ABSTRACT
With the rapidly changing nature of waste, the global estimate for per-capita production of waste was projected to increase 1.2 to 1.42 kg per person per day from 2010–11 to 2025 (Hoornweg, Bhada-Tata and Kennedy 2013). The work associated with disposal of materials labelled as waste has long been stigmatized and is considered the responsibility of people of low castes by people of high castes, who deposit waste in public space (Rodrigues 2009). Some of this work has been discursively sanitized as ‘green skills’ in official documents (Skill Council for Green Jobs 2016). We inquire into the acquisition, recognition, politics, and possible accumulation of the knowledge systems associated with waste-work. The vast literature on waste rarely documents or looks upon the work as ‘skilled’ and the otherwise extremely rich historical accounts of subaltern Dalit skills and livelihoods (Ilaiah 2009; Roy 1999) have largely ignored waste. Through Lave’s (1993) lens of ‘learning as a social practice’, we navigate the spaces of different forms of waste-work, exploring the institutions that mediate both formal and informal means of learning. The chapter narrates the stories of waste-work from two small towns in India – in Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh. We draw parallels and contrast the experiences of workers. We study the skilling and skills of 46 workers, interviewed from September to November 2019, who pick, sort, clean, sell, and dispose different materials that get categorized as waste – varying from recyclables to human faeces. Even as there is official recognition of formal learning hours for sanitation work, and initial days allotted to learning being unpaid, most forms of work were informally learnt, on the job by ‘seeing and learning’ and ‘learning by doing’. We find that workers found it difficult to discuss the skills of work as distinct from their physical and economic working conditions – often referring to ‘getting used to’ as a form of learning. The processes of learning, we further find, are mediated by official categorizations of work and waste that were often embedded in social structures of caste and gender. While there is increasing formal recognition of some forms of waste-work, working conditions are deteriorating: we find that there is a simultaneous sense of the workers being ‘replaceable’ and permanent positions are being replaced by ad hoc/casualized ones in local municipal labour forces while under the general threat of privatization and contractualization in which skill acquisition is informalized.
