Interlinked Contracts and Social Power: Patronage and Exploitation in India’s Waste Recovery Market KAVERI GILL University of Cambridge, UK Final version received March 2006 ABSTRACT Interlinked contracts have been examined almost exclusively in the context of the rural sphere. This article describes the nature of exchange regimes between two sets of primary collectors of recyclable waste, that is, waste pickers and itinerant buyers, and their dealers, in the city of Delhi. Far from the casualised labour transaction commonly described for the unorganised urban sector, the findings portray a picture of personalised and surprisingly long-term exchange between the parties. While a new institutional economics approach might explain the underlying motivation and consequent general form of the implicit contracts, it cannot explain the differential nature of each. It is suggested that in order to do that a political economy approach must be taken. This would understand interlinked transactions as being embedded within and consequently influenced by the particular social context, in this case of an inequitable and impermeable caste hierarchy amongst those that engage in waste work. I. Introduction Interlinked contracts have been studied almost exclusively in the context of agrarian markets. 1 This paper breaks new ground by examining the nature of exchange relations between two groups of informal labourers engaged in waste recovery, that is, waste pickers and itinerant buyers and their respective dealers, in the context of interlinked transactions across a number of urban markets, predominantly those of labour, output (in this case, waste), land and finance. 2 ‘Waste’ markets are increasingly physically important in an emerging capitalist, consumer economy such as India’s, and they provide employment to sizeable numbers of the urban poor working in the so-called unorganised sector of such an economy. 3 Furthermore, whilst the peculiarities of agricultural markets in developing countries, including those of land, labour, credit and capital in the rural sphere and the resultant frameworks of analyses cannot be ignored, 4 it is clear that Correspondence Address: Kaveri Gill, Smuts Research Fellow, Centre of South Asian Studies, Laundress Lane, University of Cambridge CB2 1SD, UK. Email: kg204@cam.ac.uk Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 43, No. 8, 1448–1474, November 2007 ISSN 0022-0388 Print/1743-9140 Online/07/081448-27 ª 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00220380701611519