Efficiency in waste collection markets: Changing relationships between firms, informal workers, and the state in urban India

Although recent scholarship has provided rich accounts of waste management privatization in urban India, the origins of the policy models that informed privatization remain unexplored. Further, the place of informal workers in the history of waste management policy and programs is more complicated than that provided by linear accounts of a transition from informal to formal in the existing scholarship. In contrast to existing explanations of these shifts, this paper draws attention to the rise of efficiency as a core municipal concern that explains the shifting relationship arrangements between the state, the informal private sector, and the formal private sector in waste collection markets. To address their concerns with cost of service delivery, Indian policy-makers justified privatization by indirectly drawing upon the influential work of E.S. Savas, the American economist credited with empirically substantiating the theory of efficiency gains from privatization in waste collection markets. Yet, informal systems are in practice not only more efficient than formal ones, they also conform well to Savas’ policy prescriptions for structuring waste collection markets. Efficiency could thus serve as a basis for securing informal workers’ claims as legitimate market participants.