Techno-optimism in Swachh Bharat: Caste, technologies, and the political ecology of waste management

My paper focuses on two cleaning technologies installed at Indian railway stations under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) and its Swachh Rail programme: PET bottle crushing machines and bio-toilets. The operative discourse surrounding these technologies is ecological. Bottle crushers are justified by compliance with the Plastic Waste Management Rules and National Green Tribunal orders; bio-toilets by preventing the discharge of excreta and wastewater onto tracks. But who feeds the bottles into the crushers, and what happens when the machines fail? I argue that installing technology does not guarantee a clean station. Rather than displacing caste-based cleaning labour, these technologies compound it. Workers, predominantly Dalit, lower-class and female, must not only continue their primary cleaning tasks but also maintain, repair and compensate for the failures of machines they work alongside, while remaining absent from the policy narratives that celebrate them. Further, I argue that techno-optimism, enables eco-casteism, producing relations in the station, concerning cleaning labour, urban waste management, and technology, that deepen existing inequalities. The ecological discourse naturalises Dalit workers in degrading roles, making their labour indispensable yet invisible. I show how waste management is negotiated in the station such that plastic bottles that do not reach the PET bottle crushing machines become part of the urban waste commons . I draw on ethnographic fieldwork at two railway stations in Hyderabad, Telangana, including 72 interviews with cleaning workers, their supervisors, and railway management, and on policy documents. My paper contributes to urban political ecology, Dalit ecology, urban public infrastructure, technology and commons, and anti-caste scholarship by demonstrating that postcolonial ecological governance reproduces caste exploitation through the very technologies that claim to displace it. I make four contributions. First, I show how SBA, despite claiming to diverge from colonial sanitation, reproduces its caste and class logics. Second, I foreground the railway station as a spatial and institutional context largely absent from scholarship on caste and sanitation technology. Third, I show how green discourse legitimises the caste structuring of waste work. Fourth, I examine how technological breakdowns redistribute labour. Overall, I demonstrate how eco-casteism is operative in postcolonial ecological governance.