SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Genealogies of Garbage in Modern India

India used to be the past. Now, it is the future. The changing status of garbage in India tells one version of this larger story. Whereas garbage used to be a marker of India’s supposed backwardness, today, certain forms of garbage—bio-medical waste chief among them—are also taken to announce India’s economic arrival. Bearing this in mind, the aims of this talk are two-fold. On the one hand, it outlines the design and implementation of one of India’s most high-profile post-liberalisation pieces of garbage legislation, the Ministry of Environment and Forest’s Bio-Medical Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, (1998) 2000. On the other hand, through an investigation of the everyday practices of this regulation in the south Indian city of Chennai, this essay seeks to illuminate that which the regulatory optics of legislation and implementation obscures. Many studies of garbage regulation focus on regulatory design. As a corollary, they assess the degree to which implementation and compliance succeed or fail. My story is different. Although there is widespread acknowledgement that these regulations have failed in their stated aims, mine is not a story of regulatory success or failure. Instead this is a tale of what these regulations have produced: a neoliberal governmentality of garbage-as-future.