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The containment measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have had severe economic consequences on the lives of the urban informal poor in India. Several scholars have commented on the vital yet insufficient role that government-run food relief programmes, mutual aid practices and private charity have played in addressing hunger during lockdown periods. This article investigates the impact of lockdown measures on food security among waste pickers in nine Delhi neighbourhoods through an analysis of data collected from daily telephone surveys with 70 adult and 69 child waste pickers over a 54-day period. Analysis of this data reveals that while respondents relied heavily on emergency food relief programmes, their sense of hunger was closely connected to their ability to provide food for themselves. Drawing on these insights, the article concludes by offering policy and programmatic recommendations to address food security problems for the urban poor in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging debates on the contemporary reconfigurations of work question previous understandings of the relationships among and between waged, unwaged, and reproductive labour, situated processes of value formation and/or enclosure, and the constitution and limits of contemporary capitalism. Taking Cindi Katz's notion of countertopographies and Gillian Hart's notion of relational comparison as inspirations, this Symposium draws attention to new and existing conceptual frames and modes of analysis to situate contemporary permutations of work within the shifting dynamics of uneven development in specific state, local, and institutional contexts. This Introduction summarises the interrelated and overlapping contributions that papers in this Symposium offer methodologically, analytically, and politically. The open‐ended aspiration that emerges from these contributions is that close attention to heterogeneous formations of work outside the wage might help to multiply forms of vigilance and critical praxis necessary to resist the co‐optation and enclosure of people's creative energies, and move toward realising the latent liberatory potentials that several of the contributions suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature demonstrates the significance of aesthetics within processes of world‐class city making, as decisions about who gets to live and work in the city are increasingly made on the basis of codes of appearance. However, less attention has been paid to how such codes are (re)produced and (re)directed by informal workers and their organisations in everyday practice. Drawing upon a multisided ethnography in Kampala and Delhi, this paper explores the ways in which market vendors and waste collectors have responded to the proliferation of three aesthetic technologies: the identity card, the uniform, and the code of conduct. We show that workers have appropriated these technologies in creative ways in order to defend their livelihoods against the threat of displacement. However, this act of appropriation has come at the cost of the exclusion of the more vulnerable workers, who now find their activities policed not only by the state but also by a range of non‐state organisations. These findings contribute to debates on labour organisation and world‐class city making by demonstrating the ways in which aesthetic rationalities emerge through an encounter with the tactics of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In farming communities dependent on the cultivation of pollinator‐dependent crops, the livelihoods of farmers are inextricably linked with pollinator health. A global pollination crisis interlinked with a crisis of food production and farmer livelihoods, exacerbated by processes of socio‐environmental change, is emblematic of the Anthropocene and of the kinds of ecosocial problems with which critical physical geography (CPG) engages. We propose examining the farmer‐pollinator system in the Indian Himalayas through an ecological livelihoods approach using a range of collaborative citizen science methods including bloom observations to document pollinator visits, plant phenological observations to document year‐round floral resource availability, and farm diaries to document orchard management practices. An ecological livelihoods approach draws on posthumanist theory, which has remained largely disengaged with methodological questions that are of concern to CPG. Citizen science, although widely used across a range of disciplines, has seen limited engagement in CPG. After elaborating some of the opportunities and challenges that an engagement between CPG, posthumanist theory, and citizen science opens up, we propose a methodology that would be simultaneously epistemological (understanding interdependence between livelihoods of farmers and pollinators) and ontological (imagining and building worlds where farmer and pollinator habitats are recomposed). Key Messages: An ecological livelihoods framework can be productively deployed in an investigation of interdependent farmer‐pollinator relationships.Citizen science tools can help operationalize the triadic conceptual approach of autopoiesis, allopoiesis, and alterpoiesis in an ecological livelihoods framework.The use of citizen science in this context allows us to bridge the epistemological divide between posthumanist and ecological scientific approaches in geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the problem of Delhi's air pollution is well recognized, as is the class bias of the judiciary in targeting certain sources of air pollution over others, what is less will understood are the unintended consequences of air pollution interventions on indoor and outdoor air quality. This paper shows how the National Green Tribunal has targeted one source of air pollution in recommending waste-to-energy technologies that deprive waste pickers of their livelihoods. The pandemic-related lockdown provides an opportunity to assess the impacts of livelihood deprivation on fuel use. Using data collected from surveys of waste pickers, this paper shows that decreases in income are related to an increase in reliance on solid fuels. Therefore, we argue that air pollution interventions designed to control air pollution from poor waste management have the unintended consequence of increasing air pollution from a different source (biomass burning for cooking) that specifically impacts waste pickers by increasing their exposure to indoor air pollution, while also undermining the government's urban air pollution mitigation efforts overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular framings of the contemporary urban Indian waste crisis focus on the crucial need for public behavior change. This article provides an exploratory study of the ideology and work of two social media campaigns - Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission and The Ugly Indian, a social media group - which emphasize the need for inculcating ‘modern’ civic behaviors of not littering, and volunteering to clean up public spaces, and examines the following questions: What types of urban imaginaries are invoked in the discussions of urban filth? Do these discussions betray structural (class-based) biases in the aesthetic ideologies they imagine and invoke? Do these discussions reify the public-private dichotomy that has puzzled scholars concerned with hygiene in urban India? Discourses deployed in these campaigns reproduce colonial and post-colonial narratives of hygiene as a ‘cultural problem’ premised on an idea of a pre-modern urban subject who needs to be disciplined. By focusing on behavior change, these campaigns privilege an understanding of waste as an aesthetic problem rather than as a much more complicated infrastructural one. As these campaigns focus on highlighting and celebrating the volunteer labor of the privileged, they may also obfuscate the economically necessary labors of the marginalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]