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Sorting waste at-source (or household recycling) helps optimize the efficiency of waste management systems and safeguard the health of waste handlers. Recently, segregation of waste has become an urgent policy imperative that has been written into national waste management policies in India. While urban Indian households have had a long-standing tradition of segregating and selling high-value recyclables to actors in the informal sector, in contemporary policy discourse, women are constructed as recalcitrant urban subjects who need to be disciplined in accordance with the new mandates of waste segregation. This paper locates these processes of subject formation within the changing political economy of waste. Waste sorting is a labor-intensive process, and certain waste management technologies require presorted materials. In addition, presorted recyclables also offer up a source of revenue for waste management service providers. Beyond seeing the need for source segregation simply in abstract environmental and public health interests, this paper argues for contextualizing this imperative within the ongoing processes of privatization and mechanization of waste management systems. These processes dispossess informal waste collectors from their means of subsistence while relying on the unpaid labor of certain women, thus reproducing gender, class, and caste relations. 

Although recent scholarship has provided rich accounts of waste management privatization in urban India, the origins of the policy models that informed privatization remain unexplored. Further, the place of informal workers in the history of waste management policy and programs is more complicated than that provided by linear accounts of a transition from informal to formal in the existing scholarship. In contrast to existing explanations of these shifts, this paper draws attention to the rise of efficiency as a core municipal concern that explains the shifting relationship arrangements between the state, the informal private sector, and the formal private sector in waste collection markets. To address their concerns with cost of service delivery, Indian policy-makers justified privatization by indirectly drawing upon the influential work of E.S. Savas, the American economist credited with empirically substantiating the theory of efficiency gains from privatization in waste collection markets. Yet, informal systems are in practice not only more efficient than formal ones, they also conform well to Savas’ policy prescriptions for structuring waste collection markets. Efficiency could thus serve as a basis for securing informal workers’ claims as legitimate market participants. 

Purpose Rapid economic growth and urbanization in India have increased demand for municipal services. In response, privatization has emerged as a policy solution to a growing deficit in urban infrastructure and service provision. But, privatization assumes prior state ownership of those services. Certain waste management services, specifically doorstep waste collection, have never been truly public in the sense that private informal actors have historically provided them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the tensions and contradictions between two related policy imperatives – universal service provision and privatization – that appear to be guiding the municipalization of solid waste collection services in urban India. Design/methodology/approach Research for this paper relies on detailed analysis of key government documents (reports of various committees, regulations and laws) that have been important in defining municipal responsibilities for waste management in India from 1990 to 2016. In addition, where appropriate, research materials from the author’s doctoral dissertation fieldwork in Delhi from October 2012 to December 2013 have also been used. Findings An analysis of key policy documents revealed that the government’s efforts to document deficits in service provision ignored, and thus rendered invisible, the work of the informal sector. While a consensus on the need for universal waste collection service had emerged as early as the late 1990s, it was not until 2016 that municipal responsibility for service provision was codified into law. The rules issued in 2016 municipalized this responsibility while simultaneously opening up spaces for the inclusion of the informal sector in waste collection service provision. Originality/value This paper fills a gap in the existing literature on how policy interventions have brought the space of the doorstep into the ambit of the state such that it allows for the opening up of those spaces for the entry of private capital. Under the guise of universal service provision, the shift to municipalization and outsourcing to private corporations is not in fact privatization – service provision is already private – but involves the dispossession of informal workers and the transfer of their resource to the formal, corporate sector.