ABSTRACT
The chapter examines both strength (negotiation) and crisis (non-negotiations) of a marginalised community of waste pickers in Calcutta. It is a study of the collective and individual negotiation, and non-negotiation regarding the community’s social and material resources and reasons behind their chronic non-formal development in terms of their sociocultural and economic participation. It analyses how they negotiate within their own community, gender-based negotiations, negotiation with the mainstream/elite/state, and waste retailers who consider the waste pickers’ community as “destitute and dispirited” outside the basic state and social developmental schemes. Despite this negative hegemonic and axiomatic consideration by the outside world the waste pickers are determined to continue their unique business of waste segregation and selling of recyclable wastes in that hostile milieu and retain its distinctive community characteristic. This is possible, as the community is not ready to implement their own rights, and not aware of the outside world’s ethical lacking.
