Die Krise privatisierter ‘Entsorgbarkeit’ und die Neuverhandlung gesellschaftlicher Müllverhältnisse in Bangalore

Abstract

In this article, I trace the successive privatization of waste management in Bangalore throughout the last two decades. Thereby, I illustrate how the dominant mode of handling waste in capitalist societies is marked by a profound neglect of wastes’ materiality. In India, an increased production and altered materiality of waste was caused by the process of politico-economic liberalization of the 1980s, which has given rise to different and at parts contradictory modes of societal handling of waste. Inherently connected to neoliberal urban reform projects, the ‘modernization’ of public handling of waste in Bangalore enhanced the encroachment and displacement of an enormous informalized recycling sector. This has intensified specific forms of disposability in the societal handling of waste. The resulting ‘garbage crisis’, which struck Bangalore in the summer months of 2012, propelled the reconfiguration of the city ?s societal waste relations. As will be argued, these changes have been long prepared by a broad alliance of waste-related civil society organizations and revealed the possible contours of a local green economy of waste.