Temporal geographies of premature death: Caste, law, and infrastructure in Swachh Bharat

Abstract

Why do sewage and manual cleaning workers, who mostly belong to Dalit communities, die prematurely? In answering this question, I argue that the mutually reinforcing relationship between law and infrastructure enables their premature deaths. The gaps in law and those in urban sanitation infrastructure in India, combined with deeply entrenched Caste ethos, and the commodification of cleanliness, create conditions where the deaths of sewage workers are a regular occurrence. I situate deaths of sewage workers within the Clean India Campaign, a government program for clean public infrastructure and managing fecal matter to posit that the relentless pursuit of cleanliness results in its commodification, which in turn exacerbates the exploitation of the sewage cleaning workers.

Using a theoretical lens drawn from Black studies and Dalit-Bahujan scholarship, I demonstrate that the temporality of law and infrastructure makes the cleaning workers invisible to the planners and implementers of the Clean India Campaign. Under such conditions, the cleaning workers gain recognition from law only when they die. Their appalling working conditions and the near absence of workplace protections hardly get any attention. It is only when they die that the law recognizes their personhood. I draw attention to how law and infrastructure influence each other and contribute to Black Studies and Dalit Studies by framing caste as racializing assemblages—contextualizing the temporal geographies of premature death and the role of infrastructures as an assemblage.