Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey's Waste of a Nation begins with a question that has plagued colonial administrators and Nationalist reformers alike: “Why is India so filthy?” As India's rising middle class increasingly distance themselves from dirty work and equate cleanliness with modernity, waste has once again become the target of state intervention. As Narendra Modi launches the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission, a public sanitation campaign to deliver public toilets and to clean up streets, dirt and filth continue to characterize the conditions of work and living for many of the less well-off. Taking as their starting point Dipesh Chakrabarty's suggestion that cleanliness indexes a modern “civic consciousness,”Footnote 1 Doron and Jeffrey argue that the solution to the challenges of waste and sanitation means first understanding waste as a “binding crisis” whose effects cross the boundaries of class and caste but that, as a result, is capable of eliciting a response that binds social classes together (p. 8).
The process of urbanization and the emergence of a consumer society since India's economic liberalization in 1991 have created a throw-away society generating an unprecedented amount of waste. While most books tend to focus on one category of waste—sewage, or municipal or construction waste, for example—this study defines waste broadly and incorporates human waste, informal recycling economies, electronic waste, and microbial pollution. Alternating between national statistics and ethnographic vignettes, the complexity and scope of waste management technologies and practices in India are set against examples in both developed countries and emerging economies like China. The authors’ ethnographic account highlights several challenges to effective waste management: a lack of existing infrastructure, splintering local government, and a cultural politics of class and caste.
Local Indian authorities acknowledge that financial constraints often preclude them from pursuing the sorts of large-scale waste treatment technologies favored by other developing nations. Doron and Jeffrey instead argue that investment is more effective when directed at smaller technological improvements such as hand-pull carts or localized sanitary landfills. A simple, easy-to-clean and maintain toilet, the authors point out, might go some way to solving the problems of open defecation and poor sewage, and promises to achieve more than most any large-scale waste infrastructure upgrade.
Ultimately, Waste of a Nation is most effective at illuminating the forms of unrecognized labor that constitute waste work in India. Lacking flush toilets and sewage systems, the dry latrines and septic tanks that hold and transport human waste still depend on manual servicing and maintenance. Despite an official ban on manual scavenging, Dalit women still carry out the dirty work of emptying out cesspits and transferring excrement in dry latrines by hand, exposing them to bacteria and parasites. Caste functions as a system of labor regulation that bestows livelihood but also entraps Dalits—the lowest caste, who typically perform waste work—in dirty and dangerous occupations. Sewer divers often steel themselves with alcohol before descending into an unmapped and haphazard system of underground pipes without safety equipment. Dalit waste handlers face social discrimination and a lack of social mobility and are at risk of pollution, toxicity, and even death.
More importantly, caste designation prohibits the possibility of cross-class alliance that Doron and Jeffrey posit is necessary for overcoming the challenges to waste management. The caste system “hinders cooperation and fosters feelings that removing noxious materials is someone else's job—even by virtue of birth” (p. 3). Caste prevents the state from officially recognizing that kabaadiwala, informal waste collectors, perform the environmental service of gathering, sorting, and diverting waste from landfills. The daily work of managing waste illuminates the class division within a system that naturalizes the separation between a middle class that enjoys cleanliness as a form of class privilege and the reality of dirty work outsourced to others.
Doron and Jeffery argue that the formalization of waste work, facilitated by civil society organizations, is critical for guaranteeing the basic conditions for dignified work: uniforms, safety equipment, and an equitable wage. Yet, they also note that formalization creates its own challenges as, for example, large companies co-opt the sorting and collection of waste and raise barriers to entry for newcomers to waste scavenging (chapter 7). In other words, the formalization of waste is part of what scholars have described as a process of the evisceration of waste as a common resource.Footnote 2
Readers might sometimes wish there was more space to explore how the formalization of waste work might align with other processes of urban displacement. Nevertheless, this engaging and readable study is an invaluable contribution to topics of labor, technology, and development and the emerging field of discard studies.
