India’s fast-growing population, and aspirations to join the throwaway prosperity of the developed world, generate vast quantities of waste, sewage and pollution. In attempting to mitigate these problems, India displays strengths and weaknesses, and the Clean India campaign has found successful techniques as well as discovering strategies that do not work. Some of India’s experiments hold lessons for Australia.

The panel examines the Indian experience of waste removal, public sanitation, recycling and local-government dilemmas with special reference to India’s economic and population growth and to the role caste plays in the contest to control waste.

SPEAKERS

Assa Doron is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the College of Asia & the Pacific, Australian National University (ANU).

Robin Jeffrey is an Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and the ANU and chairs an advisory panel for the Australia-India Institute.

Dolly Kikon, a lawyer from northeastern India, has a doctorate from Stanford University and is a lecturer at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

CHAIR

Sally Warhaft is a Melbourne broadcaster, anthropologist and writer.

Melbourne book launch of Waste of a Nation: Garbage and Growth in India by Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey (Harvard University Press).

This event is a collaboration between La Trobe Asia and the Australian India Institute (AII). It was held at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on 31st May, 2018.