On shaky grounds: situating safe sanitation in Mumbai’s sub-surface legacies of waste

This paper explores situated practices of sanitation infrastructure-making in Mumbai’s self-built settlements to examine constructions of ’safe’ sanitation amidst legacies of waste contamination. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation of sanitation construction practices and extensive work-life history interviews with 22 contractors building household toilets in Mumbai’s M East ward, we reveal how contemporary sanitation practices intersect with colonial-era landfill legacies. These contractors work on unstable, sinking grounds composed of municipal waste accumulated for a century, where each excavation encounters layers of historical contamination rather than stable ground. The analysis demonstrates how contractors’ situated expertise emerges through navigating multiple contamination streams simultaneously − managing fresh bodily wastes alongside subsurface contamination from colonial waste disposal. Through incremental learning and adaptive construction techniques responsive to shifting ground conditions, contractors develop localised understandings of safety where ’majbooti’ (strength, literal physical sense of construction and metaphorically in terms of having a grounded understanding of the local context) becomes central to safety repertoires. Their practices reveal how sanitation infrastructure serves as a critical interface mediating between surface living spaces and subsurface contamination histories. This situated knowledge challenges conventional notions of ’safely managed’ sanitation that assume waste can be made to go ’away.’ Instead, contractors’ experiences expose the impossibility of separation when infrastructure must be built within rather than above contamination. Their expertise, developed through intimate material engagement with subsurface contamination, demonstrates how safety emerges relationally through managing ongoing pollution rather than achieving its absence. While not romanticising unsafe conditions, we argue for more pluralistic understandings of sanitation safety that recognise the expertise of those building infrastructure within, rather than despite, contaminated urban grounds.