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PurposeRapid economic growth and urbanization in India have increased demand for municipal services. In response, privatization has emerged as a policy solution to a growing deficit in urban infrastructure and service provision. But, privatization assumes prior state ownership of those services. Certain waste management services, specifically doorstep waste collection, have never been truly public in the sense that private informal actors have historically provided them. The purpose of this paper is to examine the tensions and contradictions between two related policy imperatives – universal service provision and privatization – that appear to be guiding the municipalization of solid waste collection services in urban India.Design/methodology/approachResearch for this paper relies on detailed analysis of key government documents (reports of various committees, regulations and laws) that have been important in defining municipal responsibilities for waste management in India from 1990 to 2016. In addition, where appropriate, research materials from the author's doctoral dissertation fieldwork in Delhi from October 2012 to December 2013 have also been used.FindingsAn analysis of key policy documents revealed that the government's efforts to document deficits in service provision ignored, and thus rendered invisible, the work of the informal sector. While a consensus on the need for universal waste collection service had emerged as early as the late 1990s, it was not until 2016 that municipal responsibility for service provision was codified into law. The rules issued in 2016 municipalized this responsibility while simultaneously opening up spaces for the inclusion of the informal sector in waste collection service provision.Originality/valueThis paper fills a gap in the existing literature on how policy interventions have brought the space of the doorstep into the ambit of the state such that it allows for the opening up of those spaces for the entry of private capital. Under the guise of universal service provision, the shift to municipalization and outsourcing to private corporations is not in fact privatization – service provision is already private – but involves the dispossession of informal workers and the transfer of their resource to the formal, corporate sector.

The containment measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have had severe economic consequences on the lives of the urban informal poor in India. Several scholars have commented on the vital yet insufficient role that government-run food relief programmes, mutual aid practices and private charity have played in addressing hunger during lockdown periods. This article investigates the impact of lockdown measures on food security among waste pickers in nine Delhi neighbourhoods through an analysis of data collected from daily telephone surveys with 70 adult and 69 child waste pickers over a 54-day period. Analysis of this data reveals that while respondents relied heavily on emergency food relief programmes, their sense of hunger was closely connected to their ability to provide food for themselves. Drawing on these insights, the article concludes by offering policy and programmatic recommendations to address food security problems for the urban poor in general.

IDRF fellows discuss Alex Nading's book Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement, based on his International Dissertation Research Fellowship research on waste management and disease ecologies in urban Nicaragua.