Mr. Hariprasad V M will be presenting his Pre-Synopsis as per the following details: 

Date: Friday, 9th January 2025,

Time: 3.30 PM – 5.00 PM.

Venue: C-TARA Conference Room 1

Title: Informality, Marginality and Agency: A Study of Sanitation Workers in Alleppey Town, India

Guide: Prof. N C Narayanan

Co-Guide: Prof. Pankaj Sekhsaria
 

RPC Members:Prof. Pennan Chinnasamy, Prof. Himanshu Burte

Abstract:

Sanitation work in India remains labour-intensive and continues to pose serious challenges in both formal and informal settings, especially in non-sewered towns where workers bridge gaps between sanitation infrastructure and service delivery. Despite providing essential public services, sanitation workers are mostly invisible and unrecognised, labouring in unsafe environments while facing economic and social marginalisation. Existing scholarship remains fragmented, often treating informal work, caste, gender, and health risks associated with sanitation work in isolation rather than in relation to one another. Through this study, I examine intersectional marginality, state-mediated informality and constrained agency to have a more nuanced understanding of the lived realities of sanitation workers. My study focuses on sanitation labour as a central factor in fulfilling the core obligations of the state in providing basic sanitation services, rather than reducing the understanding of labour to a mere outcome of capitalist economic processes.

The conceptual framework draws on existing literature and preliminary fieldwork to develop the idea of 'flexible formality', a hybrid employment arrangement in which public institutions use formal bureaucratic tools to create and sustain informal workforces. It combines state recognition in various ways, but with precarity associated with the work arrangements. This framework proves particularly crucial for understanding sanitation work, where employment arrangements blur formal-informal boundaries, where caste stigma remains embedded in daily labour, and where workers organise under conditions of extreme marginalisation. Using this framework, the thesis examines the concepts of intersectional marginality, state-mediated informalisation and worker agency. Focusing on different groups of sanitation workers in Alleppey, I ask three questions: How have sanitation practices changed between 1937 and 2022? How do different sanitation workers in Alleppey experience marginality within regimes of flexible formality? In what ways do different groups of sanitation workers assert agency within conditions of flexible formality? By employing qualitative methods, my study analyses three different worker groups positioned along the formal-informal work spectrum. They are: Harita Karma Sena workers (Solid waste management workers), Municipal sanitation workers, and Informal faecal waste management workers engaged in manual and mechanised septic tank/pit emptying services.

The empirical evidence reveals that informality constitutes neither a residual condition declining with modernisation nor a transitional arrangement evolving toward formalisation, but rather it is a deliberate governance strategy serving specific state interests. The state utilises flexible formality to secure essential sanitation services while denying labour obligations. The integrated approach in my study shows that the marginalisation of sanitation workers is neither purely economic nor simply cultural. It is not just political either. Instead, it is a complex mix where state-mediated informality, intersectional marginality and constrained agency operate together through labour arrangements devised by the state.