wl-7287-The Visibility and Invisibility of Caste(d) Waste Management Infrastructures in Delhi

Delhi today is faced by burgeoning waste management crisis. Newspapers frequently report about blazing fires around the landfill sites, strikes by sanitation workers or lack of infrastructural facilities, and the subsequent challenges faced by Municipal Corporation of Delhi to deal with this crisis. This article brings to the fore two parallel yet interconnected waste management infrastructures—Public Private Partnership (PPP)-led waste management services and the Bhalswa landfill in North-West Delhi to examine how infrastructures are strategically visibilised to project a sanitised, hygienic, casteless, and citizen-oriented image of the city’s municipality through the former and invisibilised to conceal the ‘casteist, dirty and putrid reality of the city through the latter; In doing so, I show how these infrastructures, that practically serve the same purpose, i.e. of ‘managing’ waste acquire different forms–both in terms of technology and human labour, in different spaces. In particular, I explore this through the PPP-led quotidian municipal waste management practices in middle-class neighbourhoods and demonstrate how the politics of so-called modern and scientific infrastructure and waste management processes is closely stitched with social values of caste hierarchies–which reinforces itself through discarded materials, spaces and labouring bodies of waste workers.