Mr. Sumit Verma will present his MS by research as per the details:
 

Date: Thursday, 12 March 2026
 

Time: 1400 hrs.

Venue: C-TARA Conference Room No.1
 

Topic: Keeping Things Working: Sanitation Maintenance and the Value of Repair in Institutions

Guide: Prof. Pankaj Sekhsaria

RPC Members: Prof. Satish B. Agnihotri, Prof. Himanshu Burte, and Prof. Mahendra Shahare

Abstract:

Institutions need infrastructure to function — but not all of it gets equal attention. Sanitation infrastructure, and the people who keep it working, are among the least studied parts of institutional life. This dissertation examines how sanitation maintenance and repair work are carried out in the Student hostels of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay). It asks three questions: how do maintenance and repair workers keep sanitation infrastructure stable in an institutional setting? What does this work involve — in terms of skill and daily experience? And what can studying this work add to how infrastructure and repair are understood in Science and Technology Studies (STS)?

The research draws on 15 days of intensive fieldwork, alongside a year of living in the hostel. During fieldwork, I followed repair workers, plumbers, helpers, and pump operators through their daily routines. The empirical analysis is organised through five analytic tools: maintenance regimes, repair trajectories, symptom-forms, infrastructures of repair, and proximity work. Of these, proximity work is the dissertation's main conceptual contribution. It brings together ideas about embodied skill from repair studies, occupational stigma from the sociology of dirty work, and the experience of working in close physical contact with waste and abject material — to build an analytic category suited to sanitation maintenance and repair labour in India.

Two findings stand out. First, sanitation at IIT Bombay does not stay stable on its own. It is kept stable — through constant monitoring, improvised repairs, sensory judgement, and ongoing decisions about what counts as working well enough. Second, the institution's identity as a centre of technological excellence sits alongside a precarious maintenance system. This is not a contradiction. The two depend on each other: the prestige of innovation is made possible, in part, by the invisibility of the labour that keeps the place running.

The dissertation also makes three theoretical contributions to STS. First, it provides empirical grounding for Jackson's idea of broken-world thinking — showing that decay and entropy are the normal state of institutional infrastructure, and that stability is what needs to be explained, not breakdown. Second, it takes Larkin's work on infrastructural aesthetics into an institutional setting, suggesting that maintenance is calibrated to what looks good rather than what is necessary, whether technically or socially. Third, it identifies the relationship between caste, the body, and proximity to waste as largely absent from Euro-American repair scholarship—a gap this study brings into view and one that future research should take up directly.