Abstract
All human society produces waste matter which has no value: in the circuits of capital in production, distribution, consumption, the production of labour and the reproduction of society. Some waste matter remains without value indefinitely, and other regains value in reuse, recycling and reprocessing. India’s waste sector is one of the fastest growing in the world. This chapter analyses the livelihoods and life worlds generated by liquid and solid wastes in the circuits of capital of a small town in South India. It combines the analysis of 84 such livelihoods with four workers’ own descriptions, chosen to represent the livelihoods and life worlds of the public sector salariat, informal wage work, self-employment and petty capital. The workforce is disproportionately Dalit and Adivasi. Conditions are dangerous, and the work is extremely hard. Formal contracts prove incomplete and informal labour depends on patronage, discretion and bonding. This chapter concludes with reflections on incomes and social stigma in this sector.
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Notes
- 1.
Respondents were selected through snowballing field methods stratified by the circuits of capital (production, distribution, consumption, human labour production and social reproduction). A total of 84 workers gaining livelihoods through waste were interviewed.
- 2.
PF (Provident Fund) and ESI (Employees’ State Insurance).
- 3.
Rs. 62 was equal to US$ (US Dollar) 1 and Rs. 92 was equal to £ (British Pound) 1 at the time of fieldwork in March 2015.
- 4.
Waste from sugarcane crushing.
- 5.
A Human Rights Watch (2014) report states that 90% of India’s sanitation workers die before retirement age, a statistic the municipal workers knew.
- 6.
One lakh equals one hundred thousand.
- 7.
A situation far from confined to Irulars, see Ehrenrich (2014).
- 8.
It is a large house on encroached land to which he does not have patta right (private land title).
- 9.
“Some big places do not even have septic tanks”, said the septic tankerman.
- 10.
The cleanliness of vital state agencies now depends on the private informal sector.
- 11.
Rs 7,000–8,000 per worker per month.
- 12.
4% in 2013—on a par with Congo and Fiji (IBRD/International Bank for Reconstruction and Development [a.k.a. the World Bank] 2015).
- 13.
The question can be posed: Is this primitive or capitalist accumulation? It is not primitive accumulation in the strict sense of the dual process of the separation of labour from means of production and seizure of initial capital prior to productive investment (Adnan 2015). Yet it is also not regular capitalist accumulation, if only because very little is ploughed back into productive accumulation. This is because like the larger informal economy, the waste economy is dominated by petty production and trade in which the balance of the residual over costs tilts towards consumption and the form expands through multiplication of firms rather than concentration and centralization. In the looser sense of Khan (2001): transactions not governed by market principles, it may be admitted. Stages of waste are highly socially ordered and segmented such that there is no seamless “market”. However, since this is generally the case in capitalist economy, the term PA loses its particular meaning if used for all deviations from a strict definition of “the market”.
- 14.
Instead, workers blame their treatment on their lack of acquired characteristics such as education and wealth (Harriss-White and Rodrigo, 2017).
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Acknowledgements
The fieldwork reported here has been supported by a British ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) grant to the London School of Economics’s (LSE) project on Poverty and Inequality (http://www.lse.ac.uk/anthropology/research/Inequality-and-Poverty/Home.aspx). The essay does not represent the views of either the LSE or the ESRC. I am grateful to Alpa Shah who directs the LSE project and to Gilbert Rodrigo who carried out the field research with me.
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Harriss-White, B. (2017). Matter in Motion: Work and Livelihoods in India’s Economy of Waste. In: Noronha, E., D'Cruz, P. (eds) Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment in Globalizing India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3491-6_6
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