Papers by Gilbert Rodrigo
Journal of social inclusion studies, Jun 1, 2016
All human society has always produced waste and will continue to do so. Waste materialssubstances... more All human society has always produced waste and will continue to do so. Waste materialssubstances 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 co position nature also acts as a sin In a field stud of a na eless to n 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 subcontracted 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). O ver 80 workers and self-employed waste workers were interviewed along with employers, businessmen, politicians, activists in civil society organisations and caste associations la ers and pu lic sector engineers and o cials 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 a s that did not ena le their fir s to expand it as found that a fe pri ate fir s ith la our forces of up to also earn profit fro aste hile their la our force earns wages at poverty levels. Informal livelihoods, estimated at 10-15 for every government
of Palayaseevaram village regarding sharing of water with the Chennai city and its impact on the ... more of Palayaseevaram village regarding sharing of water with the Chennai city and its impact on the village
Review of Development and Change
Agricultural development research and policy has to address climate change. Against the mainstrea... more Agricultural development research and policy has to address climate change. Against the mainstream focus on adaptation, this article reports on public policy implications for climate change mitigation of a project measuring environmental, social and economic aspects of India’s rice economy: greenhouse gases (GHGs), energy and water; the quantity and quality of work and a systematic analysis of market and social costs and returns. A detailed life cycle assessment of GHG production generates four different kinds of technological possibilities helping the transition towards lower-carbon agriculture: rain-fed rice production (RR), System of Rice Intensification (SRI), solar pumps (SPs) and halving transmission and distribution (T&D) losses in the electricity grid. Through quantitative ranking and qualitative discursive analysis, a new method, multi-criteria mapping (MCM), is trialled in which the benefits of alternatives are evaluated by incommensurable criteria. These are costs, employ...
Journal of Social Inclusion Studies
Review of Development and Change
Agricultural development research and policy has to address climate change. Against the mainstrea... more Agricultural development research and policy has to address climate change. Against the mainstream focus on adaptation, this article reports on public policy implications for climate change mitigation of a project measuring environmental, social and economic aspects of India’s rice economy: greenhouse gases (GHGs), energy and water; the quantity and quality of work and a systematic analysis of market and social costs and returns. A detailed life cycle assessment of GHG production generates four different kinds of technological possibilities helping the transition towards lower-carbon agriculture: rain-fed rice production (RR), System of Rice Intensification (SRI), solar pumps (SPs) and halving transmission and distribution (T&D) losses in the electricity grid. Through quantitative ranking and qualitative discursive analysis, a new method, multi-criteria mapping (MCM), is trialled in which the benefits of alternatives are evaluated by incommensurable criteria. These are costs, employ...
A case study of a village where the introduction of an industry eroded the water ways to the wate... more A case study of a village where the introduction of an industry eroded the water ways to the water bodies, adversely impacting on the traditional livelihood of the villagers.
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Papers by Gilbert Rodrigo