Interview: Economist and Author Kaveri Gill

On Tuesday, we reviewed Kaveri Gill's book, Of Poverty and Plastic. Gill uses an interdisciplinary approach to poverty analysis in the Indian plastic recycling industry.  In the process, she gives us important insights into the ways in which poverty, development and the environment interact in urban India. You can read our review here; we think that Of Poverty and Plastic is a rigorous, ambitious book that will be appreciated by both activists and academics alike.  Today, we are pleased to follow up our review with an interview with the author.

Tell us how you became interested in plastic recycling in the first place. 

Well, more than plastic recycling, as an economist I have always been interested in poverty and employment / labour markets. And in fact, that remains the key focus of the book, as suggested by the title, which alludes to Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men' and its themes of poverty during the Depression, migrant workers, and their dreams of a better life. Informal plastic recycling, as one of many informal sectors, provides a 'free' livelihood to lots of migrants to the city in the context of liberalisation , and I was struck by the great irony of these people - especially those at the lowest levels of the chain - not passively accepting of their poverty and expecting handouts, but instead exerting great agency through a market to better their lot in life, even as they contribute to the greening of the city. And yet they come up against an unhelpful state, and prejudiced judiciary and civil society.  

Your book is based on interviews, surveys and focus groups conducted in slums and markets where many of Delhi's plastic workers live and work . Can you tell us a little about that experience? Any moments or lessons that stand out for you in particular?

Well, I spent more than fifteen months at a stretch in the slums of Jwalapuri and the Mundka recycling market, a decade ago now.....and have returned regularly since. During this time, I have made good friends, and really seen the view from the other side. The thing that struck me most, and remains with me, is how the opposite of powerless and passive these people are in accepting the deal handed out to them by life. As development economists and specialists, we spend our lives hearing about the importance of the poor 'exerting agency and voice'. And that is exactly what these people have painfully wrested for themselves. In a context where they are given no security and certainty about the legality of their slum plots, are rarely the recipients of regular service delivery of water or electricity -- ironically, they are underserved by the municipality as regards solid waste management and are instead themselves the free providers of the same! -- have no access to the formal labour market or any social security from the state, they have managed to painfully negotiate all of the above through creating this informal sector work, and establishing hegemony over it, thus gaining some measure of economic and political power. This they use to overcome the social stigma they face on the ground of their doing 'polluting' work, in a ritual as opposed to environmental, sense!  

You argue that middle class urban environmentalists tend to privilege “green agenda” issues like climate change and biodiversity over what what you call “brown agenda” issues like safe water, sanitation and housing. Do you see these agendas as exclusive, or is their room for common ground?  

Well, I don't see the 'green' and 'brown' agenda as mutually exclusive. By all means, let the middle classes be concerned with both! But in privileging the former over the latter, we are in danger of internally reflecting the developed country / developing country hierarchy and divide so clearly in evidence at Copenhagen. Our elites and expanding middle classes cannot wish away the 50% of the other half forming our largest metropolitan cities, like Mumbai and Delhi. And unless we take their basic needs -- housing, safe water, sanitation -- into account as a matter of priority, even as we increase our own conspicuous consumption, we are setting ourselves up for great inequality and trouble.  

Your portrayal of waste pickers and the small godown owners for whom they work is complex, but you seem to agree that society could do better by them. Given extremely low margins of profit in this commodity chain, is it possible to imagine an effective system of plastic recycling that provided these workers with a better standard of living?

Yes, first, the state and judiciary and civil society shouldn't hinder the work they are doing. If we can't help them, leave them alone - but don't create unnecessary obstacles and hurdles by banning the recycling (again, great irony but no surprises there, we have never considered banning the primary production and consumption, which would solve the environmental problem far more effectively!), by requiring they fulfill expensive regulatory requirements which would render this low value added industry economically unviable (like printing recycled content and polymer type on each product, which even the primary industry is not yet enforced to do, as it is in industrialised countries!)

If we want to help them improve their standard of living, then there are means -- give them technological aid; make banking and microfinance loans available to them etc.

You point out that lion's share of the job growth that has occurred in the past 20 years has occurred in the informal sector. You seem ambivalent about this. On the one hand, the informal sector has been the source of a lot of innovation in areas like plastic recycling; and in many cases it does the work the state seem incapable of doing. On the other hand, informal sector work offers little security, and often reinforces the "hard bar" of caste. Do you see a way out of this? 

Let me be clear about my position on the informal sector. The reality is, it accounts for 93% of the labour force in our country at present. In an ideal world, it would be far less and many more would have formal sector employment, with social security and other benefits. But we are far from that point. In the meantime, none of my informal waste worker groups fall below the official state poverty line for Delhi, not even the waste pickers working on dumps. This is perhaps the most key finding of my book, yet it has been overlooked by many. This means they are not eligible for any handouts from the state. It is against this backdrop, and in this context, that they are delivered to the doors of the informal plastic recycling 'market' to survive and make a living for themselves. To take that away from them without offering a viable alternative is to consign them to the life of even greater destitution. Of course, one hopes in the long run, as the economy grows and develops, and more numbers are able to participate and benefit from an inclusive economy, this kind of work dies a natural death, as it did in post-industrial societies of the west. In the meantime, let them survive through an independent, and in it's own way, dignified employment and market opportunity. 

To find find out more about Of Poverty and Plastic see  review from Tuesday.  There you will also find out how you can enter our contest to win a free (and well-used) copy of the book--but hurry, you've got less than two weeks!  Want a brand new copy?  Here are the links you need:

Buy Of Poverty and Plastic in India from Flipkart

Buy Of Poverty and Plastic in the USA from Oxford University Press

Buy Of Poverty and Plastic in the UK from Amazon

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Don't forget to celebrate to India's refusal to allow Bt Brinjal into the country!  If it hadn't been for the thousands and thousands of people who marched, testified, fasted and petitioned, the outcome would have almost certainly been different.  Hats off to the people who worked so hard to make this victory possible.

Reviewed: Of Poverty and Plastic

Of Poverty and Plastic

by Kaveri Gill

Oxford University Press (2010)

Four and a Half Green Stars (excellent)

A few years back, my son, who was then in Class III, was told by his teacher to write an essay on a "real-life hero.”  With no input form me, he chose to write about the kabadi walla, because “the kabadi walla helps us all recycle.”  One winter evening, we wandered through a south Delhi scrap market, interviewing itinerant buyers and the owners of small godowns who were just finishing their day’s work.  I think it was probably one of my finer moments as a father, and I've always been proud of my son for being willing to go into such unfamiliar territory.

That experience sparked my interest in Delhi’s solid waste management system, which seems to be badly broken in some ways and extremely effective in others.  So last month when I saw Kaveri Gill’s book, Of Poverty and Plastic, I couldn’t resist buying it, in spite of it’s relatively steep price tag.

I was not disappointed.  Gill’s book is ambitious, engaging and meticulously researched.  It reveals much about what is wrong –and right—not just with India’s solid waste management system, but with our post-liberalization economy as well.  This is not an easy read: it is an academic monograph, and as such it is concerned with issues of theory and methodology that the lay reader may find challenging.  But for those who work on issues related to poverty, development, waste management or recycling, this book will be worth the effort it requires.

Gill did her research in slums where plastic workers live, and in the markets where they work.  She draws her conclusions from a mix of quantitative household survey data and qualitative material gathered from focus groups and interviews.  Gill accepts the idea made popular by Amartya Sen that a real measure of poverty must look at much more than just income.  But she points out that this “capability approach” presents researchers with many problems when they set out to measure and compare poverty levels within and across countries. While Gill does not claim to answer every question she raises, she does manage to present us with a compelling picture of work and life in Delhi’s plastic industry.

This isn’t the place for an exhaustive discussion of her conclusions, but there are a few lessons that stand out.  Regarding poverty and development, it is true that the kabadi wallas, the itinerant buyers who buy and collect dry recyclable scrap, do better overall than waste pickers, who collect plastic from trash and “wet waste.”  But Gill finds that when one uses the government's poverty criteria as a measuring stick, no group of workers in the Delhi plastic industry, including waste pickers, qualifies as “poor.”  Given the work waste pickers do, and the conditions they live in, this finding suggests there may be something wrong with how the government measures poverty.

Gill finds that, overall,  workers in the informal plastic industry do somewhat better in terms of income than other informal sector workers living in the same slums.  And if anything, the plastic industry is more equal in terms of income distribution than many other informal sector industries. It is thus not possible to blame the poor conditions of waste pickers on super-exploitative middle men.  Careful analysis reveals that there is simply very little money to be made in this system, and that the owners of the plastic godowns are, like those who work for them, limited in both power and life choices.  Scavengers and godown owners alike understand that their lack of social mobility results, in large part, from the “hard bar” of caste oppression which continues to exist in urban India.

It is interesting to note that most post-liberalization job growth has occurred in the informal sector; this has reduced the access many of the most oppressed workers once had to formal jobs in the industrial and government sectors.  This dynamic—growth based on high wage jobs for a very few, well-educated members of the elite, and informal subsistence wage jobs for the rest—raises important questions about the model of development we’ve been following for nearly two decades now.

Turning to environmental issues, the book makes clear that India does an exceptional job recycling plastic: 60-80% of post consumer plastic is recycled here, as opposed to 7% in Europe and 10% in China.  This should be celebrated, Gill argues, because instead of dumping our used plastic in landfills, we now turn it into cheap buckets and new shoes.   Certainly the workers at the lowest levels of this industry deserve more respect and support from government and society at large.  But Gill also argues that by the logic of capitalism, those who are at the highest level of this industry are not the villains they are often made out to be.  Gill suggests they have played a vital social function by inventing--at considerable financial risk--new techniques and markets for environmentally friendly products.  Gill argues that they are entrepreneurs in the best sense of the word.

However, rather than celebrate this industry, too often elite groups and even middle class environmentalists endorse policies that do the opposite.  Gill looks at the mostly unsuccessful drive to ban plastic bags in Delhi in 2000 and asks why it was aimed primarily at recycled plastic. Gill argues that this was true in part because middle class environmentalists in India, as in the West, tends to privilege “green agenda” issues like climate change and biodiversity over what she calls “brown agenda” issues like safe water, sanitation and housing. But one can't just blame the environmentalists.  To some extent, Gill suggests, the ban the bag movement of a decade ago was hi-jacked by elite interests that were interested less in “green” or “brown” issues and more in making the city look “world class” by removing (or moving) unsightly plastic litter, slums and factories.

Like many of us, Gill sees the problems in the system as it exists, but isn’t sure exactly what to do about them in the long run.  Modern market economies are full of problems, she seems to say, but they are a reality we have to live with.  Our post liberalization market economy, in particular, is producing unequal growth and is distorted by many things, including continuing caste oppression. Gill doesn’t tell us how to remake, or "recycle" this system.  But she does a great deal to help us understand it.  For academics and activists alike, this book and the questions it raises are well worth engaging with.

Buy Of Poverty and Plastic in India from Flipkart

Buy Of Poverty and Plastic in the USA from Oxford University Press

Buy Of Poverty and Plastic in the UK from Amazon

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It's really difficult for me to do this, because I love to hold onto books once I've read them.  But because Of Poverty and Plastic is about recycling, among other things, I'm going to offer my used copy (full of my pencil marks) as a prize to the person who writes me the most compelling email explaining why they just have to read it.   Send it here: haribatti123@gmail.com

I'll get a panel of eminent people together to judge the entries.  Let's make the deadline two weeks from today.

We'll be spending the rest of this week talking trash.  On Thursday, we'll follow up this review with an interview with the author, Kaveri Gill.  On Saturday, we'll have all kinds of trashy links.

Poverty isn't Contagious (and why we should support a genetically modified government)

We all know most governments feel compelled to take action when the public feels threatened.  That's why the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after the September 11 attacks.  Maybe we can be grateful that India's responses tend to be less drastic, though we've rattled our share of sabers and set up our share of questionable encounters over the years.

But what if the threat were not a terrorist attack, but a disease?

Last week, the Times of India reported that 100 people in Pune have now died from H1N1; this week, we learned that the all-India death toll has reached 500.  H1N1 is scary stuff, of course, which is why we see signs of it everywhere: face masks, stories in the media, notices from the schools our children attend, etc.   Not surprisingly, government officials at all levels have felt the need to do something.  This is why, over the past few months, schools, colleges, and even shopping malls have been ordered to close at times, even if this strategy has questionable benefits.  

But imagine we were faced with a much, much bigger threat.  Imagine more than 50 Indians began dying, not every day, but every hour, from a sickness which was largely preventable.   Imagine most of those dying were children.  What would we do then?  Cancel school?  Shut down the airports? Call for the resignation of high-level government officials?

In fact, as many of you may have guessed, more than 50 people are dying each hour in India--from diarrhea--and we hear precious little about it. The exact hourly rate, 52, adds up to 1250 deaths a day and more than four lakh deaths per year, 386,000 of which are children.  

Of course, diarrhea is not just an Indian problem; it kills 1.5 million children world wide. It even kills some people in rich countries -- but not very many.  This is because over the last century, the introduction of clean drinking water and improved sanitation and nutrition has drastically reduced this problem in the developed world.  Among developing countries, there has been progress, but these efforts have largely stagnated since 2000. India, for it's part, is doing better than Afghanistan but much, much worse than China. The story and numbers, by the way, is very similar when it comes to TB,  which is also mostly treatable, given proper medical care.

How can we sleep at night with this constant carnage going on? When I started writing this post, I did some research on why it is that people tend to worry about some things that happen very rarely--like plane crashes, terrorist attacks, or deaths from H1N1--while we ignore other things that happen much more frequently--like deaths from TB or diarrhea.  I learned that there are several major theories of risk perception and that no one theory perfectly explains the irrational ways in which people perceive risks. 

Except you and I know that there is nothing at all irrational about the way the media, the government, and most of middle and upper middle class India ignores TB and diarrhea, while we go on wringing (and hopefully washing) our hands over H1N1. This behavior is perfectly rational, because diarrhea is not, for the most part, killing residents of posh colonies in South Delhi or South Mumbai--it's not even killing middle class urban Indians, most of whom have access to clean water, decent health care, and adequate sanitation and nutrition.  It's killing poor people, and people who live far from doctors.   And, as most of us know, poverty is not contagious!

So until diarrhea and TB mutate into sicknesses that threaten the people who matter most in this country, progress in the fight against them will be slow.  Unless, of course, the government itself mutates--into one that puts common people at the forefront of more than just slogans. That's the kind of genetic engineering even a good green could get behind!