Slow Violence, Wasted Bodies: Environmental Justice and the Political Economy of Informal Waste Work in Mumbai

Description

This paper examines Mumbai's informal waste recycling economy through an environmental justice lens, foregrounding both the precarious labour conditions that sustain the city's metabolism and the resistant knowledge practices through which workers navigate toxic systems. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research in Dharavi's recycling clusters, I trace how waste systems structure differential vulnerabilities along intersecting lines of caste, class, gender, and migration status, producing what Davies (2019) terms "slow violence" through cumulative bodily harm.

The majority of waste pickers and workers in Mumbai are from Dalit or minority Muslim communities, populations already subject to social discrimination who become further marked by the stigma of "filthy" work (Chaturvedi & Gidwani, 2010). Workers report respiratory problems, skin infections, reduced lifespans, and substance use to cope with toxic conditions. This is environmental injustice embodied, the metabolic burden of processing urban detritus falling disproportionately on those already marginalised.

Yet workers are not passive victims of toxic geographies. Plural resistances emerge through what Ottinger (2013) calls "community-led science": vernacular languages of valuation, intergenerationally transmitted sorting expertise, homegrown tools and techniques, and tacit knowledge constituting sophisticated "citizen sciences." Workers also resist through place attachment, returning to Dharavi despite relocation, through informal networks that subvert regulatory exclusion, and through collective refusals to participate in traceability regimes that would formalise their dispossession. As technocratic circular economy policies threaten displacement by reframing waste as service delivery rather than livelihood (Gidwani, 2015), these knowledge practices become sites of contestation over whose expertise counts.

Period	1 Jul 2026
Event title	Pollen Political Ecology Conference 2026
Event type	Conference
Location	Barcelona, SpainShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International