Waste flows

Waste flows. It flows through the city, from dustbins to segregation centres and to landfills, sometimes vanishing into the fumes of incinerators.

To make waste visible and foreground the relations and frictions that cling to its flow, I speak of two distinctive movements – vertical and horizontal, each with its own maze and rhythm.

The Vertical flow of waste

Waste flows vertically on its own, provided it is left alone, untouched for years. It might seem stagnant to many of us, but that is a visual deception.

Let me tell you a story of a mountain of waste and how it ‘flowed’ 328.08 feet below the earth on its own.
In a beautiful city lived people with their beautiful things, in harmony with their desires and wants. Everything was beautiful in this city except their inner worlds and the surroundings told a far uglier story.

Marx would say that it was because they were alienated from themselves, the things they made, as well as the nature around them. This alienation created holes in the tapestry of the city, and its people would stick patches of pretty things into their lives to make it look beautiful.

Periyar would say that life was ugly in this city because, for thousands of years, its people had created hierarchical pyramids of touchability and untouchability, purity and profanity. In these pyramids, one group’s dignity was built on another’s humiliation, and waste was hurled onto the ‘others’ to preserve the illusion of beauty.

People in this city thought buying pretty things would make them forget their nine to six jobs, and throwing things at others would keep them pure through eternity. They read books which convinced them that the practice of  Dharma, the Hindu idea of moral duty and right conduct, would guarantee them a VIP lounge in heaven.

But life is here and now.

In the early 1970s, people’s obsession with beautiful things deepened. With increased disposable income, they flocked to malls turning cash into waste. Unable to contain this excess in their own colonies, they dumped it onto another -one marked as impure.  This other colony had people who were not at the top of the pyramid or even part of the pyramid, they came from the forest.

Everyday tons of waste would arrive at their colony to be dumped.

You may ask what the government was doing about these changes in the city. It read the same Dharma book and whatever answers they could not get from the book they asked the white man. They provided vehicles to purify the city and maintain its status. Their plan was to take waste out of their sight. And that is how they birthed the miscarried child of the industrial womb, the dumping site.

Everything was okay, the waste mountain was growing larger and higher, miles away from the queen’s palace. It did not seem to move, decorated with layers of artefacts, a Museum of Man.

The waste mountain had grown up to 80 feet in the 2010s, equivalent to around ~5 floors. But when a petition revealed its flow in 2013, everyone was shocked.  Waste, once assumed to be an inert, obedient chap, had been moving under its own blanket. It did so with such secrecy that the National Green Tribunal (NGT) was very upset with it.

In over five decades, waste had flowed ‘downward’ seeping as deep as 328.04 feet into the ground.  Immediately, NGT asked the people of the other colony to stop digging into the soil for water, and drink water from somewhere else.

Accusations  and jibes were thrown at waste.

“We kept you safe for years, gave you a whole 57.8 acre land and even then you impure object couldn't be satisfied. Our scriptures are so right about you.”

Waste stayed grounded and whispered slowly, “Malik, my master – I tried whatever I could but I can't go against my nature, my nature is to flow and rot. I will transform on my own. I leach and permeate into the soil.”

Horizontal flow of waste

Some 6,50,245 vehicles (as of November 2025) are deployed in India for this horizontal flow of waste. It is the maze of modernity, technology, GPS, human power and exploitation of a certain group of people.

All of this, a rite of passage for waste.

Within this liminal space, an object is neither a resource nor waste. Something in between, ambiguous yet potent.

The act of throwing might be closest to the idea of waste. It is not produced in the factories, wrapped in shiny packets. I find this uniquely disorienting about waste – a by-product that was not planned, yet here, standing in front of us in abundance. We do not find any one selling waste but whatever being sold is so temporary in its form that it already constitutes waste. Every resource innately has waste in it.

​As the famous idea by Mary Douglas goes, nothing is dirt or waste but only a matter out of place. Potato peels lying on the floor in the centre of the room are a source of anxiety, something that disturbs the order and aesthetic of the house, something that has to be quickly cleaned. Whereas when the same potato peel is put in the compost pit, it transforms into valuable manure for the plants. It is no longer a waste.

I push myself to think beyond the mere dustbins and positions. Towards the relationship humans have with objects around them, and the relationship they forge with each other through these objects. A grandparent’s old watch is an epitome of nostalgia, inheritance, and continuity, even if it is non-functional. However, the moment it enters a dustbin, it is reduced to an obsolete waste- an old, useless object. This shifting meaning and value is simply not about the materiality of waste but the relationships that form through it. I find refuge in Bertram Turner’s anthropology of property, perceiving waste as not discard but relational. Seen this way, waste too is property- it connects, divides and transforms people through its touch and flow.

Let me unpack this idea more and dive into the horizontal flow of waste.

A stream of waste flows from the dustbin of my house and moves like a river, thickening and shrinking through the city. I follow waste backwards when it is being thought and intended beyond the realm of individual households, even before it becomes waste, before it starts flowing in the city.

A dark, black, thick, waste stream - a mix of everything that can be imagined, from phones to the intestines of an animal, the flow of human excreta and being.  As I move backwards to trace its flow, I see the blackness of the stream diluting – its Udgam,the source from where a river begins).

The origin, Udgam, of the waste stream is marked by a bulldozer, it digs deep into the earth with its claws and intends to extract most of it. I bow down to the head of the bull. Waste, in its neat, beautiful form-like the packaging of Amazon boxes before they are crushed and thrown, flows from its mouth, intended to be transformed into something temporary, disposable and unable to fulfil human desires and make enough profit. It is a spiritual experience to bow down to that bull, especially for a person like me who is absorbed in the flow of waste, to witness this relentless flow revealing the essence of relations. The unending exchange between extraction and return.

I flow back to the city.

As I move, I see many people flowing with the waste in the stream, they are wearing t-shirts that say ‘waste workers’. Some women wear the t-shirt above their pallu – the loose end of the sari draped over the shoulder, and some like to wear it as a blouse and wrap their pallu over it. I like both styles. They carry their children with them who along with their mothers learn how to swim in this stream.

It is the women waste workers who create the momentum of this horizontal flow. They enter all the dustbins, and untie all the tight knots of the pannis (thin plastic bags). They are the alchemists– before their touch, everyone perceives the throwaway as waste, but the moment they touch it and perform the transitory ritual, it becomes maal (goods), a commodity. I am fascinated by their touch. It reminds us that what we claim to have let go of still circulates through other lives, unsettling the moral economy of disowning.

Though this touch lets the blackness of the waste cover their bodies in a way that clean (swachh) water can not wash away. Alcohol and humiliation dilute it. Waste not only flows in the city but also permeates their bodies – they have labels of being untouchables, of being de-notified. Once the waste permeates their bodies, they are not invited to the weddings or celebrations in their neighbourhood. They tell me that it bothers them but they do not let it make them feel small. They are too busy in breaking the generational traumas, creating worlds for their children which look very different from theirs. Some have put fancy wallpaper in their room, so that their daughter can get a better wedding proposal. Others work hard, make an effort to invest in a private school for their children. I know one alchemist who bought a wash basin and a dish stand for her kitchen so that she can make her experience of cleaning the dishes more feasible. A woman earns and takes care of her needs.

There are also people who do not enter the waste stream but just stand close to it. These are the ones that make the most money out of this transformative journey of waste. They make money because they are clean and pure. They claim that they are the head of the waste management body and bring knowledge and technology.

But waste itself wants to flow towards the women, the alchemists, not these heads. They want to burn waste, make it invisible, and waste knows that. Waste knows that women waste workers understand its potential, its transformative, flowy nature.

Heads don't want people to think about the udgam of waste, the finitude of its inception. They have got a machine, and have convinced people that we don't need the alchemy of women waste workers. This machine will convert everything to ashes and make the waste disappear- Buy now! They tell us that we can extract as much as we want. They make us believe that extraction is the natural flow of our lives, they repeat and chant the rumours of infinitude through brand new hoardings.

But the very existence and visibility of the waste disrupts this flawed flow, standing in front of us as a mountain, as a Museum of Man, reminding us that life, after all, might not be that beautiful and pure. Waste stands there, not as residue but as witness to a world that mistakes disowning for purity. Perhaps it asks us to remain in relation, not by owning or cleansing, but by remembering what we once touched and tried to forget.

A version of this writing was published in Hakara Journal’s special edition titled Waste Flow  in August 2025- https://hakara.in/asfia-jamal/