Waste, Mobilities, and Future-Making in the Indian Himalayas

Pamela Das, Stockholm Environment Institute

Abstract: Home to diverse communities ranging from nomadic pastoralists and refugees to seasonal workers and tourists, the Indian Himalayan region has always been characterised by multiple forms of mobilities and immobilities. However, recently, there has been growing concern surrounding the depopulation of and increased migration from rural areas in the region. In popular narratives, it is climate change that is cited as the explanatory factor for such mobilities in the region. This article seeks to complicate the narrative of climate change-induced migration. It does so in two ways: First, by de-centering climate change as the dominant explanation for why people decide to move. Instead, it urges us to also pay attention to the systematic vulnerabilities created by everyday practices like increased urbanization and poor waste management practices. Second, it expands a normative idea of ‘mobilities’ to include sentiments, emotions and experiences that inform dislocation just as much as spatial movements.

Om Prakash told me that he was thinking of permanently leaving his home where he had spent the past forty years of his life. Sitting on a small rickety khatiya (a traditional Indian woven bed) in his modest courtyard, his shoulders were slumped forward; the resignation in his voice was striking. I was stunned by his declaration. However, his friends Ravi and Satish, who had made space for themselves on the steps of his courtyard, remained unmoved.

Om Prakash was talking about leaving Sudher, a village situated a few kilometres away from the bustling urban centre of Dharamshala, in the state of Himachal Pradesh in India. I arrived in Dharamshala from Oslo, Norway, at the beginning of June 2022, to conduct fieldwork for six to seven months on the politics of urban solid waste management infrastructures. A few weeks after my arrival, the local NGO I was working with recommended that I pay a visit to Sudher. Located in the village, I would find a municipal waste processing site filled with urban waste from Dharamshala. I met Om Prakash at the beginning of August while walking past some of the shops and houses located close to the site, in the hope of striking up a conversation with someone. A single father to a sixteen-year-old son, Om Prakash had introduced himself as someone born and raised in Sudher who had been working at a local automobile shop for the past fifteen years. Earlier, he was involved in agricultural work.

As I sat next to him, I looked over at the spectacular view from his courtyard — hill slopes dotted with pine trees, terraced fields, and small houses with rooftops covered in generous amounts of hay. In the distance, nestled between two hill slopes, you could see a white streak. From Om Prakash’s courtyard, one could almost mistake it for snow. That was the landfill.

Home to nomadic pastoral communities, seasonal workers, refugees, military officers, agricultural workers, and both long-term and short-term tourists, places like Himachal Pradesh in the Indian Himalayan region have always featured heterogeneous forms of (im)mobilities motivated by multiple, often intersecting factors. However, recently, a rather singular narrative about such movements has become popular. Widely referred to as ‘rural out-migrations’, there has been a growing concern about increasing depopulation in the rural areas in the Indian Himalayan region with several villages being referred to as ‘ghost villages' to convey the extent and severity of such depopulation (Kumar & Vishwambhar Prasad Sati, 2023). The Indian Himalayas have been consistently characterised as ‘climatically vulnerable’; therefore, attributing such mobilities and abandoned landscapes primarily to climate change has found increased salience in both academic literature and media articles (Das 2021; Tiwari & Joshi 2015). This is also in line with a global narrative of climate change-induced mass migration that has been endorsed by organisations such as the UN Security Council, and policy and academic articles (Boas et al., 2019).

Om Prakash, however, was not thinking of moving away because of climate change. He was thinking of moving away because of waste.

Dharamshala was selected as a ‘Smart City’ in 2015. The Smart Cities Mission was launched as a centrally sponsored urban development scheme in June 2015. It highlights an area-based and technology-oriented development approach where select areas within the urban centres would be ‘enhanced’ with the aid of the latest technological innovations and then act as a guiding ‘model’ for other ‘aspiring’ cities to replicate (Centre for Policy Research, 2018). In the same year, Dharamshala was upgraded from a municipal council to the status of a Municipal Corporation, bringing additional areas under its jurisdictions and increasing its responsibilities to provide core infrastructural services to its expanding population (Times of India, 2015). This included waste management services for the now seventeen wards that were designated as ‘urban’. A municipal waste processing site (locally referred to as the landfill or dumpsite) had already been established midway between the urban centre of Dharamshala and Sudher. Since 2015, the amount of waste being dumped into the site has steadily increased, transforming the landscape of Sudher. A village of a few hundred, Sudher was now receiving waste generated by the thousands of residents of Dharamshala. Om Prakash went on to explain:

“The first thing you notice is the stench. When I am on the bus, I don’t even have to look outside. I can tell I am in Sudher simply by the stench. With the rains, especially in the monsoon, it gets worse. Then there are the flies, all around.”

He takes a pause to point to a couple of flies buzzing around near the courtyard and then continues:

“The site isn’t even supposed to be there! It is forest land.  We used to graze our cattle there. They just decided to encroach on it and set up a dumpsite in the middle of a forest! Can you believe it? The worst has been the effect on water and farm work. Earlier, we could drink from the nalas and khads (small streams) but now that water is contaminated, we cannot do that anymore. It makes us more dependent on water supply from these rural schemes. People have been diagnosed with all kinds of diseases! The waste site is right above the fields. Dirty water and different kinds of waste end up in the fields and sometimes are even carried over by the monkeys and vultures who throw it around. Many of us here had to sell our cattle because who will buy milk from cows that are constantly eating waste? Animals keep getting sick as well! They have made it very difficult to live here.”    

As Om Prakash finished his sentence, the silence in the courtyard was palpable. I don’t know if it was exasperation, anger, or grief that filled the silence. Residents of Sudher had been complaining to the Municipal Corporation for several years, calling for a removal of the site but to no avail.

Ravi, who had been sitting at the outer edge of the courtyard, seemingly indifferent to the conversation so far, cut through the silence:

“People are now thinking of leaving their farms and cattle. The value of land has decreased here. Residents of other villages don’t want to send their sons and daughters to get married here because of how terrible this area has become.”

For Om Prakash and his friends, the biggest and immediate challenge confronting them was not climate change. While changes in monsoon patterns and increasing heat were noticed by all of them, this has never been a decisive reason for them to consider leaving Sudher. (In fact, Satish, Ravi and Om Prakash had only recently come across the English term ‘climate change’ after learning about it from their kids.) Instead, they kept referring to the everyday reality of living with waste practices in the landfill that were detrimental to their life and livelihoods in the most intimate ways. Characterising villages like Sudher in the Indian Himalayas as inherently ‘vulnerable’ – climatic or otherwise – without referring to scale and regionality has significant consequences in the way we understand how landscapes in these regions have transformed over time, what the pressing socio-economic and environmental challenges are, and what we can do about them.

The intention is not to undermine climate change as a factor. Rather, in line with recent work in critical mobilities and migration, it is to de-centre climate change as the dominant explanation for why people decide to move (Durand-Declare et al., 2021). Privileging climate change as the explanatory factor for different forms of mobilities in the Indian Himalayan region can obscure the vulnerabilities systematically created through historically contingent material practices. Himachal is primarily an agricultural state, with close to seventy percent forest land where several communities, primarily those living in non-urban areas like Sudher, depend on access to agricultural and forest land for their life and livelihoods. Encroachment and diversion of forest land by state institutions for ‘urban projects’, limiting access to grazing pastures, and systematic denial of forest rights are not new. They are a continuation of colonial extractive forest and land tenure policies put into place by the British during the 1860’s 1870’s (Sahni, 2022). It is this colonial logic that has been instrumental in advancing unchecked urbanization across Himachal, disproportionately affecting those who live in the non-urban centres. Increased urban interventions in Dharamshala like the Smart City Mission, where resources, time, energy, and money are constantly poured out into the urban centres, come at a cost to their rural counterparts. As Om Prakash rightly said:

“We are not a Smart City, but we get their trash. Is that fair? They want their future to be a Smart City. What about our future?”

Disruption of agricultural livelihoods, contamination of water sources, encroachment of land, and interruption of social reproduction point to how the construction of urban futures like the one envisioned by Smart City is often put into motion through the demise of rural futures. While the installation of Smart City programs arbitrarily demarcates and cements the categorisation of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ spaces, these same boundaries collapse in real-time when the waste from urban spaces like McleodGanj flows into Sudher.

Deciding to leave is one thing, but committing to the decision of permanently leaving one’s home is entirely another. According to Satish, every year for the past three years Om Prakash had decided to move, only to stay back. He has been saving money and making the necessary logistical arrangements to move, and he has extended family in both Dharamshala and Palampur. However, he was still hesitant. He wanted to move in lieu of what he considered to be an increasingly precarious future in Sudher but was unsure if things would be any better elsewhere. Om Prakash’s account points to another important facet of climate mobilities—what lingers between mobility and immobility. Too often our understanding of mobilities is constructed between the absolutes of physical movement and an imagined stasis. Being attentive to questions of aspirations, fears, and possibilities that animate mobilities “yet-to-be-realized” (Leivestad, 2016, p.134) is important as they demonstrate mobility as “a complex assemblage of movement, imaginaries and experience” (Salazar, 2016, p. 2).

Satish’s account demonstrates another aspect of this. A descendant of an erstwhile nomadic Gaddi family, Satish, a young man in his mid-twenties, currently works at a grocery shop in Bhasgunath, a popular tourist spot in upper Dharamshala. Growing up in lower Dharamshala, he forged a deep attachment to the landscape and expressed profound care for the plants, trees, and animals in the region. He had no intention of leaving Dharamshala as he did not want to live elsewhere, away from his family. However, lately, he admitted he struggled to feel ‘at home’ in Dharamshala. He directed his ire toward tourism. Dharamshala has always been a popular tourist destination for several reasons: picturesque mountains, the presence of revered Tibetan and Indian religious institutions and pilgrimage sites and the recent establishment of an international cricket stadium. Tourists, especially from the nearby cities of Delhi and Chandigarh flock to the hill station in the summers to seek respite from the ever-increasing heat in the plains.

Over the past ten years, a steady increase in tourism, especially post-Covid, has further contributed to the local challenge of dealing with waste. As Satish went on to explain:

“Dharamshala is not the same as it used to be. Show me a place where there isn’t waste! All the rivers, streams, and roadsides are filled with waste. The trekking routes, pilgrimage routes, all of them are covered with packets and plastic bottles. The majority of tourists who come to Dharamshala don’t pick up their waste. I used to love going for treks with my friends, excited to see the landscape. Now, it’s different. You take one step, and you see bottles and wrappers.  It makes me feel disappointed and angry to look at what has become of this place. The waste keeps accumulating in our land, soil, waters, and forests. I know that we need tourism here, these wealthy tourists bring money, but they come to the mountains, and then they leave. We stay. We stay with what they have left behind.”

Several of my interlocutors who grew up in Dharamshala before it was designated a Smart City reflected on how an ever-growing tourist economy indexed by an increasing presence of waste has irrevocably changed their understanding of the landscape. This was not merely a spatial experience, but an emotional one. Feelings, affects and sentiments, both persistent and fleeting, of being out of place inform dislocation as much as spatial movements (Harvey & Hansen, 2018). In fact, increasingly feeling out of place while being physically rooted in space was difficult to process for my interlocutors. The affective relations that once structured their spatial and emotional experience of the landscapes were now dislocated. Places that once felt intimate and familiar, a source of comfort, attachment, and respite, now evoked sentiments of anger, frustration, and disappointment. Waste often moves, defying neat boundaries and settling into unexpected nooks, corners, and spaces. Landscapes are transformed and new affective relations are forged (Arnall & Kothari, 2020). What was particularly striking was, as Satish pointed out, the increased mobility of wealthy tourists going in and out of Dharamshala and the relative rootedness of the non-elite locals who must “stay with what they have left behind”. Waste is a stubborn and visual reminder of this.

‘Climate reductive translations’ (Dewan, 2023) of dislocation can work to obscure the more everyday and systematic violence that is often unfurled through urban interventions and infrastructures. For my interlocutors, waste infrastructures like the dumping site disrupted their existing relations to the surrounding landscape and interrupted their agency to make place (Ingold, 2009). Similarly, the material and visual presence of waste transformed their affective ties and sentiments toward their surroundings. While the Dharamshala Municipal Corporation presented the waste processing site as a temporary solution for the increasing volumes of waste, people like Om Prakash saw in it a permanent future chalked out for them.

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