Events

Beyond Formalisation: Informal Workers and the Making of Inclusive Urban Waste Systems

Speaker:
Nidhi Subramanyam, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto

Moderator:
Arkaja Singh, Fellow, CPR

This event will be held in hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room and online via Zoom. Kindly register below to attend.

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Across Indian cities, municipalities seek to integrate informal waste workers into formal systems of waste collection, sorting, and recycling. These initiatives can provide workers with greater recognition and access to livelihoods, but formalisation by itself does not necessarily produce secure or durable inclusion. Drawing on comparative research in Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, and South Goa, this talk examines what it takes to make these arrangements work in practice. The talk will argue that worker inclusion often remains partial and provisional, sustained and subsidised by various forms of compensatory work that are largely invisible. Workers and their households absorb economic, embodied, and social costs, while NGOs, worker organisations, social enterprises, and other intermediaries provide organisational capacities and resources that municipal systems do not fully fund or institutionalise. The talk will consider how these hidden subsidies vary across cities and models of formalisation, and what their distribution reveals about the possibilities and limits of building inclusive and sustainable urban environmental services.

About the speaker:

Nidhi Subramanyam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, where she is also affiliated with the School of Cities and the Centre for South Asian Studies. Her research focuses on urban infrastructure planning and governance, with particular attention to questions of labor, institutional capacity, and environmental justice.

Her research in India has focused on water infrastructure, industrial urbanisation, and planning in the industrial clusters of western Tamil Nadu. Her current work investigates informal worker inclusion in emerging circular economy initiatives in Indian cities, asking how different institutional and organisational arrangements shape workers’ access to livelihoods, recognition, and social protection. Another strand of her research, drawing on work in India and Mexico, examines equitable access to decentralised water systems by tracing how these systems redistribute responsibilities and burdens associated with access, operations, and maintenance among states, community-based actors, and households. Her North American research on green stormwater infrastructure focuses on maintenance governance, maintenance workforce development programs, and their implications for environmental justice and resilience. Her research has been published in leading journals in urban studies, planning, and geography.

Initially trained as an architect, Nidhi holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Mumbai and a Master of Regional Planning and PhD from Cornell University in the United States. She is also a Registered Professional Planner and a Member of the Canadian Institute of Planners.