DISCRIMINATION IN THE WASTE ECONOMY: NARRATIVES FROM THE WASTE WORKERS OF A SMALL TOWN Barbara Harriss-White * and Gilbert Rodrigo ** * Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, Oxford University, Email: barbara.harriss-white@qeh. ox.ac.uk. ** NGO activist and rural researcher. 1. INTRODUCTION All human society has always produced waste and will continue to do so. Waste materials— substances without value—are constantly generated in all production, distribution and consumption processes. The time that waste spends without any value may be a few minutes at the minimum and eternity, at a maximum. Nature, the key provider of resources, is not simply a tap. In subjecting waste to the physical laws of decomposition and recoPposition nature also acts as a sinN In a feld stud\ of a naPeless toZn in South India with a population of one lakh, an administrative, education, healthcare, commercial, communications and cultural hub, where all spare land, irrespective of its formal ownership status, is clogged with waste, we placed an analytical template over the urban territory. The social relations of waste were then scoped for the generation and handling of waste in: i) urban production (including in rice mills, an industrial alcohol distillery and a clothing accessories factory); ii) distribution (by the Indian Railways and the wholesale-retail vegetable market); iii) consumption (handled by the Municipal sanitation workforce, plus bonded migrant workers employed by a private company sub- contracted to the municipality, who were compelled to supplement their pay by further work in the informal economy, plus an army of informal waste gatherers, and a private wholesale and recycling hierarchy); iv) the disposal of human waste (by the previous workforce plus owners of septic tanks), and v) in the reproduction of society (covering public and private hospitals and clinics, and the sale of alcohol (without which most of the labour force will not work in waste). Over 80 workers and self-employed waste workers were interviewed along with employers, businessmen, politicians, activists in civil society organisations and caste associations laZ\ers and puElic sector engineers and oɤcials responsible for waste management, including a total of about 110 respondents. While the overwhelming majority of the workers were self-employed in the informal economy in Za\s that did not enaEle their frPs to expand it Zas found that a feZ priYate frPs Zith laEour forces of up to  also earn proft froP Zaste Zhile their laEour force earns wages at poverty levels. Informal livelihoods, estimated at 10-15 for every government