see themselves both as trespassers and as heroes in attempts to negotiate with the precarity of their livelihoods.

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

This chapter shifts from the decision-making domains of the bureaucrats and planners to the everyday practices of the people. Here I am interested in opening up the study to overcome the rigid binaries between so-called state and non-state actors which calls for a focus on the micro-politics of everyday practices. Building up on the modalities discussed in the last chapter through which the waste workers are made illegal and criminalised, this chapter asks how the waste workers experience exclusion at the dump and in which ways do they hedge threats to their livelihood. The chapter does not attempt to trace their daily routines but describes and analyses their experiences, struggles, participation and vision. Two vignettes from my field notes are illustrated; the first one describes how the construction of the wall topped with barbed wire becomes a site of contestation. The second vignette zooms into the waste workers’ experiences of violence due to invalidated photo-passes and being chased by security guards. The chapter focuses on the story of the wall to trace how waste workers construct a collective idea of the state. The material shifts in the built structures of the dump altered the existing practices and flows across the wall, making way for new alliances and pathways to enter the dump. The state-led security infrastructures failed to contain the flow of people and instead became a means to access the site.

Exclusion at and from the periphery There are two types of wall: the old wall was made to stop the bustee from growing and the new one has been built after the fire… If you keep following the wall from the kabristaan [burial site6 ] you will reach the bus depot on the other end of the bustee. The work for the

6

The burial site mentioned by Arif is intended to serve the Shia community and has been built on low-lying land within the dump after facing long delays due to Mumbai’s coastal protection regulations which prevent construction on wetlands. The Kabristan is the only other burial ground for the Muslim population of Shivaji Nagar, second after the Deonar Sunni Muslim Kabristan.

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kabristaan wall is still incomplete and has been going on since the last three years because of politicians’ gimmicks (Arif, resident of Rafique Nagar, personal communication, 10 October 2016). Vernacular of old and new circulate widely in Shivaji Nagar. Informal settlements are produced as the result of a place-based, collective process of rebuilding, demolitions, regeneration and renovation. City spaces are contested and the city is constantly in the making. Space starvation is faced by most residents across Mumbai who conduct their everyday lives in close-knit, dense environments often without a reliable water supply and sanitation infrastructure. The working poor have to perform private practices like cooking and washing in shared public spaces wherever they find resources for basic needs. For example, every morning a number of construction workers gather at the Shivaji Nagar naka (junction) to find contractors who would need labourers for that day or week. The space is used for daily transactions and those seeking wage work. For Shivaji Nagar inhabitants, the dump serves as more than an economic resource; it encompasses their culture and everyday life, and provides a space for their children to play, take walks and enjoy the annual fair which is a major attraction for the slum dwellers (see Figure 8 below). The dump provides necessary life functions. It acts as an open space where bustee residents can collect firewood, graze their cattle and defecate in the open to avoid unsanitary community toilets. The dwelling areas closest to the dump are Rafique Nagar part II, Sanjay Nagar, Nirankari Nagar and Chikalwadi. The immediate fringes of the dump are occupied by relatively newer built structures7 which have insecure tenure and face frequent demolitions. These areas are referred to as part II of the existing settlements. Part I are the older and durable bustees whose residents have managed to procure documentary evidences against demolitions over one or more generations.

7

These structures are made of tarpaulin, cane and cloth.

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

Figure 8: The segregated sites of waste workers juxtaposed against the annual fair on the reclaimed marshes near the Shivaji Nagar bus terminus.

Source: photograph by author.

The wall impacted the lives of the waste workers across several fronts, far beyond its intended function imagined by the BMC. The entry ban by the BMC which aimed to prevent any trespassers entering the dump disproportionately affected the waste workers. The ban immediately disrupted the informal economy which thrived by receiving, repairing and recycling materials sourced from the dump. Construction of the wall delegitimised the entry of the waste workers, preventing them from gaining access to the dump. They found alter-

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nate ways of entering the site by forging new alliances or renewing old ones to get entry. Many had to negotiate and contest overtly with the security guards, the lower-rung bureaucratic officials of the state, or covertly gained access by crossing over the wall. Before the fire, the waste workers entered the dump through various side openings in the broken or partially built compound wall. Once inside, they walked to the particular loop where the vehicles dump the garbage. With the gaps in the wall now repaired and renewed, the main entrance of the dump was guarded by security guards. Accelerating the security measures further in October 2016, the BMC changed the security agency from a private company (Eagle Security Services) to the state security forces (Maharashtra State Security Force, commonly referred as MSF) as directed by the High Court. The wall that was now part of the waste infrastructure was appropriated in contrasting ways by the waste workers, considerably diverging from the BMC’s logic for its construction. The wall emerged as an interface – an encounter between the vision of the engineers and the everyday practices of survival of the waste workers. It was used to strike deals and undertake negotiations. Creative appropriation of space is not restricted to Deonar but generally in Mumbai, the urban poor thrive through the everyday encroachment into practices of waste(ing); by using waste to appropriate spaces in the city. The waste workers, over the years, have managed to make themselves an indispensable part of the city’s metabolism. The practice of making waste disappear out of sight, as mundane as it appears, is also an everyday act through which the marginalised waste workers assert their belonging in the city. By embedding themselves into the indispensable everyday rhythms of urban metabolism, they become the city. Urban struggles over access to livelihood resources involve strategies for ‘staying put’ (Weinstein, 2014) through which the working poor claim unique forms of citizenship, such as insurgent citizenship (Holston, 2008) and occupancy urbanism (Benjamin, 2008). Scholars like Bayat (2010) argue that the urban poor are able to secure their place by the ‘quiet encroachment of the ordinary’ which he defines as “the silent, protracted, but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied, powerful, or the

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

public, in order to survive and improve their lives” (p. 56). I share two excerpts below from my field notes that highlight the waste workers’ perception of the state and their strategies to stay put in the city.

Vignette 1 – Crossing borders Post-monsoons in 2016 there was a long queue outside the NGO Apnalya’s office to fill out forms for the annual renewal of the photo-passes issued to the waste workers. Around 500 workers had registered in the previous year of 2015 with the help of local NGOs which facilitated the form-filling process. The identity cards or photo-passes, as they are called, are issued by the respective NGOs every year with the approval of the BMC. The photo-pass acted as a working licence for waste workers to work at the dump. Before the fire there were no checkpoints in place by the BMC to record entrants to the dump so the photo-pass offered protection to the waste workers if they were questioned or caught in any suspicious circumstances.8 Unlike every other year the registration process for the photo-pass did not begin at the start of the year. Seven months had passed since the fire in January 2016 and the waste workers were not sure if their annual photo-passes had been cancelled forever. An environment of confusion and fear loomed over the filling out of the forms. The NGO representative communicated the news that the BMC had not issued an official approval for the photo-passes.

8

The dump often came under the scan of the local police because of the presence of criminal mafia gangs (trading oil or illegal construction waste) and was a breeding ground for drug abuse.

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Figure 9: The boundary wall depicting collected materials by waste workers.

Source: photograph by author.

I met a group of young boys who worked at the dump. Sharing their anxieties around the ban on their entry they told me that they now entered the dump by jumping across the wall (see Figure 9 above). For them, fighting the dangers of being caught made going to the dump into an adventurous activity. Nakir had come with his injured leg, supported by a walking stick. He was one of the many waste workers who had started entering the dump by climbing the boundary wall.

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

Nakir said: I broke my leg while trying to jump over the wall. I missed landing on the waste mound and instead fell a metre ahead on the metal pipes laid inside for water supply. You know, we have become like Bajrangi Bhaijan [protagonist from a Bollywood movie]. For kachra chunna [picking waste] we face severe hardships jump, climb and leap over the wires….There was no wall seven to eight years ago; everything that has been built was done in last few years. The BMC put up watch towers too to keep us away. When the security had gone for lunch we went to the chowki [watch tower], broke the windows and wrenched out the aluminium frame and sold it in the market here [pointing to a kata wala]. The parallels to a charismatic scene from a popular Bollywood movie was a sarcastic commentary on their own struggles of claiming waste which seemed beyond reach. In this movie, the protagonist actor under challenging circumstances secretly crossed into the highly militarised India-Pakistan to reunite a little speech-impaired girl with her family after the child had become separated from her guardian during the journey to the Indian side. “The wires are no less than the India-Pakistan border” said Abdul, inciting the conflicted relationship between India and Pakistan since Independence which is often visualised in the Indian media. [End of Vignette] The wall embodies the threat to the lives of the waste workers as they work at strategies for crossing the wall. It reflects the anxieties and disjunctures in their lives around their perception of belonging, boundaries and the desire for reconciliation with what used to be theirs, now on the other side of the wall. Crossing the boundary was an act of victory for them and they imagined themselves as a hero who fought through hardships. The parallels drawn in the interview reveal the fragile connections of the waste workers with the dumping ground, which is not limited to economic dependence but revolves around questions of iden-

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tity, belonging and survival. The wall is a marker of separation, based on which they express their old ties and connection with the dump and all that it consists of. There is a sense of claim and ownership over waste and the need to access the other side where they see themselves as heroes who earn rewards for their families. These victories over the wall are allegories that reveal their acute structural deprivation in the city and their fragile existence, both of which are in the process of erasure. Defiance was expressed against the high security measures by breaking the doors of a watch tower and more interestingly, by extracting the metal frame from its windows. These creative ways of resistance are an assertion of the capabilities of the waste workers to transgress boundaries and also condemn the BMC’s silence about their plight by selling materials that were owned by the state. The scrapping of materials from the state’s architecture should place our attention on the absence of political recognition, and the invisibility of these communities which have survived threats of eviction. For those who build their lives by extracting value from the material excretions of the city, the endeavours of surviving in the interstices of the urban space of Deonar involve resilience towards continually changing built environments. What comes into view at moments of defiance is the labour that these communities put in to make valuable the land that they squat on and materials that they work with. Materials become an important expression through which dissent is expressed and it is through entangled passive and active everyday practices of appropriation that they respond to the built infrastructures of the state engineers. Most waste workers preferred working at the dump during the day, and only a handful of them (only men) said that working at night was more profitable as there were fewer competing claims, so more quantities were collected individually. Visiting the dump at night involved greater risks as the terrain of the dump was full of pointed objects leading to grave injuries. The waste workers battled fierce dogs, rats and poisonous insects along with the threat of the criminal mafias and security guards. The wall changed people’s work schedules and routes. At night the risk of getting caught was minimal due to the low

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

light conditions at night and it was easy to spot security jeep headlights or hide in the darkness. The previous system of getting reclaimed recyclables transported out to the scrap dealer’s shop with the help of outgoing empty vehicles was not possible anymore because of strict security checks at the exit points. Given the controversial nature of the issue, the waste vehicle drivers refused to collaborate with the waste workers. The existing flows of waste altered since the wall sealed the dump and the security regulated the passage of people. Quantities of waste transported out of the dump fluctuated depending on the physical strength of waste workers to run out with their collectibles. The waste workers were unable to carry out heavy loads and instead packed light items with which they could manage to cross the wall. Only a cursory segregation could be done as the threat of being caught always loomed over the workers. Consequently, metals or wires or heavy plastic items were left out, and the panni or thaili (light plastics) were collected. This significantly reduced the quality and quantity of supplies to the scrap merchants. It is important to consider the mechanism of tacit arrangements in order to understand how the segregation activities functioned before and after the fire. Previously, the waste workers paid a token fee to the drivers of the waste vehicles which served two functions; first the drivers would inform them about the time their waste vehicles entered the site as this information was critical for waste workers to get exclusive access to the incoming waste. The value of municipal solid waste always depended on its temporality such as its freshness, age, chemical modifications, increasing or decreasing value with time. The freshness/staleness of the garbage, though critical in extracting value from waste, became secondary as navigating the dump free of violence was more important, making it essential to ensure timely entry and exit from the dump. Secondly, the drivers also helped the waste workers transport the waste to the scrap dealers which were located in Shivaji Nagar or Mandala. The drivers of the vehicles would help load their collection and take it to the scrap dealers through the main entrance while the waste workers took a shorter route to the scrap shops in the slum. For this, arrangements were made with the security guards at

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the entrance of the dump so that weighing of the incoming and outgoing vehicles could be manipulated in official records. Post-fire, new associations were sought to cope with uncertainty. The wall rerouted the flow of people and materials by shifting them to new routes and actors. The informal scrap dealers found ways to continue functioning with minimum amounts of waste physically transported by waste workers to their shop. The composition of materials changed from a varied range of metals and plastics to only lighter durable recyclables. These channels of money exchange between the driver and security at the main gate stood disrupted as the guards refused to accept bribes anymore because of the strict monitoring and increased attention on the governance of the dump after the High Court order. The watchmen emerged as important figures. They are ranked as the lowest in the hierarchy of the security team but most of them lived in the bustees of Shivaji Nagar and already knew the waste workers. The watchmen would warn them about the security personnel’s visiting times by assuming the role of protecting the waste workers in lieu of sums of money or favours. The impact of the wall on human lives reveals both an interface for opportunities (to resist the exclusion in society) and conflict. It symbolises that the waste workers’ acquired knowledge of materials and skills to segregate waste are made redundant in the new waste regimes. The wall fractures the spatial belongingness of the waste workers who have spent their lives at the dump. These associations which are more than economic are embedded in a cultural space that has developed over time as people began living and working there. If the wall is a marker of the boundary of the state’s property it is occasionally a marker of the limits to their power too. Whenever we see the security9 or hear the whistles we try and run, at least till the wall because they have authority only within the limits of the walls and not beyond it. The wall sometimes saves us; the personnel who chase us have to stop at the wall. They cannot do any harm

9

Referring to the security personnel of the private company (not watchmen).

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

even if they can see us just outside it (Tamija, personal communication, 16 September 2016). The border is used as a territorial limit to demonstrate that the waste workers are illegal only within the perimeters of the dump and not in the slum. Once they step out of the dump they assume multiple identities rather than being an illegal trespasser. The distinction between the dump as a state space and the slum as a safe space is reproduced through the transgressions taking place every day. Crossing over the wall ensures the waste workers obtain daily earnings to provide sustenance for their families. Territorial assertions by the guards and appropriation of boundaries is done by both the state and the waste workers. If one route closed, people and materials found other ways, and in the process transgressed boundaries. However, the transgressions pose a challenge for the BMC who wanted to control both the flows of waste and the land. Interestingly, the wall topped with a barbed wire (see Figure 10) became a boon for some of the economically better-off residents of the area as it prevented the garbage from spilling across the road into their neighbourhood. They supported the construction of the wall. A week before the city council elections in Mumbai, I met Mr Bhai, an aspiring ward councillor, who invited me to his house, which was well furnished with a widescreen TV, an air conditioner and microwave. These furnishings are not unusual in the bustee but exhibited the material class difference between the extremely marginal waste workers and other inhabitants.

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Figure 10: The wall with people crossing over to access the dump.

Source: photograph by author.

Mr Bhai was a businessman residing just outside the dump who told me how the wall was beneficial for the neighbourhood, “Whenever there is a fire at the dump the smoke comes this side. The wall is helpful to us because in the monsoons when it rains heavily, the sludge from the garbage would overflow to our side, but now the wall stops runoffs and keeps this area clean” (personal communication, 19 February 2017). On asking why he had not moved to any other affluent part of the city he said, “We built this house when there was nothing here and today we own this so why should I give away this piece of land which is so scarce in the city.” Even though the waste workers and other inhabitants reside in close proximity to the dump they derive different values from it. For the economically better off the boundary wall helps to contain the waste and improve their living conditions. The wall, along with

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

other security structures, acts as a tool for the Municipal Corporation for territorialising their control but this takes place by de-territorialising materials, people and places from the larger metabolic process of the city i.e. by displacing people and fragmenting their social space. While these contested spaces represent a disjuncture (Erdi-Lelandais, 2014) between the perception of the engineers and the lived space of the people at the dump, the lived experiences are heterogeneous based on social status, contacts, networks, class, political affiliation etc.

The chasing act: circulation of fear and anxiety During the period of the study, two authorities were assigned to secure the site, the first was a private company (Eagle Security & Personnel Services) and after that the Maharashtra State Forces (known as MSF) were recruited. In the beginning, when I visited the site in August 2016, Eagle Security was positioned along with a group of watchmen provided by the BMC. In October 2016, a change in the contract was made following the High Court order, and the state security forces were newly deployed with an increase in the number of BMC guards and security personnel. The justification given by BMC for bringing in the state security forces was that they were not answerable to the local police, therefore could make direct arrests. The waste workers who stealthily entered the dump were sometimes caught and asked to produce a valid permit. Initially the guards, including the security personnel and the watchmen, asked the waste workers to leave but when they repeatedly spotted the ‘outsiders’ within the secured premises, they started to threaten and chase them, often being violent. The waste workers when chased were frequently beaten, hit with lathis (sticks), their collections of waste confiscated, and they were followed by the authorities in vehicles. In my interviews with the waste workers they confided that they had started perceiving themselves as thieves who enter secured premises to steal something that does not belong to them anymore.

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The waste workers could distinguish between the change in security as the cases of physical violence increased during the deployment of the private company. Initially the MSF tried to engage in a dialogue with people and advised them to look for alternative jobs but it was not long before their relations with waste workers came under strain. Surveillance and security worked hand in hand, while guards posted in the security towers maintained a close check, other personnel conducted regular checks in their vehicles to secure the area. If a worker was observed entering the dump, their collections would be confiscated while security personnel would intimidate them with sticks and make threats to force them to leave. Anyone not obeying was put into a vehicle and taken to the main office at the entrance of the dump for interrogation.

Vignette 2 – Violence on women One day I went to Shanti Nagar to meet Shakuntala, a 48-year-old waste worker who had allowed me to accompany her on days when she went around the bustee doing voluntary tasks for the Kachra Vechak Seva Sangh (KVSS). The KVSS is a registered organisation for and by the waste workers of Deonar that supports their collective. That day I got to know that Shakuntala had been arrested and had spent two days in the lock-up along with three other women. In one of our meetings after her release, she shared the events following her arrest. Shakuntala explained: We had invited some media persons to come who asked me to take them to the dump to take stock of the situation. They promised to write about our miseries in the newspaper so that it creates pressure on the BMC…about how we were not being allowed inside [the dump] and are tortured by the [security] guards. At that moment, a small girl whom I know came and told me that her mother had not returned from the dump. Hearing this, I decided to go further inside the dump to look for her, but I landed myself up in an unfortunate situation. Her mother along with two women were caught and held up by the security guards. As soon as I appeared at the scene they caught me too

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and put us in a jeep and drove to the Shivaji Nagar police station. We were in lock-up for two nights after which the police took us to the Kurla Court the next day….In the Court, the judge [magistrate] found us innocent, and he warned the security guards not to bother the poor waste workers and asked them to release all of us (personal communication, 24 October 2016). [End of Vignette] For many women like Shakuntala, being chased became a routine experience. They narrated stories of how they found their way over the wall and the violence they faced from the security guards who hit them with sticks. On their way to reach the spot where the trucks dumped the garbage in loops,10 they were noticed or caught collecting recyclables by the guards who would then blow whistles to inform the other guards to chase them. Sometimes the guards chased them out of the dump or hunted them down to arrest them. The private guards did not have the authority to make arrests so they took them to the nearest police station. The waste workers were well acquainted with the terrain of the dump, but in practice found it difficult to run and exit the site because of the unevenness of old compacted garbage. To provide increased safety, they started going in pairs or small groups as it was easier to keep watch in all directions. On spotting a guard they would quickly inform others working nearby. 10

These are points inside the dump where the waste workers segregated the garbage. Then they place the sorted waste into burlap bags and load them into the same empty vehicles which had dumped the garbage. At the time, the recyclable bundles collected from 10–20 people would be loaded on the garbage truck which would then transport it to the scrap dealer. In most of the cases, the scrap dealer was already selected. The scrap shops were on the periphery of the dump, populating Road No. 15 and Rafique Nagar. The driver of the vehicle would take in the bags of segregated garbage in exchange for a fee which he would also share with the security guard at the official exit gate who was employed by the BMC to weigh the outgoing vehicles. One or two of them would escort the collection of bundles to ensure it reached the corresponding scrap merchant.

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The waste workers employed new tactics to enter the dump but many women and older workers were caught. Tamija, who had returned from work one afternoon, much before her usual work times said: I had to come back early today because the guards chased me. I did not run away or move on seeing them. Instead, I continued working. However, then he [the guard] came to me and started abusing and hitting me with sticks; he also confiscated my collection…why should we run away when we have been working on this dump for 15 years? (personal communication, 12 December 2016). Women, particularly, found it difficult to run swiftly through the uneven terrain when they saw the guards, resulting in either getting caught or hurting themselves while speeding through the garbage of metals, glass pieces and boulders. Once, two women joked about an incident where one of them fell while running on spotting a security guard. Shamina described how her friend fell and rolled down through the hilly terrain while trying to save herself from a chasing guard. “She fell down while we were running for our lives. We saw she had tripped but we continued running without stopping to pick her up [laughing] and then she saw we didn’t stop so she got up herself and resumed running again!” She adds, in a satirical glance at her friend, “we don’t pick up those who fall down” (personal communication, 15 January 2017). The joke reflects the self-perception through which waste workers equate their own lives as worthless. They run for their lives in an everyday ordeal, at times returning without their collected materials and hence without daily earnings to support their family. In this circulation of fear both people and materials get left behind as they try to make way to reach the boundary wall to exit. Kamli, another female worker, felt that one guard is enough to chase ten women at a time. There are 15 guards around a spot at any time, and they all patrol around the area every hour except for lunchtime. If we see that we know one of the guards or if he is too old, then we don’t run as fast. It is an everyday ordeal for survival. We have to take care of the ‘maal’ [col-

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lections] from theft inside the dump as there are suspicions of theft by the guards…our luck is not so good that we can go to the garbage dump every day (personal communication, 15 January 2017). The fieldwork revealed that women were adversely affected as a result of the ban. Most of the waste workers were women because the proximity to the dump allows them to work without travelling large distances to other parts of the city. Easy access to the dump enables them to perform care work at home and also engage in more than one job to earn extra income. Secondly, the new paths identified by waste workers to enter the dump required them to be fit and swift in navigating the dump without getting caught by the security guards. It was primarily women who got caught and suffered injuries while relatively younger men managed to safeguard themselves and leave, making time a critical aspect to their safety. Trespassers experience the violence meted out on the orders of the state through repeated incidences of arrests and pleading before the law which produces them as law-breaking subjects. The bodies of vilified waste workers are used to reproduce their placeless-ness by pushing them to testify before a court of law or even more informally, before private security guards. In the official trajectory of disciplining the subject through legal-formal restrictions, the security officials hitting and punishing the waste workers in their individual capacities seemed arbitrary. While the courts often did not penalise their violations, the guards sometimes harassed the waste workers for hours or released them in exchange for money. The state’s official ban was challenged by the whims of the security guards who deviated from official protocols. Clearly the guards acted on diverse interests which allowed for the transgressions and defied the territorial aspirations of the developmental state. At this point, it is useful to consider that the imagination of the state being referred to is not only fragmented by multiple logics as an institution but its functionaries who execute its visions and mediate across a spectrum of identities and roles. The wall is emblematic of boundaries which define what is valuable from the profane, the inside from the outside, but it is also through these encounters that take place in the reproduction

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of boundaries that power relations are reproduced. The violence of the state is not limited to arresting the waste workers but also in making them illegal through legal tools and hence forcing them to seek ways to protect their lives. Their identities as waste pickers and as inhabitants of an illegal slum compounds to render them subjects of spatial cleansing.

The photo-pass We know that the people trying to enter are poor people who live on garbage, but we have orders from above. Initially, we also told them not to enter the ground and that it’s not allowed, but they refuse to listen. We now directly take them in the car and get them here at the entrance office [of the dump] and after enquiring send them to the police chowki [police station]. They are fined and their passes are confiscated (security guard, personal communication, 2 February 2017). A security guard, Chitre, from the private security agency employed to protect Deonar explained that they have been ordered to catch any trespassers attempting to cross the wall. The private security guards at the dump refused to talk to me given the controversial nature of the issue. The tension between confiscation of passes and arrests was puzzling as those passes were already invalid, so it is unclear why confiscation of passes was treated as a punishment for the waste workers along with arresting them. A newspaper report published four months after the fire (Sarkar, 2016) reported that the Municipal Corporation had decided to issue new ID cards to the waste workers at a nominal cost. The card was designed to be biometric and the SWM department of the BMC planned to install devices with facial recognition features to allow reentry of the waste pickers to the dump. However, the promises made in the public media were not reflected in the meetings with the waste workers. The SWM department officials evaded confrontation with the waste workers and could not provide a plan to either allow their entry

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or alternately integrate them into the formal system. Protection of public land was their priority more than resettling the livelihood of those displaced; moreover, they did not have a plan for the displaced workers. The local NGOs involved who were to issue the passes eventually started withdrawing their support after the fire controversy. Every time they approached the BMC with their advocacy for the waste workers they were informed that securing the dump was a public health issue which could not be risked by allowing anyone inside. Adil, a waste worker from Shanti Nagar, observed: We don’t have the pass and that is the reason for being chased out; the guards ask us to show valid IDs and of course we don’t have any. The old pass which had been issued by Apnalaya is invalid. The guard keeps asking us to produce a valid photo-pass; he knows we cannot get one because the only way to get authorised permission is from the BMC (personal communication, 17 February 2017). The photo-pass was the only trusted document that the waste workers had received that provided them with proof of identity and kept them safe from the risks that came with working at a dump, even though for the BMC it served to regulate their entry. Documentary proof such as applications, IDs, and photo-passes are extremely important for the urban poor to prove their citizenship in the absence of substantive rights and entitlements. The process of arranging paper documents entails navigating complex networks so that the poor can make claims and demand protection from criminalisation. Appadurai refers to this as “governmentality from below” (2001, p. 34) where the urban poor, sometimes with the help of NGOs, undertake self-enumeration through radical informal ways to gain legitimacy and overcome invisibility in the eyes of the state. The concept of the photo-pass is not limited to this particular ID, but the term is common in slums to refer to a document having the capacity to prove or disprove legality of tenure. Any paper document which serves as an ID card is attributed high significance. Anand (2017) argues that the reason urban settlers mobilise water connections or other public utilities is because it helps them to establish

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their citizenship. The legal water connections do not just deliver water, but they also deliver legality, proving the customers to be law-abiding based on which they can claim citizenship. For the claims of the poor to be recognised, these marginalised populations “meticulously mobilize the correct languages, papers, materials, and practices that document their presence in the city” (Anand, 2017, p. 15). The waste workers are also slum dwellers; they battle other similar pressures to prevent eviction, demolitions, or displacement while asserting their claims to access waste. They are required to prove their identity repeatedly. Waste workers revealed that they had used their photo-passes to secure health services as they were marked with the BMC’s emblem which grants them legitimacy to secure public services by mimicking municipal employees. Any piece of paper, old or new, is carefully stored by the waste workers as they are regularly faced with the challenge of proving their identity and citizenship. Cancellation of any proof of identity can be a source of anxiety and uncertainty. The waste workers association, KVSS, repeatedly made visits and wrote letters to the responsible authority in the Municipal Corporation, both at the ward and the city level. The secretary of KVSS in one of the interviews told me: The BMC is no longer interested in issuing us a photo-pass. Initially, they said they would issue us biometric cards to keep a strict check on who enters the dump and also to make us accountable if any unfortunate incident takes place. All these years we have been entering the dump and working without harassment. The BMC knows we ragpickers are doing them a favour as we segregate the wet and dry waste and take the recyclables out of the dump. After the fire, they refuse to listen to our pleas (personal communication, 20 October 2016). However not all waste workers received the photo-pass in the past. Seen as a source of document validating their presence in both the slum and the dump, the process of securing the photo-pass was a highly contentious process. Not all waste workers were able to secure a photopass which was issued annually by the NGOs (until the fire took place in 2016).

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

Post-monsoon in 2016 when it was time for the annual renewal of the photo-passes as practised in the past, I observed that the board members of the KVSS, along with the NGOs administering the distribution of the photo-passes, exercised their discretion to decide who would get the photo-pass. This was done arbitrarily based on personal contacts; the scrap dealers who often doubled as dealers and waste workers were removed from the list. As a result, the number of people who officially possessed the pass was much less (500) than the actual number estimated by the NGO to be associated with the dump (around 1,500). Consequently, these decreasing numbers in NGO records exacerbates the invisibility of these communities. In a city where most of the population works in the informal sector, the task of recording their number is not only challenging but has not been attempted by the state except when these populations threaten the urban order or demand resettlement. Many waste workers who applied for the photo-pass every year did so irrespective of having other part-time jobs. The dump was a safety net for them during hard times and by owning the photo-pass they could secure the possibility of accessing the dump at any point in time. The partisan and skewed process of issuing the photo-passes exacerbates exclusion of those who fall in the lowest rungs of the community. When the state as an institution invalidates the photo-passes of workers, it disregards and makes invisible the existence of those who are not even officially accounted by the NGOs. Those with no history of photo-passes to show, even if expired, shared that they do not share equitable grounds amongst their community members to fight for their claims. This chapter shows that the state reorders urban space which is inhabited by the urban poor through official narratives and altered practices in that space. Exclusion is legitimised through a reading of laws, policies, government orders and PILs. The urban poor, the street vendors, slum dwellers, pavement dwellers and waste workers live and work often on public land due to the city’s failure in providing them with secure housing and employment. The labour of these communities enables the social production of the city. Their presence is tolerated in public spaces as long as they can be used for their labour by dominant

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state-market drivers. They are actively made invisible by the production of formal, legal spaces against which those who fail in proving their legitimacy are rendered as encroachers, outsiders and illegal. The circulation of fear and anxiety propagated by the uncertainties at the site reconfigured the circulation of flows and materials, thereby shifting the socio-spatial relations at the dump. In the case of material space, the fear of circulating discarded waste material has led to engineering of spaces for its containment and controlled circulation. Containment of waste aims to put waste in its rightful place: commonly, the bin or the dump. Containment, underlined by fear of leakages and contamination of unwanted matter, is only possible through circulation i.e. by shifting the risks posed by those materials to other spaces by redefining boundaries of inside and outside, clean and dirty and attributing moralities and aesthetics. Circulation of waste is more than a mere flow of discarded materials; the process involves leakages, erasures, meaning-making and value struggles. In the case of the circulation of uncertainty, the mechanism used for displacing waste workers is the absence of official responses to rehabilitate them and/or integrate them as per the national policies. The circulation of fear and violence at the site by representatives of the state de-territorialises them from their work, materials and movements; it reconfigures their material practices. Construction of the wall displaces both the people and their labour from the very process of city making. The wall in its figurative and emblematic sense is supported and maintained by circulating and reviving discourses of difference i.e. by defining the ‘other’ in multiple ways, and producing “positions of empowerment and disempowerment” (Swyngedouw, 2006, p. 115). Though the wall may appear as just an infrastructure, it weaves in with itself a whole range of activities that tend to manifest the ‘othering’ from the ‘us’. The us represents the legal city – the government, the decision-makers, the elite residents – while the other are socially unwanted groups in the city who are seen as a homogeneous group of encroachers made illegal by using legal tools. As revealed in a personal interview (7 March 2017) with BMC’s assistant supervisor who had previously worked for ten years at the dump, the waste workers

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were the ones who helped to douse the fire as the untapped methane caught smaller flares at the dump. There were narratives of drug lords and criminal mafia groups operating at the dump at night involved in other law-violating activities but the government departments failed to differentiate between the miscreants, using them as a single category to expel unwanted groups and cleanse the space. The wall creates a distance between the two sides, the inside being valuable and in need of protection. However, physical boundaries can seldom act as watertight compartments and instead become the interface through which leakages and spillovers are mediated. In this chapter, I have argued that a circulation of fear is necessary for the state to enforce the physical boundaries created to safeguard its resources. However, I have also shown that exclusions of the waste workers are legitimised by the state through repeatedly identifying them as a nuisance in the narratives produced by the engineers and bureaucrats. Attempts by the BMC to contain waste and restrict certain communities of people by making them illegal is challenged by transgressions that take place, often through ambiguous arrangements within formal processes as well. The criminalising of people, apportioning blame, and containment of waste is a spectacle that allows informal transgressions across the boundary wall; in other words it restores informal access to the dump by shifting existing practices and reconfiguring social relations. At the same time, violence against the waste workers and their criminalisation credits more power to the state, not necessarily to immediately displace the waste workers but to make them easily disposable. This chapter begins with the view of society through a Lefebvrian lens which provokes us to consider waste and space in the process of making. Taking a Lefebvrian approach offers a perspective to study the production of space. However, in this case it does not adequately recognise that the dump is not crafted only by the dominant knowledge producers of the state but that these processes are negotiated and shaped differently by state functionaries along with the marginal communities. While the Lefebvrian approach has been a pioneering shift within geography to see space as a social construct, it has been ques-

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tioned by postcolonial urban scholars who argue that it is not sufficient to understand the politics of place-based practices. As a heuristic lens it helps to explain transformations of and in space through the conflicts emerging from the interaction of the three domains of space. The question remains, in which ways can we engage in a granular analysis of inhabitants’ responses to the practices of the state, while at the same time avoiding homogenised understanding of the state? Towards this, the chapter argues for an analysis of the micro-politics of everyday life which can reveal the dynamic configurations through which the lived space is produced at the dump. Epistemologically, investigating the field by tracing practices (ways in which the actors interact, exchange and transgress) can help us go beyond the reproduction of binaries like formal–informal, legal–illegal, us–them etc. Taking this approach can prevent absolute homogenising interpretations of categories like the state and waste workers while allowing us to look into specific political exchanges and the multiple identities of actors. Deonar has been constructed as a contested space (see Chapter 1), through formal–informal relations spanning legal–illegal, planned–unplanned and tacit–written arrangements by multiple actors including state functionaries. I also show that the state is not a single entity, neither does its functionaries always work through formal domains, instead it can be argued that the state engages in informality that enables it to oscillate between its strong and weak positions. The plans and vision of the state are challenged and negotiated, not just by the urban poor but by state functionaries (e.g. security guards) who act in disparate ways often outside formal structures. The coalitions between actors accrete different materialities and agencies across a spectrum of power relations which come together to shape the practices and flows across the dump. The space is not only contested by formal state institutions but it is entangled with the local politics of Shivaji Nagar and of Mumbai in general. It is the everyday practices of people living around the site which contribute to the rhythms and asymmetries of life that make the dump.

Wall and boundaries: Reproduction of uncertainty

References Anand, N. (2017). Hydraulic city: Water and the infrastructures of citizenship in Mumbai. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/97808223 73599 Appadurai, A. (2001). Deep democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. Environment and Urbanization, 13(2), 23–43. https ://doi.org/10.1177/095624780101300203 Bayat, A. (2010). Life as politics: How ordinary people change the Middle East. Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789053569115 Benjamin, S. (2008). Occupancy urbanism: Radicalizing politics and economy beyond policy and programs. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(3), 719–729. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2 427.2008.00809.x Burte, H., & Kamath, L. (2010). The violence of worlding. Economic & Political Weekly, 140(July), 1–32. Caldeira, T. P. R. (2000). City of walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. University of California Press. Erdi-Lelandais, G. (Ed.). (2014). Understanding city: Henri Lefebvre and urban studies. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Holston, J. (2008). Insurgent citizenship disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans. Ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. Ribot, J. C., & Peluso, N. L. (2003). A theory of access. Rural Sociology, 68(2), 153–181. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.2003.tb00133.x Sarkar, A. (2016, April 17). 1,000 to be issued RFID cards: Ragpickers to be back in Deonar from June. The Indian Express. https://indianexpr ess.com/article/cities/mumbai/deonar-dumping-ground-1000-tobe-issued-rfid-cards-ragpickers-to-be-back-in-deonar-from-june2804399/ Simone, A., & Rao, V. (2012). Securing the majority: Living through uncertainty in Jakarta. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36(2), 315–335. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01028. x

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Swyngedouw, E. (2006). Circulations and metabolisms: (Hybrid) natures and (cyborg) cities. Science as Culture, 15(2), 105–121. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09505430600707970 Tata Consulting Engineers Limited. (2016). Development of waste-to-energy (WTE ) project at Deonar, Mumbai. http://www.environmentclearanc e.nic.in Weinstein, L. (2014). Durable slum. In globalization and community (1st ed.). University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 5 Struggles for reclaiming the dumping site We don’t want a temporary jugaad [arrangement]. Who will be responsible if something happens? ...we want secure access to the dumping ground [hum sahi tareeke se chun ne jana chahate hai]. (Sadiya, personal communication, 16 September 2016)

Speculating that the dump might never open up again for them, Sadiya, a middle-aged female waste picker, insisted on finding a ‘sahi tareeka’ (a formally recognised way) to enter the dump. The illicit violence by the security guards generated anxiety within the community, and the previous streams of waste flows were disrupted. The waste worker community now deliberated about finding legitimate ways to enter the site. They wanted formal institutional approval supporting their entry as against the de facto, short-term arrangements that they had made till now. Unobstructed access to the site does not necessarily imply a legally recognised access and the waste workers wished to secure more legitimate ways of entering the dump than stealthily jumping across its boundary wall or bribing the guards. Waste workers were not concerned about legal permission by the court but were seeking the approval of the municipal governing body, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), through a written document to legitimise their presence. Sadiya wished that their activities at the dump could be institutionally

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sanctioned. It was critical for the waste workers to protect themselves against state violence and gain legitimacy as workers. Anticipating that future waste recycling will be forbidden at the dump, Sadiya convinced some women workers to form an independent co-operative of waste workers to find alternative employment. She envisaged this organisation to be different from the existing KVSS association of the waste workers which was affiliated with the NGO Apnalaya. Establishing an only-women’s co-operative could help get work contracts by making them eligible to compete with other city organisations to secure profitable public and private contracts. Under the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) Bye-laws, a registered ‘sanstha’ (organisation) run by pickers is eligible to work at dry waste sorting centres1 set up by the BMC across the city. Sadiya’s efforts of gaining legitimacy by forming a co-operative failed because they could not fulfil the minimum financial criteria required to compete for work tenders. She lost her personal savings that she had put into the application process. The BMC promotes participatory governance and decentralisation to help more NGOs and community groups to become stakeholders in city governance but the actual application process may require proof of financial security (like bank accounts or savings) which many small self-created groups do not have access to. There is a lack of awareness amongst the working poor regarding the eligibility requirements for government schemes which makes the process inaccessible to most who struggle to read and write. Taking advantage of the situation, a middleman offered Sadiya temporary entry to the dump in exchange for a bribe of $14 per worker but refused to take any responsibility to protect them from security guards in case the workers are caught. I

1

As of 2020 there are 46 dry waste centres across Mumbai that help to facilitate recycling. The BMC provides operating space, transport vehicles and a nominal remuneration to the selected co-operative. The retrieved dry waste can be sold by the co-operatives to remunerate their waste pickers. Apart from this, the Swachcha Pabodhan Abhiyan and Parisar Vikas Programme (Mahadevia et al., 2005) are two other BMC programmes that aim to integrate informal waste workers in the city’s SWM system.

Struggles for reclaiming the dumping site

observed that as a collective, the waste workers avoided subscribing to such precarious arrangements, but as the chapter proceeds, I will show the wide spectrum of their deal-making responses that varied across their individual and collective capacities which they used for seeking legitimacy across formal–informal domains. The first part of the chapter discusses the staging of collective protests by the waste workers of KVSS, followed by a brief discussion on why their protest failed and whether the protests can be seen in the light of rights to the city. The second section goes on to discuss the negotiation strategies, mostly at individual level, which the waste workers employ to overcome power hierarchies in order to work at the dump. Recognising the heterogeneous coalitions that the waste workers form, I restrict this analysis to tracing their mobilisations observed during my field explorations.

Towards mobilisation By September 2016 the unrest within the waste worker community grew as the renewal of their working permits (the photo-pass) did not take place as in previous years. The committee members running KVSS, the waste workers’ organisation, met the local NGO, Apnalaya, for consultation on ways to reach out to the BMC officials. Mr Viraj from the NGO suggested they should approach2 the Assistant Municipal Commissioner of the ward, but the committee members wanted to take an oppositional position since all their written requests and letters had failed to yield any response from the BMC. Disappointed by the silences of the BMC, the committee members of KVSS decided to stage a collective demonstration. During the planning of the protest (dharna), the waste workers came up with strategies to pressure the BMC and make the protest as spectacular as other protests in the bustee. Protests, whether symbolic, or systematically planned, mark slum life. Such events are publicly supported by local political leaders primar2

The NGO took a neutral stand as it could not officially get involved in the protest march being a non-governmental organisation.

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ily to gain votes as protests tend to bring together a large number of residents and are advantageous for expanding political outreach. With a highly heterogeneous population, informal settlements act as hotbeds for vote bank politics along multiple axes of difference including caste, class, ethno-religious identities, gender etc. The KVSS, instead of mimicking other protests in the neighbourhood which were backed up by political parties, avoided any political party’s involvement on the advice of Apnalaya to prevent vested political interests tarnishing their solidarity. Apnalaya itself refrained from involvement in the protest in order to maintain its non-partisan image, encouraging the workers to plan their protest without external support from NGOs and political parties. By law, any form of demonstration needs to be communicated to the law enforcement agencies like the police so the KVSS informed the important authorities about their protest march, as suggested by Apnalaya. Taking help from neighbours, they wrote letters to the Assistant Municipal Commissioner of M-east ward (from now on Commissioner), the Police Commissioner of two police stations (Shivaji Nagar and Deonar police station), the political representatives, Mr Abu Azmi, the Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) and (also head of the Samajwadi3 Party) and his most renowned corporator in the area, Mr Abdul Shaikh. The vice president of KVSS, Hadi, stressed that it was important to inform Abdul Shaikh4 who worked closely with BMC and was in a position of power to ‘get things done’ for them. “Whatever we do here happens under his nose and we want him to support us; we have to face them before we face the BMC engineers,” said Hadi. The route of the protest march was mapped out to gain maximum visibility; it would begin from the NGO’s office, i.e. the southern edge of 3

4

In the 2012 BMC elections the Samajwadi party won four seats and Abdul Shaikh was one of Samajwadi’s councillors from constituency no. 132. Before the 2017 elections there was a delimitation of wards when the ward limits were rearranged before civic elections in order to ensure that the population in all wards are nearly equal. The Samajwadi party still won four seats in the area. In India, a corporator (councillor) holds a powerful position as he or she has the power to initiate or stall local developmental projects. These officials are more popular in the slums (de Wit, 2017).

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the dump (Road No. 14) and proceed towards the M-east municipal ward office. The waste workers’ agenda was to meet the senior bureaucrats and demand concrete plans for their re-entry inside the dump. If their demands were refused by the officials due to the planned closure of the site, they would ask for alternative employment provisions. After this, they planned to return back to the slum by taking a special road, the Kachra Depot (garbage depot) which is the official road leading to the dump. A member of KVSS explained to me that the ‘Kachra Depot’ was an official approach road to the dump used by garbage vehicles. Taking this official road would be representative of the demands by the waste workers to be legitimately included in the waste management system. Information about the dharna was disseminated quickly, along with the agenda and schedule for the event. Placards and banners were made for the day of the demonstration. I present an excerpt from my field notes below (Vignette 3), taken as a participant observer of the protest. It captures moments of interaction between the state and the waste workers. The waste workers decided that the protest would be led by women and children at the front of the rally, assuming that the police would not use brutal force on them in the case of a confrontation. Women formed the largest ratio of the work force at Deonar, it would also convey how not just individuals but entire families were dependent on the access to waste.

Vignette 3 – The protest On the day of the protest around 200 people assembled in front of Apnalaya’s office. The mood of apprehension, hope and uncertainty was similar to the day of election results. Hadi took to the megaphone to address the protesters. He also used the opportunity to advance his personal political agenda as a potential candidate from the Bahujan Samaj Party.5 The march finally started at 11am from Road No. 14. I soon noticed a police jeep with some police officers at the beginning of the row 5

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is a national party from North India. It represents the Bahujan, i.e. communities from low castes and scheduled tribes and

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of people, and two vans following the tail end of the rally (the setup is locally referred to as ‘police bandobast’). The rally was mainly comprised of waste workers, but some scrap dealers and slum residents who intermittently worked at the dump were welcomed to increase the number of protesters on the street. Two police officials (both men) accompanied the procession on foot. Banners, signs, a megaphone, small drums and slogans were used to attract the attention of bystanders. Big ropes were held parallel to the marching row of people to contain them and to prevent traffic jams. The workers in front held a big banner which listed their identity, affiliation and demands. Behind this, people held smaller signposts and placards in Hindi and Marathi with the following slogans: • •

• •

‘Wake up BMC and recognise our woes, fulfil our demands’ (BMC hosh me aao, humari mange poori karo) ‘We are also citizen of the country; we are not beggars; give us our rights’ (hum bhi desh ke nagrik hai, nahi kisi se bheekh maangte, hume hamara adhikar chahiye) ‘Garbage is ours’ (kachra humara hai), ‘Livelihood is our right; dumping is our right’(dumping pe adhikar humara hai), and ‘The BMC is afraid to meet our demands so puts bouncers to prevent us’ (BMC humse darti hai bouncer ko aage karti hai).

it set foot for the first time in Shivaji Nagar to contest in the 2017 municipal elections.

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Figure 11: Protest by Deonar’s waste workers against the ban on their entry

Source: photograph by author

I asked Yasmin, a woman waste worker to explain what they were demanding from the authorities. She said: Let us work inside the dump (humko chun ne do andar). We have been working here since we were kids, like 10-year-olds, and now they are chasing us away. We don’t know any other work except chun na [segregation of waste]. After 40 minutes of marching we reached the BMC local ward office, the KVSS leaders asked everyone to sit around peacefully as part of the protest demonstration. More security staff, including female security officers, awaited the protesters. People wanted to go in at once to talk to the ward officer but were stopped by the police. It was only after the protesters had chanted slogans for an hour that the Police Commissioner and a junior engineer from the department of SWM came to talk to the waste workers.

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The Police Commissioner said, “Meeting with the Commissioner is not for outsiders and only a small group of four or five core members can be allowed to go in to talk.” All the people huddled around; everyone wanted to go in and talk directly with the Commissioner. Raising his voice, the police officer warned, “Don’t you people understand that you don’t have permission to enter the dump; it is simple as that.” Even after being informed about the event, no one from the local media was present to cover their protest, unlike in the case of the middle-class protests against the fire. The meeting with KVSS committee at the ward officer’s cabin did not work in the favour of the waste workers. They were escorted out by the Police Commissioner and the engineer but this time were accompanied by a senior Chief Engineer SWM and councillor from Shivaji Nagar who was summoned by the Commissioner to defuse the protest. The SWM engineer said: This dumping ground is not under their administration6 at the ward level, so go the BMC central office and approach the Deputy Municipal Commissioner from the Solid Waste Management department as they are responsible for taking decisions about the dump. The councillor added: This is what you people don’t understand; you were freely working all this time weren’t you? No one told you anything, now after the fire you see what has happened, two of your own people were arrested, poor them! They are gone for seven years of imprisonment! Since such a big haadsa [tragedy] has taken place [referring to the fire] we are restricting you for your own betterment. You all did not listen to us and some of you kept going inside. You failed to follow the rules; there is no unity in your community. 6

Though Deonar was under the Chief Engineer’s office at the centre it was assigned to the project department for execution. Only the circulars were signed and passed through the main central SWM department but the ground execution was shared amongst the project department and the M-east-ward office (local municipal body).

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Disappointed on hearing this response a woman angrily shouted: You know what we were told inside the dump? That we should get permission from M-ward office and now you are telling us it is not BMC’s responsibility! Hundreds of households did not have anything to eat! Today we have come to get what we deserve. Observing the restless crowd, the engineer immediately attempted to leave but then stopped and said, Every time you people have come to us for various things, didn’t we work for you? Then trust us on this too and go back now, if you try to create a nuisance here then you will land up at the police station…. Look, we are not going anywhere, neither are you. The councillor promised them that he would arrange for a meeting with the Deputy Municipal Collector through Abu Azmi. He said, “I will contact bhai [brother] and that will be the best way to approach the government officials for arranging a meeting to solve your problem.” The protesters were forced to leave the ward office. From there they marched towards the Kachra Depot. On reaching the dump, the security guards allowed the rally to pass through what seemed like a checkpoint on one side and allowed them to walk to the main entrance with a board stating ‘prohibited area’ in English. Everyone gathered and sat down in front of the official entrance of the dump. Right at that moment, the local MLA’s vehicle drew up and stopped before the protesting group. The MLA had not come to the ward office to support the waste workers in negotiating with the BMC. Rumours suggested he was called by the Commissioner to ensure the protesters did not create a nuisance and disperse. Hadi explained, He says we are creating trouble so the ward commissioner had called him to check on us since he is responsible for us. We are not allowed to be here; the police can put a legal case on us for transgressing into the dump even though we are sitting here peacefully. [End of Vignette]

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The above interaction between the waste workers and the engineer depicts a paternalistic relation between the state and the informal workers. Taking the side of the BMC, the councillor in this case acts as the representative of the state and asks the waste workers to stop protesting. The BMC engineer’s invocation of past exchanges with the waste pickers is intended to remind them of their persistent dependencies on the BMC. Such a paternalist tone from the BMC representative along with the councillor can be traced to the dominant perception of waste workers as informal workers. Their claims are undermined not only by the lack of legitimacy in waste work but also by the ‘slum’ status of the settlements where these workers live. The BMC as an institution assumes a powerful position, one that has the authority to determine the future of these workers. There might be multiple other actors who act as brokers to bring municipal services to the informal settlements, such as the councillor or social workers. However, unlike the provision of other utilities such as water or electricity which is facilitated by brokers, in this case it is the Municipal Corporation which has the power to permit or refuse the waste workers their access to waste. The waste workers’ attempt to restore their livelihood by taking an institutional approach debunks a popular notion that the poor use illegal and corrupt ways to fulfil their needs. This observation counters Partha Chatterjee’s categorisation of civil and political society (Chatterjee, 2004) who says that it is only the civil society members who subscribe to law and property rights while the modus operandi for the subaltern political society lies in informal claims outside the state. He argues that political society are seen as population groups who operate outside law and are governed through strategic and ad hoc responses based on their composition and needs. While this description aptly resonates with postcolonial politics, it is problematic to assume that the poor always act outside the law due to the volatile political situations they live in. In contrast to Chatterjee’s argument, the waste pickers do not just grab any opportunity presented to them but choose the ones which reduce vulnerability and violence. Their choices may oscillate between formal or informal relations but they do recognise the formal institutions of the state as the sanctioning authority of their entitlements.

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Moreover, waste is a contested terrain where the state also claims control. The flow of waste across the city binds the formal and informal factions which work together to dispose of the city’s excess material. Even though it may seem that the informal sector functions independently outside the state, the evidence here reveals its efforts towards ensuring a legitimate access to waste which requires working with/in the formal realms of the state. The protest failed to garner a response from the authorities on many fronts. Firstly, the lack of support from the NGO and political parties left the waste workers to fight their own battle. Unlike the array of professionals available to the middle-class protesters like activists, lawyers, environmentalists and bureaucrats, the waste workers’ networks for information were limited to resources within the neighbourhood. Secondly, their claims to enter the dump did not align with the public interest discourse in the city which aimed at the immediate closure of the dump. The leader of the ruling party of Shivaji Nagar, did not actively support their cause because of political interests. His target electorates were the slum dwellers, of whom the waste workers formed a small component. Meetings with the MLA and other political leaders lead to disappointment for the waste worker community as he asked them to look for alternate livelihoods citing a better future and dignity in leaving waste work. Political networks dominate life in slums so much so that residents approach the local leaders, councillors or a social worker instead of municipal engineers. The councillors exercise a considerable degree of power in facilitating essential state services to the slum. The corporators are elected representatives of the people who work locally in their neighbourhoods to implement the policies and programmes of the municipality, but in the slums they act as facilitators who can get things done, as Hadi had mentioned before. They have direct access to people, on one hand, and the BMC on the other, so their mediation can manoeuvre people’s access to institutions of the state. Instead of acting as a bridge they can hinder their access to both the upper-level party chiefs and BMC officials. The brokers and social workers play a key role in access to services and in collecting proof of citizenship; however, this situation with the waste workers points out that this is not always the

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case and there can be varied political configurations through which the urban poor attempt to secure their needs. Some of the factors that determine how they shape political action are dependent on the nature of claims, partisan support, social status and the identity of the struggling community. In this case the middlemen, either brokers or councillors, are able to accelerate or delay the waste workers’ access to BMC officials or the MLA, but that is only a small part of a larger assemblage of processes and pressures that form the fabric of the waste workers’ struggle for legitimacy. Another aspect that emerged in the above vignette is the role of powerful members of the KVSS, individuals like Hadi, who have political aspirations but may not always act in the interest of the organisation they are working for. Personal political interests lurking within the committee further weakened their mobilisation by creating rifts between the core committee members of KVSS. Their solidarity was fragmented by the different political loyalties of their members which made inroads for vested local leaders who aspired to contest the upcoming elections by making it an election agenda. Not getting support from the ruling party in their area, the waste workers had garnered the support of opposition parties in the neighbourhood. After the protest, minor squabbles within the core committee sprang up as each of its members owed allegiance to different parties. The mobilisation amongst Deonar’s waste workers was weak. They did not succeed in uniting on the basis of their professional identity because it was difficult for the waste workers to isolate themselves from party loyalties which was essential for them to secure other urgent, daily needs in the bustee. Individual affiliations with political parties generated further contention amongst members and prevented collective mobilisation. While many KVSS members wanted to bring in their preferred party leaders to the KVSS meetings it was only those favoured by the core committee members who could make inroads into their organisation. Partisan politics within the KVSS prevented a united front in their struggle for securing their livelihoods.

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Right to waste Waste in the city is not merely a form of discard but a source of survival for many. During the initial field visits it seemed that the spatial use of the dump was central to the waste workers’ claims but further analysis of the field interviews reveals that it was ‘access to waste’ that they were demanding as a livelihood claim. The waste workers’ primary demand was to be able to work at the dump but they were open to accepting alternative places of work as long as they had access to waste materials in the city. Their struggle was not limited to the territory of the dump and extended to spaces where they could legitimately work with waste. Multiple frontiers have emerged along waste streams in the city where extracting value from materials has turned into a highly contested activity by various state and non-state actors. Deonar waste workers’ demands for alternative spaces in which they could work with waste is not just a fight against their exclusion from the dump but confronts their structural exclusion from other spaces of the city. They demanded access to materials at the dump as well as to inaccessible waste streams in the city to which only the BMC-employed sanitation workers had access. Waste workers at the dump lie at an extreme marginal position even when compared to the social status of other neighbourhood-level waste pickers in the city. The KVSS committee found an official letter issued by the Ministry of Urban Development in New Delhi that directed urban local bodies to integrate the informal waste collectors within the formal systems of the municipal bodies. The central government under Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) had made provisions to support ULBs in training their officers to incorporate informal workers involved in the collection, transportation and disposal of waste, which was mandated in the national waste management policy in 2016. The said letter by the Ministry is one of the many initiatives taken on a national level for inclusion of informal workers. It suggests ULBs should adapt successful models established by Chintan, a renowned Delhi-based NGO advocating for waste workers’ rights. The KVSS discovered the letter through a known junior overseer, a street-level bureaucrat working in M-ward SWM de-

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partment. The KVSS’s argument to get permission to enter the dump based on the letter did not yield the expected response. After repeatedly attempting to meet the Chief Engineer of the SWM department over a period of three weeks, they could finally talk to a junior engineer who told them to contact their NGO to be part of the SBM. The BMC was implementing the SBM national provisions through NGOs and co-operatives for informal pickers in the city. The BMC had decided that the 2016 mandate in SWM Rules to include waste workers did not apply to those working at the dump because of the controversial status of the dump after the fire. Under the SBM, the central ministries were issuing work orders and targets to the federal states but its implementation remained at the discretion of respective ULBs. The BMC had incorporated the waste pickers registered with the NGO SMS in the SBM programmes and these were the waste pickers who were already working in waste segregation centres in housing societies and no longer worked at the dump. Waste workers working at the dump are seen to be treated as a nuisance, more so if they are not organised or part of an NGO. The spatial belongingness of the waste workers to the dump site hindered the possibility of their inclusion in the city as they were continually discriminated against in comparison with their fellow city waste pickers. The dump as a spatial site also fulfilled the monetary and daily needs of the waste workers while providing them with an opportunity for survival. In fact, the informal recycling chain could flourish at the dump because unsegregated garbage was sent there. The BMC’s failure over the past years to ensure segregated garbage is disposed at the dump has provided opportunities for informal recyclers. In the absence of formal housing and employment opportunities, the dump provided critical support to the resettled populations to allow them to earn a living. With sanctioned, albeit tacit, informality from the state and Municipal Corporation, Deonar encouraged intimate dependencies between the materiality of the waste and the chances of survival, while in public narratives it was commonly called a toxic sink. The interaction between waste and space is complex i.e. the presence of polluting materials threatens (spatial) order or leads to the breakdown of (material) value. At Deonar, waste and space are in a dialectical tension with

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each other, i.e. waste materials add negative value to space whereby it becomes characterised as a dump site. But the process gives birth to ‘afterlives of waste’ (Gidwani & Reddy, 2011) fuelling value through human labour. The so-called waste sinks are sites for nurturing relations of belonging and identity for those who spend their lives rummaging, reclaiming and repairing materials and their lives. The dump provided much more than only livelihoods: it was a socio-cultural space of belonging. Waste workers narrated that they resorted to the dump to alleviate themselves of the stigma associated with waste work itself. It acted as a territorial protection, by working ‘inside’ the dump they succeeded in concealing their embodiment of polluting substances and it liberated them from social stigma as soon as they were ‘outside’ of it. For many, the dump allowed them to contain the stigma which they would have otherwise faced if their neighbours and relatives saw them working with garbage on the streets. Society’s discriminatory attitude towards waste forced them to continue working at the dump instead of shifting to the decent but ‘visible’ waste work opportunities advocated by NGOs. The dump was a spatial niche, a margin at the margins. In this sense, claims to the dump were both economic and cultural, aimed at restoring livelihoods and coping with social stigma. However, knowing that the dump was protected government land to which no legal claims could be made, the waste workers focused on reclaiming their right to livelihood. During the interviews that I conducted it was clear that the waste workers were ready to take up alternate forms of work opportunities but only those which involved waste segregation. They confided that identifying and separating valuable materials was the only skill that they had ever acquired. Ready to move away from the dump in dire circumstances, they believed their access to waste should be recognised legally as a right sanctioned by the institution of law. Unlike other forms of collective actions in Shivaji Nagar, which in the past have resulted in strong resistance like Ghar Banao Ghar Bachao (Bhide, 2020; Doshi, 2013; Singh, 2011; Weinstein, 2017) which successfully inversed evictions or delayed displacement, the waste workers’ protest appears to have failed in getting them formal recognition.

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While other housing movements within slums have been consolidated and able to deter state-induced displacement, the struggle of the waste workers remains fragmented. This is not to undermine their agency but the intersectional nature of their marginalisation makes it difficult for them to directly and/or indirectly manoeuver formal state institutions. Their marginal status within the slum itself prevents them from forming a strong collective front and securing active NGO support. Making a rights-based claim is not exclusive to waste workers but is embedded in their everyday struggles as slum dwellers whereby they have to frequently resist demolitions, secure essential utilities and negotiate entitlements. But, their success on one front such as housing or water access does not ensure their political win in other realms for survival. Their struggle is played out on multiple fronts, through an assemblage of actors and agencies. Intersectional lived experiences shape the collective and individual actions of the urban poor and therefore, universal claims describing their political actions should be avoided. There are multiple layers at which exclusion and its reproduction can influence the success of a community’s political struggle. The community members in this case were unrecognised waste workers living in a slum which was already located at the extremes of poverty and stigma within the city. They face the compounded impacts of marginalisation and inequality as a result of their identity, social status and profession. For instance, a female waste worker has to counter vulnerability at multiple fronts to earn a meal as compared to a man or any other woman in the slum. Given that within the waste worker community men and women are confronted with varying intensities of exclusion on the basis of gender, caste, religion etc. their lived experiences should be treated as a critical part in the co-production of urban life. Therefore, to constantly negotiate their exclusion, the waste workers resort to a range of political actions. To confront displacement the urban poor innovate multiple ways to claim rights, formally or informally, through NGOs, collectively or in individual atomistic capacities. It has been well established in the literature from the global South that the urban poor considerably leverage their material and legal exclusions to challenge disenfranchisement and

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claim entitlements both within and outside the established frameworks of citizenship. Their understanding of the dignity of labour and rights is shaped by the politicisation of their living conditions accompanied by regular confrontations with state and non-state actors. There is no generalisable trope to classify how individual actors interact with state actors: it is dependent on the nature of claim that they are fighting for. Their tactics may employ informal politics at times when formal efforts have failed them. The efforts of the waste workers are marginalised, firstly within the city, and this is starkly evident when compared with the protests of the middle class demanding closure of the dump (Chapter 3). Secondly, they remain a minority within the marginal groups themselves which becomes clear at moments when other related mobilisations are successful in the slum except their own. Political struggles invoke different logics even if they share the same location or are driven by the same set of actors. These observations raise further questions. Does this then mean that the waste workers have failed in their struggle over waste? If they had been working informally why do they claim their rights now from formal legal institutions? If urban politics takes such different forms then how can we understand it as a collective right to the city?

Everyday practices and right to the city? The spatial claims of waste workers can be interpreted as socio-spatial claims to the city because they relate to the material space of the city. For instance, the reclaiming of the Kachra Depot road during the protest by the waste workers resonates with Lefebvre’s call for the right to the city as a ‘cry and demand’ to appropriate spaces in the city. The demand for rights (referred to as haq and adhikar by protesters) to their livelihood, even though not explicitly addressed to the court, is actually oriented towards the Right to Life (Article 21 of the Indian Constitution) which forms the legal basis of securing most social rights by poor groups. Can this demand for ‘rights’ then broadly be understood as the rights to the city?

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Writing in the 1960s, Lefebvre saw the right to the city as the rights of the inhabitants of a city which can be exercised by appropriating urban space, i.e. by capturing the tools of its making. These rights are based in everyday experiences that shape the city, including the struggles and contestations. Lefebvre (1991) argues that it is through such struggles, experiences and practices that the right to urban citizenship is (re)claimed as a right to the city. The urban poor’s call for justice emerges from the right to inhabit the city, to sustain and claim spaces of the city against the dominant social and political hierarchies. But then, can the demands by the middle classes (discussed in Chapter 3) also be read as the right to the city? Contradictory agendas emerge from two diverse social groups in the city: one to shut, secure and shift the dump, the other to allow entry to the dump or the provision of alternative means of livelihood. Both can be understood as demands for the right to the city. Appropriation of urban space by the middle class employing their right to a healthy environment, and the waste workers’ everyday resistance depicts the gap between their socio-spatial status to occupy spaces in the city. This is a clear case of a citizen group’s right to health and environment impeding the other’s right to livelihood and survival: the common spatial denominator for both being — the city. The middle classes are contending with the state, but the waste workers are contesting on multiple socio-spatial fronts with both the state and the middle class in order to re-territorialise themselves back. To study the given context, a Lefebvrian approach cannot sufficiently provide the tools for looking at the power relations between groups when the rights of different groups clash with each other; each claiming a set of entitlements based on their contribution to the oeuvre of the city. For Lefebvre, the third space or the lived space is a space for action where the right to the city can be exerted by everyday actions, by being an inhabitant of the city and being able to participate in the decision-making process of the city. I have shown that the narratives of the affluent class influence the governance of the dump whereas the waste workers are sidelined by the nexus of BMC, judiciary and middle classes, who do not recognise them as legitimate stakeholders. In addition to the demand for rights being termed an elitist call for revolution by Holston

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(2009), there are dangers of collapsing these struggles into a universal call for the right to the city. In this case, as waste workers, they are unable to secure a place in the participatory processes of decisionmaking in the city or planning processes. The political formations cannot be homogenised as different claims can be shaped in completely diverse ways, some through law, others through non-governmental actors. In order to realise a Lefebrian right to the city the waste workers should ideally demand the right as users of spaces in the city, such as the centre and more privileged places and not remain in the margins. But conversely, the waste workers’ primary demands to continue working at the dump, i.e. at the peripheries, seems antithetical to the right to the city imagined by Lefebvre. Also, their forced acceptance of displacement from the dump in order to find alternative employment with waste anywhere in the city depicts a collapse of territorial claims. Contrary to Lefebvre’s preoccupation with space, it highlights the importance of material claims at the peripheries and not public or central spaces in the city. The contentions between place-based social relations and material flows (as waste) with regard to the right to the city is beyond the scope of this book and should be left open for further research, perhaps using a different framework. Holston argues that the right to the city has failed to come from the streets of Paris as Lefebvre would have imagined and has largely figured in social movements emerging from the global South cities, for instance in South Africa or Sao Paulo. Holston (2009) critiques Lefebvre on the very concept of ‘rights’ arguing that Lefebvre failed to acknowledge that social relations are embedded in power relations and that rights are sanctioned by law. Defining rights as “a social relation that distributes various sorts of powers and liabilities between people” (Holston, p. 247), Holston contends that gaining these rights requires the sanction of law. Rights have to be sanctioned and maintained by institutions. Consequently, it generates subjective powers and obligations for those who secure these rights. Even though Deonar’s waste workers are made illegal by orders of the state, they do not make oppositional claims to the state but make demands within the existing frameworks of law and the state. Underlying their insistence on the right to

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livelihood lays the access to waste. I show that waste is central to their struggle. The workers do not demand just any livelihood but specifically an employment that allows them to continue working with waste. Working with waste stands contradictory to globally accepted notions of the dignity of labour that discourage working with garbage or human waste. This claim from waste workers is based on the idea that they are skilled in identifying waste materials but lack the necessary education or training for any other job. Along with the social stigma associated with waste work, this demonstrates the vicious cycle of structural inequalities that force people working with waste to continue doing so. Such a form of marginalisation has been functional for the social reproduction of a more unequal city where the right to the city fails to shape up the political struggle in Lefebvrian ways. On the contrary, the reproduction of inequality takes place through the production of the city, and in this way a whole community is available at the disposal of the city which repairs, recycles and feeds resources into industries that continue the cycle of consumption. I now shift from the urban citizenship debates to analyse the trajectory of political actions after the waste workers’ formal demands to state institutions went unheeded. The next section focuses on moments of transgression and leakages at the dump which the waste workers participate in for their continued survival in the city. They do this through informal means as their appeal for legitimate recognition failed to get an effective response by the municipal authorities. While protests are visible modes of confronting inequalities, it is the less spectacular practices of the everyday which reveal how the urban poor negotiate a denial of their rights. The city becomes a site for analysing the continuation of everyday life through which the urban poor challenge and negotiate their exclusion. This includes stealthy acts of transgression, forging contacts, and leveraging political support. I illustrate that the continuation of everyday life at times animates and reproduces the very power relations that the community is fighting against.

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Pehchaan – forging contacts Anxieties increased within the waste worker community following the disappointing response of the BMC to the protests. Failing to provide necessary essentials for their families and exhausted from indefinite waiting the waste workers started seeking out ways at an individual level. They attempted to gain entry to the dump individually or in small groups on a daily basis. Negotiations were carried out in many ways, through personal contacts with lower-level bureaucracy,7 and patronage-client exchanges involving the use of bribes and favours. Forging new contacts or renewing existing ones become possible due to dense social networks that make up the fabric of life in informal settlements. However, not everyone has equal access to influential actors in a network; some manage to establish close links while others get left out. As one of my primary contacts in the field I spent a considerable amount of time with Malini, the president of KVSS. Malini was from the Dalit community who acquired segregation skills from her parents. They had migrated out from their village in North India when she was an infant. Malini had become an influential person within the community and was elected for president. After the protest, she approached a social worker called Bahadur who worked closely with the corporator in her ward. Knowing certain key contacts in positions of power in the bustee could facilitate in restoring long-term access inside the dump. Social workers8 are ambitious political entrepreneurs working closely to direct services and flows of funds by brokering through a porous bureaucracy (Blom Hansen & Verkaaik, 2009). They are not necessarily affiliated with NGOs but function like the charitable arms of political leaders, helping them maintain a positive public image. Bahadur was

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Street-level bureaucrats include the low-rung employees of the SWM, BMC like the security guards, overseer, Assistant Head Supervisor etc. See Björkman (2014) for detailed understanding on the functioning of social workers.

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also the ward adhyaksh9 who managed affairs of the locality under the corporator but his influence exceeded that of the corporator. Malini had approached him for his contacts and influence over the street-level bureaucracy to create another channel for pressurising the BMC. She told me: He is the MLA’s right hand and handles all the local service works for them; he is the one who actually works with the people, if we have him on our side he can raise the issue to the MLA. He is a political aspirant who wants a ticket for himself as a corporator in the next party elections. Approaching and requesting services from the political leaders was a regularised process in the settlement. The system was maintained this way because it reasserted their power while the BMC refused to provide services to a ‘slum’. As mentioned before, the councillors and party leaders controlled access to the bureaucracy in such a way that everyone from the slum had to go through them to be able to meet any administrative officials. After being disappointed at BMC’s response to their protest, requesting someone to indirectly convince the MLA seemed more plausible for Malini. But Bahadur told her that he could not do anything as his party leader did not support the opening of the dump. However, he could arrange an informal way for her to get inside. Bahadur took Malini to meet a security guard, Ibrahim, from the private company who monitored the boundary wall located in Bahadur’s area (i.e. the ward constituency he served). In an interview that lasted over three hours, Bahadur stated that his social work was dedicated to the north Indian Muslims migrants of Shivaji Nagar. He explained that he was one of this group and narrated how they were severely oppressed as compared to the more privileged Marathi groups supported

9

Member of a political party who also engages in social work mostly to maintain the goodwill of the party amongst the people. Social workers are like the foot soldiers who work with the people and are well acquainted with the needs of the constituency. The parties assign them as a president or chairperson of the ward affairs, and they work under the elected councillor.

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by the opposition party, the Shiv Sena.10 Irrespective of political differences Bahadur extended help to Malini citing her north Indian migrant background. Political aspirants like Bahadur look for people’s support, while people like Malini need theirs; it is a mutual relationship of give and take which determines how power positions are maintained. There are religious or caste biases that work behind supporting a party, but contrarily I observed that support is given to parties who assure people they will meet their demands irrespective of the caste or religion they represent. The well-defined public agendas of political parties at the state level splinter into messy criss-crossings across the intimate political networks of a slum. More than party ideologies, parties are evaluated by the people in terms of the past work done and future promises of developing infrastructure which play a role in local elections. The pehchaan (contacts) that the waste workers forge are mostly located within the slum and not higher up in the bureaucracy. Therefore, certain factors determine to what end the waste workers were able to use these channels to claim access to the dump, for example, who knew whom, who were the mediators, brokers, facilitators and decision-makers. It is important to maintain good relationships with the social workers and middlemen to survive and ‘stay put’ (Weinstein, 2014) in the slum. Malini used her newly forged contact with Ibrahim (and later with the state security agency) to enter the dump and obtain her regular daily income. Fearing accusations by other members for being a biased KVSS leader she kept her activities under wraps as long as possible. It was only later on that she managed to arrange permission for a few other women to enter the dump. Despite having Ibrahim’s approval to be inside the dump, she sometimes had to assert her position as KVSS president if another security guard questioned her. On many occasions she strategically used her position as a KVSS head to help legitimise her presence. When needed she would tell the guards that she was in the

10

Mumbai has a history of ethno-linguistic politics; discrimination is commonly invoked by the Shiv Sena who deploy ‘regional chauvinism’ (Appadurai, 2000, p. 630) by supporting the Hindus while portraying the Muslims as outsiders.

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dump to talk to the security chief and had come on behalf of the community. When she did not include other waste pickers in her visit to the dump, they resorted to similar informal strategies of going inside the dump for a few hours by tacit approval of the security guards by virtue of ‘pehchaan’ (forged contacts), bribes or favours. But their entry was temporary and many ended up getting caught by senior officers. Their relations with lower-level bureaucracy11 came to the rescue and worked in the favour of some workers who had managed to establish contact with the security personnel. Bribes and favours were offered directly to the private security personnel who ensured brief visits in the absence of the senior officials. It was observed that the core members of the association, the president, the secretary and their relatives, found it easy to get away from the police as they knew some of the security personnel. Depending on who was on duty, whether the officer was considerate enough and personally knew the individuals, they would be sent to the local police station for detention. The severity of punitive action was decided subjectively by the security chiefs. The core members of KVSS were active members of two major opposing political parties,12 the Samajwadi and the Shiv Sena who fought for elections in February 2017. They used their affiliations with lowerlevel bureaucracy, watchmen13 who lived in the same slum, local councillors, the Muqaddam and Junior Overseers (official positions in the BMC’s SWM department). New collaborations and alliances connected the informal arrangements to formal institutions that lubricated these transgressions across the boundary wall. Through such informal practices, the urban poor are able to meet their needs, but this also forms a basis for their exploitation and furthers dispossession. At the city level, 11 12

13

Refer to Benjamin (2004) to know more about how informality, slums and lower-level bureaucracy work in India by forging alliances. Each party caters to a certain section of the population, the Shiv Sena being the regional party working in the interest of the local ethnic people and having an anti-immigrant agenda while the Samajwadi party from North India target the Muslim voters. Watchmen were lower in the hierarchy than the security guards and were recruited on temporary contracts by the security agency and not by the BMC.

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these incidences add to the discourse of the slum residents being corrupt, associating their existence with illegality, crime and informality. These practices become, as Doshi and Ranganathan (2017) argue, the links between informality and corruption where the “everyday survival of the lower classes is marked by informal practices that are denounced by upper classes as ‘corrupt’ or ‘illegal’” (p. 187, emphasis in original). When the Maharashtra State Security Forces were deployed by the BMC at the Deonar dumping ground, the waste workers tried to address the MSF with the same approach of requests and bribes. Soon the waste workers alleged the state security forces, the MSF, had started taking even more money compared to the private security guards before and allowed anyone into the dump who could pay. As the news about this new barter system spread further, waste workers from other dumping sites began coming to Deonar to try their luck. It was in a similar time frame that the Mulund dump was closed down, leaving the workers there displaced and dispossessed. Given the territorial nature of claims over Deonar, this seemed problematic for the existing waste workers of Deonar. Without any collective bargaining power to prevent the invasion of newcomers from another dump, the local workers concluded that this new infiltration into their workspace was a result of their failure to leverage ‘effective contacts’ with the MSF. Money became the basis on which anyone could enter, whether or not they belonged to Shivaji Nagar. The practices of taking bribes by the security guards had disrupted the existing territorial belongingness of the Shivaji Nagar waste workers by commercialising entry into the site which alienated them further from the dump.

Money is not enough The patron-client relation today is different from the electoral politics of post-independence, wherein votes were procured from hierarchical caste-based social groups in lieu of gifts and favours. Today, the vote bank politics that has emerged in the slums has seen an expansion from caste-based vertical ties to more horizontal social ties based on identi-

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ties and interest groups which act as vote banks (Björkman, 2014). The scholarly debate on the position of the interest groups in the case of the urban poor is headed in two directions, on one hand, critics like Chatterjee (1998) and Jaffrelot (2007), argue that the exchange of votes for public utilities and concessions by the urban poor should be understood as their versatile manoeuvring of the formal institutions. On the other, scholars like de Wit (2017) argue that the voters are manipulated to cast their vote, the exchanges being based in exploitative, hierarchical relations with elected officials. My observations resonate closely with Björkman (2014) who hints towards the commodification of patron exchanges which have transformed to the extent of appearing as any other market transaction. She argues these exchanges have a temporal dimension where the voters temporarily agree to support particular parties in exchange for immediate benefits like cash-for-vote. This reduces the long-term accountability and responsibility of the party in question to be answerable to their voters once they are in power. Informal settlements require these exchanges and circulations to fulfil their needs. The transaction-like exchanges take place outside the partisan members as well, such as the security guards or amongst KVSS waste workers themselves. For instance, within the community of waste workers Malini holds a privileged position and, as I have shown in the previous section, she has successfully negotiated with other actors to enter the dump. Malini becomes the new contact person that the other community members in their individual capacities reach out to. Networks are thus always in the making, with those lower in the hierarchy striking deals with those with power. Margina, a 45-year-old woman who lived in Rafique Nagar (II), had migrated from Bangladesh in 2009 and came to reside at Deonar. In the last decade, she had lost her husband due to TB and her only son died in an accident jumping from a garbage truck. Everything in her house had been picked from the dump. Even the floor was covered with tarpaulin sheets to protect her from the muddy low-lying ground during rains, as her house was built on the waste dump. I had first been introduced to Margina when she came to meet Malini, the president of the KVSS. She came with her ‘aakdi’ (an iron tool used by waste workers

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to segregate waste) hanging across her chest. Margina revealed that her husband had accidently found a gold coin in the dump which was worth more than USD 1,400 but that he spent it on his alcohol addiction. Since the dump had been shut, she had found short-term embroidery work which required her to sit all day and was less rewarding than segregating waste. Margina declared: I want to go back to the dump. I am looking for ways to enter but I am scared of the security guards so I have come to Malini. She can help us get in as she knows people there; I don’t. I hardly talk to people this side [referring to the eastern side of the dump, the opposite end of the dump from where she lived]. I am tired of sitting at home. At work [the dump] I have colleagues I can talk to. I once approached a guard and requested him to allow me to work for one hour but he threatened me and called me names. Malini being the president must help us, I heard the core committee members are going in but not taking us along. We have elected them but they are not speaking up enough. We used to pay INR 50 (1 USD) to the drivers to carry our materials. Now money is not enough to let us go in (personal communication, 7 January 2017). Margina’s statement highlights the diversity of lived experiences in accessing the dump. In the earlier parts of this chapter I showed that the core committee members such as Malini successfully made arrangements to enter with the help of watchmen. Her position as the president of KVSS had provided her with the benefit of connections through which she negotiated with Bahadur to make further contacts. Though she belongs to the handful of people who are privileged she is able to deprive other waste workers through her power and knowledge. On the other hand, Margina is also a woman but lacks the relative privileges that Malini had gained due to her position in the KVSS. Coming from the same community, religion and slum, Margina has to put in more effort to confront her exclusion from the dump. As she says, requesting entry from the security guards or even bribing them has not helped her to collect recyclables inside. Transactions involving money and favours which facilitate access to daily needs such as filling forms and getting identity proof has not helped Margina. This

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shows that leveraging contacts with powerful actors within the slum is required more than other approaches such as bribing. The differential experiences of the two women waste workers in this chapter point towards the importance of forging contacts, through brokers, street-level bureaucrats, councillors or social workers. Knowing people in power is not enough as it is one’s political and economic position within the community that determines if they can leverage their networks in their benefit.

Differentiated violence of the everyday The study finds that to overcome the uncertainty over their livelihood, the waste workers resort to more instant measures, often in atomistic ways, to access resources to support themselves. This may appear ideologically and politically incongruous to their collective actions. Using independent techniques to ‘get through’, they engage in alternative ways of negotiation through their networks, most of the times alone or in a close-knit group with close confidants. Analysing these helps to trace networks of power and how these actors have the potential to impact the practices taking place around the dump. The politics of who can mobilise or leverage which kind of network helps us understand how the social groups are embedded in hierarchies and how these relations are (re)reproduced socio-spatially. Without going too much into the debates on citizenship, these negotiations are understood as carefully assembled strategies for legitimising claims on material space in the city. Exchanges of money or favours provide an effective way to analyse the structural inequalities irrespective of their legality or illegality. The fact that many of these waste workers fail to reach the higher strata of authority to make their demands, as accomplished by the middle class, reveals the rigid inequalities faced by them which prevent them from making rightful claims to a dignified livelihood, receiving recognition and the other necessities which are available to the rest of the city. But even then negotiations should not be seen as acceptance of the current social hierarchies. Instead, these reveal the contested boundaries which

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are made (im)penetrable for the poor. The social space reproduced is not homogeneous; each individual acts in multiple roles and identities to produce a combination of associations for survival. Unequal relations are reproduced not only between economic classes but even within the waste workers, dividing them across political networks, identities and ideologies. They are not only fighting marginalisation from the larger city but also within the slum. As a collective the subaltern actors seek formal, stable and legitimate solutions while at a personal level they are driven by the need for immediate gains, such as a day’s income, for which they resort to informal coalitions. The collective and the individual responses are deeply connected just as the formal and informal domains cannot be separated from the urban fabric. The collective and individual responses of the waste workers do not play out at different scales of action but are part of concerted efforts to secure a place for themselves in the city. After facing denial by the Municipal Corporation and politicians in response to their formal efforts demanding rightful claims to livelihood they resort to informal ways. Informal workers and the labouring poor do not create these informal paths of exchange between the state and non-state actors, instead they navigate the already existing informalities through which the state functions. The state governs through informality (Roy, 2009). Benjamin (2008) calls this ‘occupancy urbanism’ where poor groups appropriate institutions through locally embedded politics. The identity of who is a state actor and who is not does not matter as long as these coalitions and contacts are able to facilitate their access to waste. Their efforts are oriented towards legitimising their presence in the dump to an extent that the inevitable violence that they face can be negotiated. Here struggles over waste are not only value struggles in the sense Gidwani and Maringanti (2016) put across but it is also a struggle to evade state violence in order to access waste materials. I concur that the political terrain at the margins is defined by the differentiated violence of the everyday, in other words, the intersectional experiences of the waste workers become salient in negotiating the violence faced by them in their everyday struggles to inhabit the city.

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Informal arrangements do not protect them from violence as arrests and detentions do take place but it is experienced differently by individuals based on their own position in the community, whom they know and which networks they can tap into. Urban politics is read through the uneven terrain of social differences which is why powerful actors in KVSS access waste at the cost of their fellow community members. Recently scholars (Auerbach & Kruks-Wisner, 2020; Björkman, 2021) have illustrated that the mediators, also referred to as intermediaries or brokers, are critical to urban life. Social workers act as intermediaries who may not wield the absolute institutional power of the councillors they work for but can be far more influential in getting things done. These intermediaries create paths for transgressions across the highly secured boundary wall of the dump with the help of security guards who do not always act on state logic. In other words, the boundaries of the state are porous, i.e. the state itself functions through informality. The relatively privileged waste workers stretch the slippery boundaries of the state security apparatus through political contacts such as Bahadur i.e. by using common religio-ethnic identities. This complicates the understanding of the security personnel and watchmen as state actors because they sometimes act according to, or in opposition of, the formal state logics. It needs to be remembered that the state had tacitly allowed the waste economy to thrive around Deonar; therefore, the dump was not unregulated but governed through less regulated, implicit arrangements. Not all state-employed security guards act in individual transgressive capacities but it is through violence that they assert their control as a formal state actor. The production of space by the state actors (discussed in the previous chapter) and its negotiation through transgressive acts like jumping across the wall, running from guards or refusing to run when caught, are necessary to reproduce the urban margins. Whether waste workers mobilise, actively protest or make quiet encroachments, it is through their everyday acts of survival that questions of access and exclusion play out. This is in contrast to the spectacular and counter hegemonic forms of resistance that are commonly understood as resistance. It is problematic to try to fit these everyday actions into categories. Using independent and isolated techniques to

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‘get through’ or manage their entry, the waste pickers engage in alternative ways of negotiation through their networks. Analysing these helps to trace networks of power and how these actors have the potential to impact the practices taking place around the dump. The politics of who can mobilise or leverage which kind of network helps us understand how the social groups are embedded in hierarchies and how these relations are (re)reproduced socio-spatially. These negotiations are understood as carefully assembled strategies for legitimising claims on material space in the city. For instance, there can be symbolic forms of struggle where the suppressed communities negotiate and continue their everyday lives in the city. Through the continuation of the everyday, they challenge the structures of power, i.e. not by refusing them in totality but by making inroads and claims through their practices. The everyday is not mundane but a site where new political formations get shaped; it is not always emancipatory but can function to exacerbate existing injustices. The frameworks which are available to the waste workers are still based on institutions of law and the state which is why they wrote letters and pleas to the BMC as the administrating body. The claims to waste livelihood resembles an incremental encroachment as described by Bayat (2000) but it is distinct from his broad understanding of everyday resistance in the sense that the waste workers act not just against the state but secure access at the expense of their fellow community members. They appropriate the state’s security infrastructure by leaving behind others to avoid competition and maintain their privileged positions. This counters Bayat’s understanding of political struggles and I argue that instead of being trapped in categorisation of their struggles as resistance, quiet encroachment or insurgent claims, what is critical here is how and when are they able to assert their claims and from whom. Their strategies, collectivities are embedded in the politics of slum life and keep shifting along multiple axes of identity, class, caste, ethnicity etc. depending on the issue they are fighting for. For example, in his study in Brazil, Holston (2009) notes that after a long process of de facto claims and land conflicts, the marginalised populations have been able to secure legal rights over their auto-constructed housing.

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Similar claims have been successfully made by slum dwellers in Mumbai; in fact the residents of Mandala (many of whom are waste workers) have participated in anti-eviction movements with NGOs. However, the waste workers continue being displaced and dispossessed. Their claims remain fragmented, and they do not enjoy the collective victories experienced by fellow slum dwellers who succeed in claiming social justice through legal ways even if they occupy public lands. They are not only fighting marginalisation from the larger city but also from within the slum. More, importantly, the embodiment of violence is implicitly embedded in working with waste; therefore, the negotiation of violence has been an ongoing process which has pushed only certain resettled groups into waste work. The waste workers form a minority as they are a small population who are at the margins within the slum communities. Even within the waste pickers at the city level, those working at dhalaos (Kornberg, 2019) or as municipal labourers (called sanitation workers and not waste workers) have better bargaining powers through unions and negotiations than those at the dump who are excluded from most emancipatory efforts. As illustrated above, the national waste policies which mandate inclusion of the informal sector are suspended in the case of dump site waste pickers. There are intimate connections between waste and exclusion which make the struggles of waste workers distinct from any other protest movement existing in the slum. Waste workers, most of whom are Dalits and religious minorities, face extreme marginalisation even if their representatives are in power. Those in the lowest strata continue facing exclusion and remain in the interstices of the city, actively suppressed, made invisible in the city to face the disdain associated with waste work.

References Appadurai, A. (2000). Urban cleansing: Notes on millenial Mumbai. Public Culture, 12(3), 627–651.

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Auerbach, A. M., & Kruks-Wisner, G. (2020). The geography of citizenship practice: How the poor engage the state in rural and urban India. Perspectives on Politics, 18(4), 1118–1134. https://doi.org/10.1017 /S1537592720000043 Bayat, A. (2000). From “dangerous classes” to “quiet rebels”: Politics of the urban subaltern in the global south. International Sociology, 15(3), 533–557. https://doi.org/10.1177/026858000015003005 Benjamin, S. (2004). Urban land transformation for pro-poor economies. Geoforum, 35(2), 177–187. https://doi.org/10.1016/J. GEOFORUM.2003.08.004 Benjamin, S. (2008). Occupancy urbanism: Radicalizing politics and economy beyond policy and programs. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(3), 719–729. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2 427.2008.00809.x Bhide, A. (2020). Everyday violence and bottom-up peace building initiatives by the urban poor in Mumbai. International Development Planning Review, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2019.27 Björkman, L. (2014). “You can’t buy a vote”: Meanings of money in a Mumbai election. American Ethnologist, 41(4), 617–634. https://doi.or g/10.1111/amet.12101 Björkman, L. (Ed.). (2021). Bombay brokers. Duke University Press. http s://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1kgdff6 Blom Hansen, T., & Verkaaik, O. (2009). Introduction – urban charisma: On everyday mythologies in the city. Critique of Anthropology, 29(1), 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X08101029 Chatterjee, P. (1998). Community in the East. Economic and Political Weekly, 33(6). Chatterjee, P. (2004). The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/1 0.4324/9781315182094-3 Doshi, S. (2013). The politics of the evicted: Redevelopment, subjectivity, and difference in Mumbai’s slum frontier. Antipode, 45(4), 844–865. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01023.x Doshi, S., & Ranganathan, M. (2017). Contesting the unethical city: Land dispossession and corruption narratives in urban India. Annals of the

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American Association of Geographers, 107(1), 183–199. https://doi.org/10 .1080/24694452.2016.1226124 Gidwani, V., & Maringanti, A. (2016). The waste-value dialectic. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36(1), 112–133. htt ps://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-3482159 Gidwani, V., & Reddy, R. N. (2011). The afterlives of ,‘waste’: Notes from India for a minor history of capitalist surplus. Antipode, 43(5), 1625–1658. Holston, J. (2009). Insurgent citizenship in an era of global peripheries. City and Society, 21(2), 245–267. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-744X.2 009.01024.x.City Jaffrelot, C. (2007). Voting in India: Electoral symbols, the party system and the collective citizen. In R. Bertrand, J.-L. Briquet, & P. Pels (Eds.), The hidden history of the secret ballot (pp. 78–99). Indiana University Press. Kornberg, D. (2019). Garbage as fuel: Pursuing incineration to counter stigma in postcolonial urban India. Local Environment, 24(1), 1–17. ht tps://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2018.1545752 Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith Trans. Ed.) Blackwell. Mahadevia, D., Pharate, B., & Mistry, A. (2005). New practices of waste management – case of Mumbai (No. 35; SP Working Paper Series). School of Planning, CEPT University. Roy, A. (2009). Why India cannot plan its cities: Informality, insurgence and the idiom of urbanization. Planning Theory, 8(1), 76–87. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1473095208099299 Singh, S. (2011). ‘Mandala’ (Ghar Banao Ghar Bachao Andholan). https://p ad.ma/documents/OJ/10 Weinstein, L. (2014). Durable slum. In globalization and community (1st ed.). University of Minnesota Press. Weinstein, L. (2017). Insecurity as confinement: The entrenched politics of staying put in Delhi and Mumbai. International Sociology, 32(4), 512–531. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580917701604 Wit, J. de. (2017). Urban poverty, local governance and everyday politics in Mumbai. Routledge.

Epilogue

Returning to the field After my fieldwork in 2017, I briefly returned to Shivaji Nagar in 2018 and again in 2019. The Waste to Energy (WTE) plant had not yet been finished and was not in operation. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) was unable to get any company onboard for construction of the WTE and bring Deonar out of the crisis. Four long years have passed since the research for this book was conducted; however, no physical construction for the WTE plant has been accomplished. Officials informed me that only one company had shown interest in the project because of the massive scale of the work. In 2020, the BMC finally chose a contractor and the following year it appointed an additional private consultant to monitor and supervise the construction of the plant during the 15-year period of its operation. The waste workers have been prohibited entry inside the dump since 2016 due to the fire and plans for setting up a WTE plant, but as of late 2021 no construction work has commenced because of issues in obtaining environmental clearance for construction. Even though the waste workers were found innocent of starting the fire after the police investigation, the question remains as to why they were still being penalised? During my conversations in 2019, I found that the middle-class residents living in Chembur, who had earlier demanded scientific treatment of waste, were opposing the construction of the WTE plant.  This forced the BMC to review its plans for a second WTE plant at the site. From the status quo of Deonar it is evident that the BMC has failed in addressing the crisis of waste

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disposal at Deonar as no system has yet been established to reduce the adverse impacts of disposal. The politics around the fire has pushed blame of the state’s poor waste management onto the informal workers while the dump at Deonar continues to pollute as before. Looking back at the governance of the dump, it is evident that the cost of Mumbai’s aspirations for scientific disposal is being borne by the marginalised waste workers. The labelling and criminalisation of waste workers as reflected in the empirical chapters reveal the politics through which they are made disposable. The nexus of state driven actions and middle class narratives together legitimises or delegitimises the poor at different moments of crisis in the city. Additionally, the market value of land, waste and dominant civil society discourses contribute in determining who can legitimately live in the city and who cannot. The BMC, along with other stakeholders, have neither completely regulated the dump, nor have they incorporated the waste workers into the city’s WTE plan, instead a fuzzy status of temporariness has been maintained at the site. Meanwhile, at Shivaji Nagar a few waste workers are still entering the site stealthily. From what I heard, many had left Shivaji Nagar to find work in other parts of the city while others left the city permanently. I met Malini later again in 2019 (Malini is the president of KVSS and my primary contact during my fieldwork in 2016–17). She confirmed that she continues to go inside the dump through an arrangement she had made with the help of her contacts with political party members. Malini used her position and popularity as a KVSS leader to get influential contacts but she represents a small number of workers who are able to make things work in their favour. The majority of the waste workers who primarily come from the Dalit community were without sustainable access to waste. The empirical chapters highlight that caste plays a powerful role in determining who and which communities work with waste at the first place, but a situated investigation reveals that within the community it is also political power along with the ability to leverage contacts that shape the ways in which negotiations unfold. Those who now enter the dump are reluctant to invite other workers to accompany them due to fears that this may increase

Epilogue

the visibility of people in restricted spaces and threaten their own access to waste. Women in particular bear the brunt of the exclusion as they remain either unemployed or continue working part time. Tamija and Margina, who were socio-economically more disadvantaged than Malini, told me that they had moved to other alternative occupations. Tamija obtained a loan of money from her neighbours and opened a fruit cart in the local bazaar (market). Since 2016 she has attempted six different jobs like handwork, leather cutting, and sewing before settling on starting a business selling fruits from her own cart. She has not been able to return the money she borrowed and continues living with high debts. Margina, a woman who had lost her son in an accident at the dump, continues living in dire poverty. She had joined the informal labour force as a construction worker but the intensive physical work has taken a toll on her health. She now works at a small karkhana (factory) pasting embellishments onto textiles intended for export. Amongst lung problems which she developed while working at the dump, she also suffers from poor eyesight. The working conditions at the dump were highly toxic but displacement from the dump has only exacerbated the waste workers’ social, economic and health struggles. The development transformations taking place in the city have not helped them to avoid vicious cycles of unemployment, impoverishment and violence. Instead, technological transformations by the municipality, such as WTE, are directly responsible for pushing the waste workers into precarious jobs within the informal workforce, thereby reproducing informality. The infrastructural upgrades in the city improved the workers’ dwelling conditions, but they continue getting exploited by brokers for the supply of water and electricity in their homes while paying much more than other city residents. “There is no place as big as Deonar to dump Mumbai’s waste, no one will allow this in their backyards; we are confident that waste will keep coming here”, said Tamija (personal communication, 6 February 2019). Many like Tamija and Margina continue to wait in hope of the dump reopening again. The haphazard closure of the dump has generated possibilities for privileged waste workers to overcome legal impositions by negotiating

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for access to the dump within their networks. The poorly planned closure by the BMC has fragmented the community further and allowed those in power to access their livelihoods while excluding those who are less privileged or who lack political backing. We see that state-led production of space through displacement of local practices has reproduced the inequalities within the waste worker community in serious ways. The social resurrection of the dump by cleansing it of informal workers is symbolic of the ideologies driving a classist, casteist and capitalistic transformation of urban space. While the future might see a stricter enclosure of the WTE area, the dump, for the time being, continues being transgressed every day. Spatial transformations towards modernisation and technological upgradation are shaped by a concern for aesthetics, efficiency and standardisation. This requires a homogenisation of space to mimic attributes that make it attractive like other saleable spaces in the city. By dismantling the existing social space and whatever exists in that space, a process of social fragmentation takes place to convert historically embedded spaces into a ‘tabula rasa’ (Kennedy & Sood, 2016). Further, the post-reform path of infrastructural development necessitates making the land marketable for private capital by demarcation of its boundaries and quantifying it by measuring, mapping and planning so that any visible ambiguities are erased. The dump with its informal activities and encroached borders throws up a challenge to the modern economic and aesthetic logic. Bringing the dump, in other words, a redundant wasteland, back into circulation is understood as a ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey, 2001) through which capital finds new ways to extract the value of land and waste. Closely related with the spatial changes, the neoliberal transformations further aggravate the existing inequalities in societies by reproducing these relations across space and time. Neoliberal rationality becomes problematic when it implements technically driven solutions at the expense of the social needs of the vulnerable communities involved.

Epilogue

Towards conclusions Three important conclusions can be drawn from the empirical evidence and discussions in the previous chapters of this book. First is that the state-led production of space takes place through a process of boundary making. The second finding is that political action by the waste workers is embedded in their encounters, interactions and ability to mobilise political contacts. These encounters reveal internal conflicts and power hierarchies, often these mobilisations reproduce internal power equations and comes at the cost of exclusion of fellow waste workers. Contentious politics proliferate hierarchies which subsequently exclude those who are severely disadvantaged. The third finding reconfirms the scholarly understanding that the state as an institution functions through informality (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004). The state does not always act in homogenous ways, i.e. modus ponen is not true here. Meaning that it should not be assumed that state-employed actors will always act on the rationality of the institutional state; in fact they employ various logics and practices which may even exist in contradiction with the institution itself. The security guards who represent the state facilitated the transgression of security infrastructures by acting in their private interest and accepting favours from waste workers. During these moments, the guards employ state capacities assigned to them even though their actions contradicted the rationality of the state and its prescribed roles. Extending this understanding of the state functionaries as a representation of what we call the state, it can be deduced that the state also reproduces informality through oscillating acts of transgressions across the formal and informal domain. The intersection of formality with illegality creates a ‘gray space’ (Yiftachel, 2009), where informality is not outside of the state or law, but works in tandem. Understanding the creation of these spaces through everyday practices helps to highlight the inequalities produced during governance of the dump. These findings help to answer the overarching objective of the research that seeks to identify how the state-led transformation of space reproduces exclusion. I now take up these points in detail.

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a) Despite the increasing dominance of the market under neoliberalism, the state as an institution continues to play a significant top-down role in the urbanisation of the city. The state initiates a boundary-making process at the dump by altering the everyday practices at the site. Based on the simplistic notion that boundaries are used to categorise people, materials and spaces, I describe boundary making as a mechanism or a set of practices that position people and places as out of place. Facilitated by dominant groups and their ideologies, boundaries are operationalised through an assemblage of territorial, material (technological), social and spatial practices that tend to fragment social space. Deonar as a marginal space is shaped through a politics of boundary making; this can be understood as three interconnected processes. The first is through social exclusion, i.e. by labelling waste workers as ‘miscreants’ and blaming them for starting the fire. The blame was operationalised through a discursive process of criminalising the waste workers in media reports, interviews and the internal documents of the BMC. Labels such as miscreants initially used by officials on public grievance forums soon travelled from the vernacular domain into the written official documents of the High Court, BMC and state regulatory institutions. The existing social biases against informal waste workers consolidated into official categories within the workings of the state, and established the entire community as a threat to the city. The construction of the ‘other’, which in many ways is not new for Deonar and M-east ward (Bhide, 2020a, 2020b) was an exacerbation of existing social biases towards waste workers who come from low castes, migrant backgrounds and religious minorities. Blame followed by legal action was used to cleanse them off government land so that it could be appropriated for WTE and other designated uses as per the visions of the new Development Plan 2034. The second aspect of boundary making took shape through the security apparatus implemented by the BMC on the order of the High Court that called for physical enclosures through walling, security and surveillance at the site. The Court order reflects the dominant

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voices of the civil society represented mainly by the middle classes residing in the same ward. Tendencies of gating or militarisation of space is emblematic of emergent neoliberal spaces that require enclosures and protection of property (Vasudevan et al., 2008). Walls generate a socio-spatial difference between what becomes the protected inside as against the dangerous outside. The security apparatus along with construction of the wall is an attempt by the state to control and reassert its territorial control over the dump, while retaining access for private consultants. Dispossession of the waste workers takes place by delegitimising them by cancelling their photo-passes and banning their entry with the use of law. This stands in contrast with other competing private consultants to whom access was granted with the authority of the BMC to assess the viability of the first-ever WTE plants in Mumbai. Boundaries must not be taken as fixed territorial processes always produced by the state, but as a consolidation of differences through dominating practices aimed towards a maintenance of binaries: clean–dirty, citizens–miscreants, legal–illegal etc. Unveiling the exclusionary processes brings me to a dominant practice that enables the socio-spatial fragmentation, i.e. the production of uncertainty that often escapes critical examination. After the fire, while tracing the political struggles of the waste workers I observed that on a number of instances when they approached representatives of the SWM Department, they were sent back without meeting the appropriate official. The inaccessibility of the responsible bureaucrats and their lack of response was not initially recognised as a strategic action in my initial observations. It was only when the waste workers started mobilising as a collective in order to reach out to the head of BMC that I noted that each of their numerous past failed attempts was due to a concerted strategy denying them redressal. Among the 20-odd attempts by the waste workers to meet the various BMC officials in person over a period of two months in 2016, they were successful only twice. This repeated refusal, unavailability, non-response of the BMC officials and political representatives should be read as a concerted response. I call this a strategic

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non-response because during the same time the private consultants and contractors who showed an interest in the WTE plant were entertained and provided with all the required information to support their project proposals. The non-response may have emerged due to lack of a plan or political will, yet it deprived the people of their chance to be heard. The BMC and the state government refused to incorporate the waste workers in the future planning of Deonar which clearly favoured private partnerships to solve the waste crisis at the expense of the informal sector. Unlike Simone (2013) who in his work on Jakarta understands uncertainty in a liberal sense as a ‘productive’ resource, offering possibilities to neoliberal urbanism, I understand state-generated uncertainty as a tool for violence. It is the systemic production of a tension, or exclusion from knowledge creation about one’s possible futures while retaining control over it. Circulation of uncertainty is a tactic of the centralised state to prevent collective action and establish the informal as outside the system. This can be done by the use of what I have shown here as nonresponse, withholding information or corruption and even through the use of digitalisation technologies which leave the working poor deprived. Creation of a limbo over the dump’s status is indicative that the waste workers are perceived as outsiders and are the first ones to be displaced since there is no place within the system that acknowledges them as equal partners in waste governance as imagined by the national waste policies. b) The second finding reveals that the waste workers negotiate their exclusion across the formal–informal spectrum to claim their right to livelihood. Closely related to this finding is the slow production of violence within the waste worker community. I have argued that the violence experienced by the waste workers directly emanates from state-led interventions and the resultant contentious actions that they produce which reproduce power relations within the communities. Disadvantaged waste workers find themselves subordinated to their powerful colleagues who manage to navigate the legal and formal processes. Categories such as slum dwellers or waste workers are not homogenous, which many scholars fail

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to account for. These groups from the informal populations might mobilise themselves across territorial commonalities like living conditions, informality, occupation or identity, but my analysis reveals that their lived experiences vary even if they belong to the same community. Accounting for the “fluidity of social and political hierarchies” (Auerbach & Kruks-Wisner, 2020, p. 268) will help explain why some waste workers are successful and not others. Gender, religion, economic status and ethnicity are only some of the aspects which determine the degree to which an individual or a family experienced the consequences of livelihood displacement. Women1 in Shivaji Nagar confront challenges in finding employment outside the slum due to the distrust associated with Shivaji Nagar. They were most severely affected because they were directly dependent on the dump; for some it was an additional source of income for the family while for others its proximity to their homes allowed them freedom to provide care work at home during work. Against the prevailing living conditions, an individual waste worker’s capacity to resist, acquiesce or negotiate hegemonic power relations is based on their experience of the differentiated violence that they encounter. Their success in negotiating with actors to gain access inside the dump is determined by their ability to leverage political networks. The slum is a politically active space where its residents engage in a constant struggle to resist displacement and access public services. Inhabitants often approach influential figures in the slum like local leaders, NGOs, community representatives, social workers, or slum lords who have the power to get things done, whether formally or informally. It is not only the impacts of exclusion but the coping strategies and resilience of individual waste workers that depend on their socio-political positioning in the slum. Within the waste workers’ community,

1

Women bear the responsibilities of childcare which restricts them from travelling outside the slum area. The NGO I worked with during my fieldwork confided that domestic violence was common because of drug abuse and high alcoholism in the slum.

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caste did not prominently emerge as a factor for their discrimination even though most of the workers belonged to the Dalits, Muslims and other minority communities. For example, in Chapter 5, I show that the head of KVSS, Malini, who belongs to the Dalit community, has been able to make an informal arrangement with the security guards while other women who are also from minority social groups have not been able to negotiate access. Malini’s political identity as the head of the KVSS facilitated her while the other women who were members of KVSS failed to gain entry. I have referred to this observation as the differentiated violence of the everyday which is deeply entrenched in slum life. People from the same community experience state violence differently, and in the process of negotiation, they end up reproducing it for their fellow community members. The vicious cycle of exclusion thus continues and is reproduced not only by the state but is internalised and reproduced by the waste workers themselves. The waste workers seek legitimacy to work at the dump through the functionaries of the state, and simultaneously, leverage the gaps in its functioning to gain access to waste. In their collective and individual capacities, the waste workers accept, subvert and/or negotiate their displacement by engaging with the formal institutions of the state. This engagement takes place across the formal and informal realms i.e. in the grey space. My findings suggest that it might seem that the urban poor disengage their claim-making from the state by making their own arrangements, but it is through these stealthy, delegitimised, slow encroachments that they assert their presence in the city. While the BMC refuses to recognise the waste workers’ substantive rights to livelihood in the formal domain, they exert an alternative kind of citizenship claim through informal negotiations with chosen people in power. Their actions are not limited to using political patronage but strategically use the grey spaces of the state (i.e. through state-employed security) to make claims by stealthily entering the dump. Holston’s (2009) concept of insurgent citizenship helps understanding of these practices of transgression by placing them in the larger context of struggles at the peripheries.

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He argues that:   [T]he urban poor articulate this demand with greatest force and originality. It is rather in the realm of everyday and domestic life taking shape in the remote urban peripheries around the construction of residence. It is an insurgence that begins with the struggle for the right to have a daily life in the city worthy of a citizen’s dignity (Holston, 2009, p. 254).   Irrespective of the absence of formal rights they are able to make arrangements at the remote locations of the periphery to challenge the violence of state-led spatial transformations. Differentiated experiences of displacement and state violence shape the nature of political action taken by the waste workers but whether or not their demands are successfully legally recognised in the formal domain, it is their endurance in the continuation of daily life which shapes their rights to the city. Shifting away from the central spaces of the cities, unlike the middle classes who assert citizenship based on substantive rights, the waste workers through their transgressions and coalitions articulate claims to urban citizenship from the margins. Holston says that when the city becomes the space for these contradictory processes of oppression, innovation, claims for contribution and participation, then these claims should be understood as a form of urban citizenship. The struggles of the working poor through auto-construction, making legal claims to housing, access to resources and right over rights might well be entrenched in social inequalities and even reproduce power hierarchies. But these assertions to a right to rights and alternate ways of collective life at the margins are not isolated instances of protest or violence but are strategies that the poor make for claiming an ‘insurgent’ form of citizenship. I have suggested that it is in these moments of contestations and negotiations that the reproduction of exclusionary social relations is revealed. My work questions generalised binaries that frame informal residents as people who refuse to follow legal, formal and recognised ways of living in the city. I show that they locate the source of legitimacy in the state and mobilise amongst

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themselves for an officially recognised mechanism to reclaim their livelihood. c) The third important finding of my work is that the governance of the dump reaffirms that the state functions through informality or by making exceptions (Roy, 2011). The various interactions and practices revealed in this book illustrate that as much as the state treats informality as an externality, it is itself seen to function through informal practices. The state acts in both formal and informal ways to design, plan and govern cities, planning processes are embedded in informal relations (Björkman, 2015; Roy, 2009; Watson, 2009b). For instance, in this case it makes exceptions for private investors and consultants to enter the dump with authorised permissions and determine feasibility for a WTE plant whereas the waste workers are seen as a threat. The finding echoes the recent scholarly calls for questioning the assumption that the state is a homogenous institution. In the book chapters, I do not deny that there is the idea of a centralised state which follows dominant logics as inscribed in the instrumental role of the state. However, in practice, the state comprises of different institutions, departments, hierarchies and actors such as planners, architects, engineers and street-level bureaucrats. The normative logics describe what the state should be, and the rule of the state translates into practice through a complex political process. The politics of governance should be studied through a microanalysis of the practices and logics of its functionaries, i.e. the institutions, departments and its actors who are assigned to represent the state. Individual actors who represent the state might not act in its interest, and instead take on different identities in different situations while retaining their positions as state actors. Or, the centralised state itself might resort to informal ways of governance to support certain activities or actors. An enriching range of scholarship following the critical works of postcolonial urban scholars (McFarlane, 2012; Roy & AlSayyad, 2004; Roy & Ong, 2011; Watson, 2003) have established that the state and technologies of governmentality operate through informality which is an inseparable part of the urban fabric. Most of the construction

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(not just slums) in metropolitan cities in India takes place by tweaking law, violating regulations and arbitrary exchanges through the formal–informal domains (Bhan, 2016; Datta, 2012; Ghertner, 2011, 2017). Informality is not emblematic of the illegal practices of the urban poor but it is a mode of governance exercised by the state. Numerous case studies have depicted that the state acts in violation of its own regulations or arbitrarily alters them to serve its interests. Roy notes that the state deploys “informality as an instrument of both accumulation and authority” (2009, p. 81) which requires it to assume a contradictory weak or strong role (Burte & Kamath, 2010). By zooming into the exchanges between the waste workers and the security guards deployed by the municipal corporation, I reveal the locations and moments at which the state actors are unevenly placed and act in informal ways. Seemingly contradictory processes can coexist in urban space, legal claims, as well as temporary and uncertain arrangements, and it is this grey spacing from above and from below which Yiftachel refers to “permanent temporariness” (2009, p. 299). Grey spacing is a continuous process involving the state and the people; therefore, it is problematic to work within the binaries that link the urban poor with informality on one hand, and the state with law and rights on the other. The arguments presented in this book establish that the impasse at Deonar cannot be attributed to the single event of the fire but is co-produced by ongoing practices by multiple actors, in nexus with a colonial past and existing socio-cultural attitudes. I have addressed the primary question that the book set out to address i.e. how are waste workers excluded from the city? Moving away from the tensions between the formal–informal domains of waste management witnessed at Deonar I will now discuss how the socio-cultural attitudes towards waste play an important role in the spatial politics of waste. The next section titled ‘metonyms of waste’ serves as an extended reflection on cultural politics and its role in shaping the margins of the city (which can also be geographically located within the city). The section after this is titled ‘waste as spatial practice’ which is my theoretical contribution arising

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from this research. I propose that insights on waste should not be limited to material or cultural leanings as waste can act as a critical site of analysis, and hence should be understood as a ‘practice’.

Metonyms of waste The contestations at Deonar are not limited to struggles over space, but over meanings, symbolisms, navigations of, and in, space, and on the other, over values and perceptions of waste. An important finding of my work is that waste and its metonyms are invoked by powerful actors and institutions to assert spatial and temporal control over the dump. The moral and cultural avoidance towards waste weaves into the boundarymaking processes in the city. If the presence of waste symbolises disorder then its removal indicates the maintenance of social order. It is this underlying logic that plays a role in the planning, construction and designing of urban space. The middle-class demands to close the dump and shift it outside the city is emblematic of the underlying ideas of pollution and purity existing in Indian society. The politics at the dump is representative of the society’s avoidance of waste and an othering of materials and people considered polluting from the central spaces of the city. On one hand, discrimination is faced by waste workers within the slum, but on the other, Shivaji Nagar faces disdain from the rest of the city which also percolates into the lived experiences of the waste workers. Following this, I investigate another dimension of boundary making at the city level where the slum as an urban space is stigmatised by the residents of the city and the slum dwellers reproduce this stigma within themselves. Proximity to the garbage dump defines the social status of people who live on and off it, not being limited to waste workers but the entire area of Shivaji Nagar. These populations have been removed from far off parts of the city undergoing infrastructural development and have been resettled here. Amita Bhide (2020a) has analysed the historical construction of the M-east ward into a periphery of the city marked by the relocation of polluting industries, a slaughter-

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house and the rehabilitation of populations. The pattern of displacement of the urban poor from the city closely mimics the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ logic of organising space. Chakrabarty (1992) and Kaviraj’s (1997) observations on the cultural notions of keeping the inside clean and protected from the dangerous outside resonates through Mumbai’s numerous gated communities who live with high security and only tolerate the underclass when availing themselves of services from them. I argue that waste makes people and things disposable, but it is more than a tool for indicating marginality. It is a dynamic category that is constantly in the making, compelling us to reimagine waste beyond its material implications. Waste is a social relation that assigns identity, shapes the lived experiences, social belongingness and livelihoods of those working with it. At the same time, it is central to the governance and management of the city. Waste workers use waste to assert their rights to survival in the city. It becomes an interface for exclusion as well as for making claims for inclusion. Unlike other urban metabolic flows like sewage water which the middle classes have successfully controlled in the developed areas of the city, at the margins the visibility of both sewage and plastics is prevalent. Private activities like washing and cooking are practised outside residents’ houses due to the small sizes of the rooms or fragile pipelines. The city may seem to be divided into private and public domains but in Shivaji Nagar the private (private sphere of the home) extends fearlessly outside into the available space and becomes the site of everyday practices. People cook and wash on the streets wherever space and water are available. This kind of extension of the private into the outside is metonymically labelled by the rest of the city residents as filthy when seen in conjunction with the bodies and activities of the poor. People from this area, as perceived by government officials, are not law-abiding citizens; it is erroneously believed that they escape from paying electricity bills, never pay loans and breach anything that the government has made compulsory. All these stories thus affect the image of the Shivaji Nagar community to the extent that they are treated with mistrust and suspicion in their everyday life. Employers deny them jobs and their

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requests for other basic services are left unattended in municipal corporation departments unless politically supported. Reflecting on the perception of the bustee residents that emerged during informal discussions I found that they located themselves as living ‘outside’ the city. In their imagination, Mumbai, the city, was situated at a distance from where they lived. The central business district of the city, such as the southern parts, was referred to as seher (the city), or Bambai (Bombay) indicating that their own location was outside of Bombay. Contrarily, this same sentiment did not resonate with the middle-class residents who lived just a kilometre or two away from the dump; they considered themselves as responsible, morally upright, tax-paying citizens of Mumbai. All the respondents from these areas saw themselves as the hard-working Mumbaikars. The bustee inhabitants on the other hand, shared a strong belongingness only to the slum. Most men said they travelled long distances for work but most people including women mentioned that they had not gone out of Shivaji Nagar for almost a year except for a visit to a bigger hospital. On various occasions when I hired an auto-rickshaw to visit the field site, drivers used a range of negative connotations to verbally label the area and its residents by using terms like ‘chor’ (thief), ‘bhai-log’ (goons), ‘mafia’, ‘goondagardi’ (hooliganism). Along with terms like dirty (ganda), bekaar jagah (useless place), the slum was considered ‘dangerous’ and ‘risky’. They explained to me that they refuse passengers who want to travel to Shivaji Nagar because of its disorderly traffic and dangerous people. Another driver cited how the area was a foul-smelling area (baas maarta hai poora) which according to him was because Muslims ate a lot of beef and the place was full of migrants. These views came from the informal workers who lived in other parts of the city. Due to its historical development the area is mostly associated with a Muslim identity. Along these lines, Contractor (2012, 2017) argues that the marginalisation of Shivaji Nagar as a socio-spatial periphery is intrinsically associated with the communal identity circumscribed by the marginalisation of the city’s Muslims from its mainstream public. According to Contractor, various associations of undesirability are used to evoke aversion and expulsion of Muslim bodies to excluded locales,

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done through a spatialisation of identities. These are excluded locales in the city where citizenship and notions of community are contested. Shaban (2012), in his study on ethnic politics in Mumbai, shows how a city’s neighbourhoods are metaphorically inscribed with social identities through the everyday use of symbols and labels as well as acts of ethno-political violence that target groups such as Muslims and Dalits. Though many scholars argue that ritualistic ideas of pollution do not apply in the more sophisticated urban forms, there is a combination of both, the modern idea of hygiene and cultural notions of pollution practices in city life. This is why Dalits form the majority of waste workers. However, there are additional factors which explain why the marginalisation is not simply caste-based but includes other religious communities (which may or may not have caste-like social structures). In India, the modernist urban aspirations overlap with the caste-based relations in scoiety where dirt and ritual pollution are closely related. Pollution and purity, in many ways, have shaped attitudes towards waste in modern society. Mosse (2018) concurs that even in the contemporary heterogeneity of our urban existence, the lower castes tend to become concentrated in the lower positions and margins of the city while the high-earning jobs are taken by the higher castes. Caste and class overlap along with gender in complex ways generating intersectional exclusion. Though I did not find a clear categorisation on whether the area was undesirable because of the dump or abattoir or its ‘Muslim’ minority identity, it can be said that its political composition as well as its historical legacy has concertedly shaped Shivaji Nagar. The residents from these areas are trapped in an imaginary of exclusion and biases which form a basis for their exclusion from getting jobs by virtue of living in Shivaji Nagar. All of my respondents narrated how on several occasions they were refused and denied jobs in the market as soon as the employer noticed that the applicant resided in Shivaji Nagar. The respondents said that this was because they were perceived as untrustworthy, dishonest and as criminals. Bustee residents agreed that there was a presence of mafia gangs which brought a bad name to the area but they questioned the stereotyping of the entire settlement into discriminatory categories.

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Shivaji Nagar is constructed as a socially unwanted periphery marked by economic and social exclusion which disturbs any straightforward explanation of urban transformation in the city. It emerges from a mix of hegemonic ethnic ideologies, underlining caste structures, neoliberal global aspirations of growth and the cultural attitudes of inhabitants that reproduce layers of marginal spaces. Metonymic association with waste and slums play a vital role in shaping the perception of the city, not only of waste workers but stereotyping the residents of the entire Shivaji Nagar area. While it is waste that divides the outside–inside, the clean–dirty and the slum from the rest of the city, or legal from illegal, it is power that punctures through the redefinition of boundaries. The conceptions of these dualities do not exist in a void: they play out in social space which is already ‘social’ and not just an empty container. Binaries are highly unstable, theoretically resonating with Henri Lefebvre who also argued that binaries are superficial as they are only forms or shapes of space which are subject to change. It is in the attempts to maintain these boundaries that the politics of boundary making takes place.

Waste as a spatial practice Urban theory’s focus on the everyday is expanded from its Western Lefebvrian viewpoint by Southern urban scholars who dislocate it from the West. The ‘everyday’ has been developed as a polemical concept to initiate conversations around Southern urbanisms. This work in many ways contributes to Bhan’s provocation in his article ‘Notes on a Southern urban practice’ (2019) where he identifies modes of practice which are: associated not just with certain practitioners, but with registers of value, power and importance. Such highlighting – perhaps it is better to think of it as amplification – is an important part of the ethos of Southern inquiry that must seek to constantly make explicit and challenge registers of value and power (Bhan, 2019, p. 651).

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Along these lines, I contend that waste should be seen as an urban practice, a process which reveals the hidden, unrecognised and covert registers of inequality. A focus on waste as a spatial practice with its meanings, perceptions and actions will incorporate learning from the abject, disdained and undesired spaces. Taking a relational approach to the wast-ing or discard-ing of people calls for a commitment to continuously dislocate dominant sites of knowledge production, and shift our attention to those off the maps and plans. Postcolonial urban scholars have contributed to developing informality as a lens to understand the global South, but such an intervention is incomplete without considering the role of waste which is omnipresent across the lifespan of cities – during its construction, repair and demolition. Throughout the study I have understood waste as a broad category encompassing its affiliated meanings, values and symbolisms. Ideas around waste underline the practices, imagination and actions of the state and waste workers as seen in this study. The boundary-making processes reconfigure existing social and material relations at the dump, reproducing differentiated violent lived experiences. Waste plays a stimulating role in the production of urban space by shaping the realms that boundaries create. Waste is a highly fluid category; it not only creates binaries like dirty–clean, slum–city, public–private but it can both construct and disrupt boundaries which divide these spaces. Social relationships are shaped around the presence or absence of waste; Butt reasserts that social life is organised around “distributive processes, one of which is the uneven distribution of waste across the social body” (2020, p. 2). Made possible through acts of disposal, the process of becoming waste churns out not just materials but people who are made disposable. This is done by drawing boundaries and manoeuvring densities across social space through which osmotic pressures are placed on certain bodies to inhabit polluting spaces and develop intimacies with waste materials. Waste is associated with inequalities and social stratification and disorder. This socio-spatial politics of waste may produce moments that collapse space and waste (may become one) such that it renders materials and people in that space as waste. Wasting is more than a mere flow of discarded mate-

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rials, it involves city making through boundaries, leakages, erasures, meanings and struggles for justice. To avoid essentialising the term, I suggest that instead of trying to define what comprises waste, we should reverse our approach and identify various practices that can be understood in relation to waste or wasting. As something that is omnipresent in urban life, waste is more than material: it is the circulation of the social beliefs, class relations and physiological changes that shape the city and, in turn, define it. At these moments, waste is more than its material form: it is an ever-shifting category which is social, political, symbolic and cultural. Going beyond the claims that waste has multiple cultural meanings, I have shown that it actively mobilises social relations and is a way of making sense of material realities of the city and the dump. To put it in Lefebvrian terms, I argue that waste itself becomes a spatial practice. Lefebvre (1991) defines spatial practice as routes or networks that shape urban reality and waste does exactly this. It is not only a product but also a process – a process that segregates people. Seeing waste as a spatial practice and not merely as dead matter allows this study to see how waste is employed as an instrument of social action. There are studies that have touched upon the spatiality of waste, addressed either through a) waste management where it is treated like an object that needs to be in its right space, or b) through geographies of new materialism which have explored its socio-materiality, its mediations and networks, and c) historical remnants of colonial planning and decolonisation efforts. Postcolonial scholars have highlighted diverse practices around waste which emerge from the specific historicities and colonial past of these nation states. The study of the spatialisation of waste should look beyond topologies and locations and probe into the cultural notions and materialities of waste. Waste and space ‘become’, by this I mean social relations are arranged in space that shape political understandings of waste. My study showed that this takes place by its intimate workings with illegality and law, with presences and absences, with formal policing and informal negotiations, or through formal boundaries but also informal transgressions. These locations mostly, though not without exceptions (Bullard, 1990) exist in

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the global South. Similarities might exist with other cities that have been created by the reclamation of the sea through rubble and garbage, and for these locations the relations between urban space and waste as mutually constituted hold true. In the journey to empirically understand urban spaces in the global South, I found that waste is central to urban planning and governance and can even unravel histories of colonial city making. For cities being built on the exploited labour of the working classes, rendered as unwanted and left to suffer from environmental injustices, it becomes extremely critical to understand everyday practices around waste. Using waste as a spatial practice will allow us a better grip on broader questions on inequalities and power geometries prevalent in urban life. My attempts to conceptualise waste as a spatial practice might seem incomplete here; I prefer leaving this as a work in progress for future deliberation. Another question that emerged, but lies beyond the scope of this book, is the need for a deeper analysis on how waste can deepen our understanding of informality. By locating the study at a waste dump site in the global South, I hope to contribute to a body of knowledge that should not only learn about the margins but learn from them. Shifting away from studying state spaces as a rigid political entity to studying micro-politics through everyday encounters can prevent us from deriving singular ideas about how urban space is produced. Everyday negotiations take place outside and within the state at the same time through the governance of wasted spaces that are located outside the gaze of development. The call to dislocate urban theory from a Southern urbanism is also to displace the sites of knowledge production. Comardoff and Comardoff (2012) with their call for studying locations off the map where “old margins are becoming new frontiers” (p. 15) provoke us to pay attention to sites like waste dumps, peripheries and thresholds. As for urban theory, critical perspective on space by Lefebvre has shaped my initial reflections on studying the urban; it has triggered my personal quest for systematically deconstructing its holistic notion. The challenges of studying the global South through concepts developed in Anglophone circles is experienced palpably when one is in the field and unilinear concepts of slums, poverty, or good governance are confronted by the fuzzy work-

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ings of everyday life, conundrums of activities taking place through unregulated, but also formal, legal realms and the blurry roles played by people across institutions, spaces and rationalities. To account for colonial histories of these sites, planning legacies, caste-based stratification and its alliance with the neoliberal economy requires us to go beyond Western vocabularies and incorporate the insights from postcolonial critiques and Southern urbanisms (Banks et al., 2020; Narayanan, 2021; Schindler, 2017; Shin, 2021; Watson, 2009a). Instead of resorting to a dominant theory, I have drawn from empirical works in and from the South in a relational way because no two cities in the global South are the same; however, they provoke a reflection on the multiple forms of urbanisms being produced worldwide.

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