Is Urban Waste Finally the Political Crisis of Our Times?

Rising clamour around the Clean India campaign (Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan), extensive newspaper reportage, a political rhetoric centred on clean and green cities, and yet Delhi continues to suffer under the burden of its waste. It is often the visibility of waste in the form of small mounds, local receptacles, raging fires and putrid smell around the large landfills doting the city’s three corners that commonly become a cause of concern and worry.

Once considered a marginal issue, hardly covered by media two or three decades ago, today it has become centre stage of Indian politics; municipal and state elections are fought around the issues of waste and cleanliness. Political parties are often seen throwing shade at each other on the issues of waste and hygiene.

In Delhi, India’s capital, the ongoing tussle between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) over responsibility for the city’s waste crisis has long been public and politically charged. When the BJP controlled the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and AAP governed the Delhi Assembly, blame was freely exchanged across institutional boundaries. Later, when AAP took over the MCD and BJP got control of the Delhi Assembly, the same battle lines persisted – each side accusing the other of negligence and failure.

 Is our government doing enough?

Thus, this tussle between the two parties over who is responsible for Delhi’s waste crisis has been at the centre of many disputes. Similarly, when any infrastructural project gets instituted around the waste sites-such as Biomining (facilitated by machines like trommels and excavators), both the parties leave no stone unturned to take the credit for the same. And palpably, the debate over responsibility has not substantially changed how either party approaches waste management in the city.

Moreover, in the process, the questions that get asked by civil society actors are, is our government doing enough? Do we have the adequate infrastructural and managerial resources to deal with the burgeoning crisis? However, are these questions enough? Do we need to ask questions beyond institutional and infrastructural frameworks, or perhaps even question these frameworks?

How about questions of caste and religious inequalities and labour of waste workers? The spaces in which waste gets disposed? Why are the landfills always on the periphery of the city? Why is that some spaces are deemed fit to become receptacles of city’s detritus and sites of ecological degradation? What about the questions of increasing consumerism and its subsequent effects of ecological and economic inequalities faced by the have nots of the city?

Historically, waste has been treated primarily as a problem of visibility – something to be hidden rather than addressed. Today, its growing prominence reflects how waste has become one of the defining crises of our time because it can no longer be hidden behind ‘invisible’ mountain-like structures such as dump yards and landfills. As the city expands and the volume of waste multiplies, it is now challenging to have off-site or peripheral locations, where our governments could possibly dump and invisibilise waste.

This is not to suggest that waste is actually a matter of visibility; it ought to be shaped by concerns of caste inequality, cleanliness, hygiene, rising consumerism and sanitary development. Yet, these social, economic and public health dimensions are too often overshadowed by the pursuit of profit and surface-level aesthetics.

Consider, for instance, the waste management infrastructure of North-West Delhi. The Public Private Partnership (PPP) has been predominantly shaping Delhi’s waste collection services since 2007. In North-West Delhi, it is the Delhi Municipal Solid Waste Management Limited (DMSWML) in partnership with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. They do door-to-door collection of municipal solid waste, in a van accompanied by a driver and collector. Typically, the drivers are from relatively upper caste communities and the waste collectors from the Valmiki community (Scheduled Caste community).

Post collection, waste is dumped in a nearby receptacle owned by the company, where wet and dry waste is segregated and is dumped in compressing machines located at these receptacles. In some cases, depending upon the zone this waste comes from, it is again dumped in the Bhalswa landfill (that too unsegregated) or in some cases it is taken to Ramky’s waste-to-energy (WTE) plant in Bawana, where dry waste is incinerated in the plant to produce electricity.

This appears to be a rather sanitised and well managed solution to waste disposal. However, little is discussed about the after-effects of this waste-to-energy (WTE) process or how drastically it affects the health of the residents in nearby areas. The Down-to-Earth has extensively covered the deleterious effects of WTE on the residents and their immediate surroundings; cancer, TB, breathing ailments are some of the most common issues they face. If seen closely, what also goes unnoticed is the fact that this incineration is not only about reducing waste and generating profits through electricity, but that it has also become a way to create new periphery- which rests in the atmosphere.

The invisibilisation of waste through incineration – previously achieved by dumping it in landfills –functions as a new form of waste management that operates on the same logic of erasure, which simultaneously creates new, and arguably more hazardous, peripheries. If these are the solutions our government(s) are working towards to make our city look ‘green’ and ‘clean’, then are we actually striving towards making healthier cities or are we creating a spectacle out of them in terms of making them glitzy, impeccably clean as a matter of appearance?

The plight and marginalisation of sanitation workers

Moreover, reliance on mechanisation of waste management infrastructures is seen as a way forward to better manage the city’s crisis, albeit without any focus on the economic and occupational conditions of waste workers. Any discussion on the city’s waste governance is incomplete without discussing the lives of waste workers. Their lives are not simply limited to performing the dangerous work of cleaning and reproducing liveable city spaces but are also shaped by the forces of caste, class, religion, and ecology that are at play in the city.

There is no dearth of writing on deplorable working conditions of sanitation workers (safai karamcharis), PPP-led garbage collectors and informal waste pickers. All of them face the wrath of exploitative and discriminatory societal and working condition in their distinct ways. For sanitation workers and those employed under PPP-led waste collection services, the fury of everyday casteism collides with the insecurity of contractual labour.

Meanwhile, informal waste pickers – those who sort through middle-class neighbourhood garbage and landfill sites – endure some of the city’s most abysmal working conditions: fires at the dump, high AQI (always more than the rest of the city), constant emissions of methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, and exposure to septic waste define their daily realities, all compounded by the weight of caste and religious marginalisation.

Given that today many informal waste pickers in Delhi, alongside multiple other marginalised communities, are Bengali Muslims, their religious, caste and regional identity has become a matter of threat for their existence. In addition to all the threats they face in the city, their very being, as seen by the present government, has become a source of danger for them.

Instead of envisaging a vision of better livelihood and dignified working conditions, what one is witnessing today is marginalisation of not only traditional cleaning communities in Delhi, that is Valmikis, but many others as well. With growing awareness around waste and cleanliness, what should have been a moment to further the demand for a respectable and dignified life, has become a moment of absolute crisis, where the lives of waste workers are visible to the larger upper caste and upper class public only when their services are required to pick up waste and sweep the cities.

The recent Gurgaon fiasco is a case in point. At a time when many Bengali Muslim waste pickers were being picked up by the police on the pretext of them being ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ and were running to save their lives, the upper class and middle-class residents were primarily concerned with the disposal of their waste. This has hitherto been the case for Valmiki sanitation workers, whose presence on the streets of Delhi goes unnoticed unless it is about cleanliness. It is ironic that the work force which labours to maintain clean, healthy and hygienic cities remains the most stigmatised and condemned strata of our society.

As I gather my thoughts on current state of waste crisis in Delhi, this article is also an appeal to the residents of the city and the fellow citizen of the country to look at the waste crisis in its complexity and not simply as a managerial issue of cleaning the city of its waste and dirt, and making it look immaculately clean. The crisis that is unfolding in front of our eyes today intersects at the level of capitalist development, urbanisation, growing consumerism, existing caste hierarchies, religious marginalisation, alongside compounding ecological dangers.

To reiterate, waste is not just a rejected negative value of our living, rather it embodies the present-day consumerist lifestyle and the social relations of a capitalist and caste-ridden society. As dutiful citizens, we are so obsessed with ‘rightful’ and ‘orderly’ disposal of waste that we fail to gauge the moment of waste constitution and afterlife of waste, and how it is part of our quotidian existence.  It is not an outside of our existence but rather innate to very act of living- social, historical and economic, defined and shaped by epochs of centuries.

In an age where we pride ourselves on capitalist ‘development’, it is ironic that we are now fighting for the very basics — clean water, breathable air, and a liveable environment. The simple act of sustaining life has become a struggle. These struggles should be a wake up call for us to ask our governments if is this is the idea of development and progress we signed up for. An idea that discounts basic human dignity (especially that of waste workers across marginalised caste(s) and religion) and ensures our fundamental right to life is lost!

Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University and Swiss Government Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024-2025.

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