Abstract

This chapter is about informal women garbage collection workers, or pourakarmikas, in Bangalore city, India. We assert that gender stands as the cornerstone of their everyday work experiences, as well as their everyday technological experiences. While work experiences are outcomes of a dismal concoction of multiple social variables (such as informality, caste, and gender), their encounter with a new technological intervention has reflected and reproduced labour experiences, and has simply seated itself in the existing sociopolitical ambience. Besides documenting the travails of pourakarmika workers in Bangalore, the chapter brings together conceptual traditions in labour informality among women workers and the feminist politics of technology, placing gender as the centrepiece to intertwine them, hence providing a cooperative analysis of informality and socio-technology when studying this section of informal women workers.