Author: Sujal Kumar Poddar, Aasvi Kedia, Ditti Baid, Suryansh Pratap Singh ABSTRACT This study investigates the structural and economic disconnect between India’s municipal waste management ambitions and the lived realities of the informal waste workers who form the actual backbone of the country’s recycling ecosystem. While modern policy frameworks, exemplified by the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) guidelines of 2022 and urban clean-city campaigns, promote a highly formalized, capital-intensive vision of the circular economy, they systematically marginalize the informal sector, which handles 60% to 70% of urban recyclable waste. Utilizing primary survey data collected from 110 informal waste workers across Indian urban clusters, this paper analyzes the micro-economic constraints, behavioral realities, and institutional dynamics that govern waste worker decision-making. The empirical findings indicate that waste workers are not inherently unaligned with environmental sustainability; rather, their practices are strictly bounded by severe financial precarity, high transaction costs, and systemic institutional exclusion. Descriptive and cross-tabulation analyses demonstrate that over 57% of surveyed workers earn less than ₹10,000 per month, and 81.8% experience high financial instability, leaving them with zero economic margin to absorb the costs of enhanced segregation or safety compliance. Furthermore, the existing fiscal framework, such as an 18% Goods and Services Tax (GST) on recyclable scrap, drives transactions into untaxed, informal cash networks, penalizing formalization. This paper argues that India’s circular economy cannot succeed through top-down corporate monopolization. Instead, sustainable waste management requires an incentive-compatible policy framework that restructures fiscal policies, enforces informal cooperative sourcing quotas within EPR, provides micro-level neighborhood infrastructure, and leverages municipal co-management models to elevate informal workers into recognized green-collar professionals.

Authors: Dhriti Jade¹ ,Rajni Kumari² , Kiya Kamdar³  ABSTRACT This study delves into the contemporary workings of patriarchy, and exposes how dynamic and resilient it continues to be as it navigates through social and cultural contexts today. Patriarchy has diversified into countless social structures, cultural environments, and individual encounters. The patriarchal order not only perpetuates a division between the genders based on claimed superiority and hierarchy, fostering inequality in our private and public lives but is also constantly reinvented through everyday actions, cultural norms and institutional practices which allow it to remain prominent within our modern lives. It explores how patriarchal notions are entrenched, subtly reproduced, and negotiated on an everyday basis within society. We contest that the traditional yardstick to measure patriarchy has become archaic.  Within this larger context, the study will also explore the manifestation of this system via social media as a contemporary space where patriarchal notions are reproduced and simultaneously challenged. While such platforms do provide avenues for feminist conversations, organizing, and representation of minority narratives, it is also true that dissemination of gender stereotypes, discriminatory attitudes and harassment continue to be facilitated on the internet through algorithms and digital practices. Using established theoretical frameworks we analyse data and provide critical insights. Ultimately, the need for digital literacy and a greater degree of accountability on the part of the institutions will be discussed in order to effectively confront the complex workings of patriarchy.