Migrating injustices in the small city: drought-impacted interstate migrant workers’ experiences in Tiruppur’s sanitation sector

Abstract

Climate stresses like droughts amplify economic precarity, pushing low-income, caste-oppressed communities across India to pursue temporary rural-urban migration as an adaptation strategy. This paper develops an intersectional framework on ‘migrating injustices’ to examine how caste and regional identity mediate interstate rural-urban migrants’ experiences of vulnerabilities and injustices, particularly as these experiences move and endure with migration, shaping migrants’ adaptive abilities. The framework is applied to trace the injustices that a group of 800-odd drought-impacted, caste-oppressed, landless persons from central India experience through their adverse economic incorporation as sanitation workers in Tiruppur’s privatized sanitation sector in southern India. Findings reveal that a history of caste oppression and uneven development in their home region produced unequal drought impacts for our informants, pushing them to migrate. However, migrants’ caste and regional identity combine with their climate and economic precarity to direct their migration into precarious, unjust working conditions and employer-provided, environmentally risky accommodations—both removed from local socio-political networks, undermining migrants’ ability to contest injustices in Tiruppur. In highlighting the translocal and trans-sectoral intersections between the migrating environmental, economic, and caste-based injustices for circular migrants, the paper argues that eliminating migrating injustices is crucial for achieving transformative adaptation and urban climate justice.