Agarwal, Aparna

The visibility and invisibility of caste(d) waste management infrastructures in Delhi - Economic & Political Weekly - 60(28), Jul 12, 2025: p.65-71



Delhi today is facing a burgeoning waste “management” crisis. Newspapers frequently report blazing fires around landfill sites, strikes by sanitation workers or lack of infrastructural facilities, and the subsequent challenges faced by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi to deal with this crisis. This paper addresses two parallel yet interconnected waste management infrastructures—public–private partnership-led waste management services and the Bhalswa landfill in north-west Delhi—to examine how infrastructures are strategically “visibilised” by the former to project a sanitised, hygienic, casteless, and citizen-oriented image of the city’s municipality, and “invisibilised” by the latter to conceal the casteist, dirty, and putrid reality of the city. – Reproduced

https://www.epw.in/journal/2025/28/special-articles/visibility-and-invisibility-casted-waste.html