The Garbage Economy

Abstract

Every day, millions of middle-class and elite residents across Delhi hand their garbage to men with carts and sacks—informal collectors who vanish waste from sight, recycle it into value, and make the city livable. Yet these same workers—overwhelmingly oppressed-caste Muslim and Dalit—live in kabadi bastis stigmatized as dangerous, unsanitary, and disposable. The Garbage Economy reveals how their labor, so essential to urban life, persists amid privatization schemes, violent evictions, and pervasive casteist and Islamophobic discrimination. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, Kornberg takes readers inside Delhi’s waste economy, from morning collection rounds to scrap markets and state offices. The book introduces the framework of casteing capitalism to show how caste relations structure who has access to capital, whose labor is degraded, and which communities are marked for dispossession. Advancing the concept of transactional pathways, it traces exchanges of garbage, scrap, and money across households, neighborhoods, and global markets to reveal the reproduction of status and entrenched inequalities. At once intimate and structural, The Garbage Economy illuminates how waste becomes a window onto the architectures of caste, class, and religious identity in contemporary India. It is a story of survival and struggle, stigma and dignity, in which the dirty work of recycling reveals contemporary logics of urban capitalism. The book was awarded the 2025 Joseph W. Elder Book Prize from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS).