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The caste system has implications for the environmental experiences of Dalits (formerly \"untouchables\"). Dalits are disproportionately impacted by natural disasters and climate change because of their high dependence on natural resources and manual labor, including agriculture. Dalit viewpoints and ecological expertise nevertheless remain missing from the environmental literature and mainstream activism. Aligning with Black ecologies as a challenge to eco-racism, I use the term \"Dalit ecologies\" to conceptualize Dalit articulations with their environment and experiences of eco-casteism involving inequities such as their exclusions from natural resources and high vulnerability to pollution and waste. My analysis of scholarly literature finds that nature is caste-ized through the ideology of Hindu Brahminism that animates mainstream environmental activism in India. Dalit subjectivities and agency nevertheless remain evident in their literary and oral narratives and ongoing struggles for access to land, water, and other environmental resources.

Events like the COVID-19 pandemic can become what Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey have called ‘binding crises’: ‘events with the clarity and immediacy of a terrifying threat’ (2018: 12), impacting the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless – though unevenly. Binding crises of the past (like the 1842 Great Fire of Hamburg, the 1858 Great Stink in London and the 1896 Bombay plague) have led to ubiquitous reforms in sanitation and waste management practices, most notably landmark innovations in modern sewerage systems. In what follows, I draw on ethnographic research, conducted discontinuously over five years (2015–2019), around municipal solid waste management (MSWM), and the political ecology of informal plastic recycling in the city of Ahmedabad, India.1 I argue that the current pandemic may constitute such a binding event as freelance waste-collection networks are paralysed by the lockdown and ‘authorised’ modes of waste collection are prioritised, leading to a novel ‘infrastructuring’ of emerging relations between human bodies and wasted things.

Indian policymakers, from Jairam Ramesh (of the Congress) to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have, in particular, spoken about the need for toilets over temples (Ramesh 2014; Press Trust of India 2013). Waste management is at the forefront of the Prime Minister's Office's(PMO) flagship programme Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the primary goal of which is to end open defecation. Doron and Jeffrey employ the use of several detailed case studies, textual analysis, archival research work and interviews with people who work with waste.1 The authors highlight the presence of both continuity and change that is to be found within and outside India in dealing with the question of waste. [...]to the novelty and attention attached to the statements made by Jairam Ramesh and Prime Minister Modi, Doron and Jeffrey rightly highlight the long-held viewpoint of many Dalit leaders and intellectuals: without the abolition of caste and without restoring dignity to work, imagining a clean India is woefully inadequate and insufficient.

Among pilgrims, the difficulty of the journey is believed to be rewarded with an equivalent portion of spiritual reward, but the risk-averse traveler may find compensation less quantifiable, however exciting the experience. [...] the presence of the media at the mela largely operates to facilitate a tourist gaze, telescoping events at the Kumbh and feeding them to various markets.\\n79 In 2001, the Indian media in particular directed much attention toward Westerners in pilgrimage mode, from the silly to the very serious, implying that there is something appealing about this form of mimicry in reverse.80 To return to \"Kumbh Mela Women,\" the photograph with which I began:

At best it can be hypothesised that \"there is a relationship between 'infant mortality' (dependent variable) and 'access to toilet' (independent variable)\" which can be put to test. Even if the hypothesis is tested and accepted it does not guarantee the relation, because unlike physical and natural phenomena wherein the researcher can test the relationship between two or more variables through experiments under the controlled conditions of a laboratory, social phenomena do not give such opportunity to do so. [...]the incidence of infant and child mortality due to contaminated water caused by open defecation is also misleading, because one cannot conclude with certainty without ruling out other possible causes of water contamination and infant mortality, which is nearly impossible. [...]human excreta is not the only source of water contamination, there are other creatures that also defecate in the open. [...]excreta and urine are not the sole contaminants of water.

\"The cell phone drew India's people into relations with the record-keeping capitalist state more comprehensively than any previous mechanism or technology,\" say [Robin Jeffrey] and [Assa Doron]. New brides often have to surrender their mobiles, as part of a dismantling of their previous social networks. Recent horrific rapes in urban India get blamed on the taunting video image of the mobile wali [girl] who \"danced, smiled, drank, smoked and wore skimpy clothes - all with a mobile phone in her hand\". The effort to stop the tide is probably futile. Mobile phones give the young their own space and encourage people generally to do new things. \"As a disruptive tool, the cell phone suited democratic India admirably,\" say Jeffrey and Doron.

The Great Indian Phone Book: How Cheap Mobile Phones Change Business, Politics and Daily Life By Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron Hurst and Company, 256pp, Pounds 24.99 ISBN 9781849041928 Published 28 February 2013 In a country of 1.2 billion people, of whom fewer than 500 million have access to toilets, the existence of more than 900,000 mobile phone subscribers is intriguing, to say the least. Drawing on case studies from state-level electoral politics, the authors argue that mobile phones can facilitate alliances between the elite and the oppressed, enabling marginalised groups to gain political power.