The Making of a 'Clean City': Governing Waste and Informality in Urban India

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Mountains of trash in cities worldwide represent the monumental failures of 'dumping' waste. The ever increasing quantities of waste threaten the way cities are imagined, built and lived, particularly in the rapidly urbanising global south. In India, urban population alone is expected to generate 165 million tonnes of solid municipal waste by 2030 and 436 million tonnes by 2050. A nation-wide 'Clean India Mission' was launched in 2014 to address the problem of waste and cleanliness in urban India. In the seven years of the mission, Indore, a tier-II city of two millionpeople, has been awarded as the cleanest city over five years (2017-2021) and is advertised as a 'model' city for waste management in India and globally. This research interrogates urban geographies of waste in India under a new cleanliness policy and its impact on the reproduction of spatial and socio-economic inequalities.In Indore, the quest for a clean city has intensified existing socio-spatial segregations and is reproducing inequalities by altering relations and practices surrounding access and control over waste. Beyond the apparent success of the model, the policy has engendered work-related harassment and demolition of homes of informal waste workers (Qabeer, 2018; Truelove and O'Reilly, 2021).The state's "proclivity for order, progress, wellbeing & betterment" (Scott, 1998, as cited in Kamete, 2020, p.163) renders the livelihoods, settlements and bodies of informal waste workers often under attack because they represent disorder, nuisance, pollution and informality (Baviskar, 2002; Ghertner, 2015). However, informality is indispensable to the inefficient and insufficient "formal" system of waste management in India. About 1.5 to 4 million people in India are involved in informal processes of waste work-collecting, sorting, recycling, and reclaimingvalue out of waste (Mistry, 2020). In the name of beautifying cities, informal waste workers are pushed further into spatio-economic margins.The making of India's cleanest city thereby presents a timely opportunity to scrutinise the granular effects of a top-down national policy at the city scale, and the renewed struggles for survival of informal waste workers under a new waste governance regime.