Abstract

This article draws on examples of inventive plastic reuse from India and personal anecdotes of elders as an anthropological reflection on possible plastic futures. It sketches the large‐scale governmental reforms in the domain of municipal solid waste management, or MSWM (which, by legal definition in India, includes plastic waste). In this regard, it draws out some of the problematic socio‐political and environmental implications of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ‘Clean India’ campaign, whose technocratic policy orientations towards standardized centralized MSWM echo his cultural nationalist agenda. These reforms contrast with home‐based re‐engineering methods and the redeploying of plastic discards (thereby making them notuner moton (‘like new again’), and their localized circulation through relatively local but uneven reputational and economic networks. Clean India sequesters and processes vast quantities of plastics through the wide‐ranging adoption of a waste‐to‐energy techno‐fix (in which plastics are incinerated). In contrast, the authors illustrate routine practices and relations whereby people reuse, repurpose and recycle plastics. While Clean India can detract from and disrupt these mundane practices and everyday relations, these are suggestive of alternative plastic futures – both socio‐material and environmental.

Highlights

  • When India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s social media handles posted a video of him ‘plogging’, picking up plastic garbage while jogging, one morning on a beach in Tamil Nadu, it included a message on civic duty – to ensure the country’s ‘public places are [kept] clean and tidy’ – with Modi leading by example (Fig. 1)

  • The Prime Ministerial gesture resonated with urban middle-class enthusiasm and anxieties about ‘clean and tidy’ environments (Baviskar 2011), which received promotion and practical templates under Modi’s ongoing Swachh Bharat or ‘Clean India’ mission, inaugurated in 2014

  • With substantial social media presence and mobilization (Jeffrey 2015), the mission calls upon citizens to take the ‘cleanliness pledge’ online, which includes 100 hours of mobilization a year, cleaning streets and public places, starting with one’s neighbourhoods and workplaces

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Summary

ORE Open Research Exeter

TITLE Plastic possibilities: Contrasting the uses of plastic ‘waste’ in India AUTHORS Dey, T; Michael, M JOURNAL Anthropology Today DEPOSITED IN ORE 05 July 2021. COPYRIGHT AND REUSE Open Research Exeter makes this work available in accordance with publisher policies. A NOTE ON VERSIONS The version presented here may differ from the published version. You are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication

Plastic possibilities
OGD INDIA
Alternative reputational networks
Plastic futures
Full Text
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