Illegal scavenging bodies: The subterranean lives of migrant manual scavengers in India’s sewer lines

Keywords: illegal bodies, stigma, untouchability, waste, infrastructure, sewage
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

Through this paper, I analyze the relations between the state and its service providers whose work and lives are deemed illegal, in aspiring world-class cities of India. Manual scavenging is legally banned in India. However, despite the stigma, illegality, and criminality associated with its practice, several individuals and groups continue to associate with the work. This is due to the nation’s pressing need for manual handling of excreta given a crumbling sewage infrastructure, a demanding middle-class population valuing cleanliness and aesthetics, and a rapid rate of urbanization. Manual scavenging though risky and stigmatized, provides flexibility and a steady flow of income to vulnerable migrants from poorer Indian regions and from the neighbouring state of Bangladesh. Using qualitative interviews with migrant workers and local activists, I analyze why the state allows, through contractual hiring and other means, the practice of manual scavenging to perpetuate in India. I do this by analyzing the relations between the migrant workers and the state- which in order to deliver good governance for its legal citizens uses the stigmatized and illegal bodies of migrant labourers to deliver public utility services. It also penalizes and deports these bodies in accordance with political currents and judicial mandates of the times. Here the state ‘needs’ the workers, as they provide the material labour upon which the immaterial labour of the city thrives, but does not ‘want’ them, due to the stigma attached to them as being illegal and polluted because of their alien status and engagements with dirt.