The living and working conditions of sewerage workers in the Vijayawada Municipal Corporation were documented through a sample survey of 98 workers. The Other Backward Classes and Other Caste workers outnumbered those from the Scheduled Castes, refuting the caste-based view of this occupation even while reflecting the precarious employment situation of the unskilled in Andhra Pradesh. A sizeable proportion of workers are on contract or on a timescale without any social security benefits. The working conditions, work-induced health disorders, and non-provision of safety equipment at worksites are the main reasons for the vulnerable working conditions. Low levels of education, lack of skills, and limited opportunities in the labour market restrict their mobility vertically and horizontally. About 70% of them reported financial insecurity.
Colonial municipal planning discourses imagined waste as infrastructure to build Bombay city by filling creeks and reclaiming land. Waste as land was reassembled through the judiciary’s remaking of the landfill as a zone of pollution to be “scientifically” closed through waste treatment technologies. Even as science attempts to comprehend its complexity and contain it, waste possesses an agency of its own that disrupts the social, haunting reclaimed real estate with its fugitive gaseous presence.
