Abstract

“Informality is not an absence of law, but a reflection of how law chooses to exclude”.[i] This insight captures the paradoxical status of waste pickers in India, a group estimated at over four million who are indispensable to urban waste management yet remain legally invisible.[ii] Waste pickers contribute substantially to the economy and the environment by reducing municipal costs, recovering recyclables, and sustaining the recycling value chain. “An equally important facet of the right to life is the right to livelihood,” the Supreme Court held in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985).[iii] This observation anchors the paradox of waste pickers in India: indispensable to urban waste management yet invisible in labour law. This Note examines recent legislative developments, including the PWM 2016 (Amendment) Rules (PWM), 2024[iv] and the inclusion of waste pickers under the NAMASTE Scheme (2024–26),[v] alongside constitutional jurisprudence and comparative cases from Colombia. The central question is whether these measures translate into enforceable rights or remain within a welfare paradigm. The Note argues that a rights-based framework is essential to integrate waste pickers into India’s circular economy.

India generates over 150,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste daily, with waste pickers forming the backbone of recycling and segregation.[vi] In the Indian legal and policy context, the term waste picker refers to informal workers who recover, segregate, and sell recyclable materials from streets, bins, landfills, or municipal collection points. The Solid Waste Management 2016 Rules,  (SWM 2016)[vii] explicitly define a waste picker as a person or group “informally engaged in collection and recovery of reusable and recyclable solid waste from the source of waste generation, the streets, bins, material recovery facilities, processing and disposal facilities for sale to recyclers directly or through intermediaries.” International organisations such as WIEGO[viii] adopt a broader definition, emphasising the economic and environmental contributions of those who collect, sort, and recycle discarded materials. Recent initiatives such as the NAMASTE Scheme (2024–26) recognise waste pickers as a distinct beneficiary group entitled to occupational ID cards, protective equipment, and social-security linkages, even though they remain outside the formal protective scope of India’s labour codes.

Despite their contribution, they remain excluded from statutory protections. This Note situates their role within constitutional law, labour codes, and recent regulatory reforms. India’s informal economy remains the principal site of work for women and men lacking formal contracts; waste picking is a large, heterogeneous subset of that labour. Recent national estimates show informal work dominates total employment, with women disproportionately concentrated in own-account and home-based activities; waste picking sits at the intersection of poverty, caste, and gendered labour markets. The “state of informal waste workers” evidence base documents that waste pickers supply low-cost sorting, collection, and material recovery services indispensable to municipal performance metrics and to producer Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) compliance[ix], while bearing disproportionate exposure to injuries, bio-medical and chemical hazards, heat stress, and harassment in public space. A 2024 institutional analysis[x] across Indian cities further shows how “rules-in-use” tendering terms, access restrictions, and registration hurdles systematically exclude informal workers even when “rules-on-paper” promote integration.

I. Legislative Comment: India’s Recent Developments

The SWM 2016 mandate recognition of waste pickers by urban local bodies, yet enforcement remains weak. The rules oblige local authorities to arrange door-to-door collection (including in slums and informal settlements) and crucially to “recognise and integrate” organisations of waste pickers and collectors into municipal systems. That mandate, located in Rule 15, creates a legal hook for inclusion, not charity. The PWM 2016 regime operates in parallel on the commodity stream. The 2016 rules introduced EPR for plastic packaging, and the PWM 2016 (Amendment) Rules, 2024 further rationalise registration and compliance under the centralised EPR portal administered by central pollution control Board (CPCB) (along with earlier 2023 changes), tightening the architecture through which producers evidence collection, recycling, and end-of-life processing.  Properly implemented, these frameworks reinforce segregation, material recovery, and traceability functions already delivered informally by waste pickers.[xi]  Rules of 2024 strengthen producer responsibility and traceability, creating indirect opportunities for waste picker inclusion. The 2024 update to the NAMASTE sanitation programme expressly expands coverage to “all waste pickers” for protective equipment, identity cards, and livelihood linkages- an administrative acknowledgment that waste pickers are essential workers entitled to minimum safety. That inclusion is reflected in official scheme guidance (June 20, 2024 approval noted; PPE, ID, and MIS provisions specified), but without an embedded statutory right the delivery still hinges on local uptake and budget. Meanwhile, the labour-code consolidation has not yet yielded enforceable coverage for self-employed waste pickers: the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSH) Code received assent in 2020 but has not been brought into force nationally; when it is, its firm-centric design offers thin protection to own-account workers unless rules and notifications are crafted to cover platformised and contracted collection chains.[xii] The Code on Social Security, 2020[xiii] similarly awaits full commencement; the e-Shram registry is a promising bridge for unorganised workers, but portability of benefits and scheme depth remain uneven.

II. Judicial Comment: Constitutional Jurisprudence

The Supreme Court has consistently expanded labour protections.In People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India (the Asiad case),[xiv] the Court read Article 23’s prohibition of forced labour to cover work below the statutory minimum wage and condemned subcontracting practices that siphoned wages through intermediaries (jamadars). Bandhua Mukti Morcha[xv] extended this rights-protective stance to bonded labour and insisted on State rehabilitation obligations under Articles 21 and 23. Olga Tellis stitched livelihood to life under Article 21, anchoring due process in urban governance. These cases are not niche history; they are living constraints on how municipalities and brands may structure collection work, particularly where “contractorisation” pushes risk and informality downstream. These precedents form the doctrinal basis to challenge exclusionary municipal and corporate practices. Neither SWM 2016 nor PWM 2024 articulates labour-standard minima (remuneration floors, OSH norms, anti-discrimination duties) for Urban Local Body(ULB) contracts[xvi] and producer take-back chains, even as they depend on human labour for EPR outcomes. The constitutional jurisprudence on labour exploitation counsels against such lacunae. If Rule 15 of SWM 2016 legally obliges ULBs to recognise and integrate waste pickers, then procurement clauses that (a) bar access to transfer stations and materials-recovery facilities, (b) criminalise informal collection without providing licensing pathways, or (c) privatise door-to-door collection without social-clauses for labour standards, are vulnerable to challenge as arbitrary (Article 14) and as indirect deprivations of livelihood (Article 21) absent fair procedure and rehabilitation Olga Tellis again.  Almitra Patel v. Union of India[xvii] the long-running SWM litigation in the Supreme Court also makes clear that municipal compliance is not aspirational; it is judicially supervised. Using that scaffold, organised waste-picker groups can argue that “effective SWM 2016”  requires integration, not exclusion, of the labour that achieves segregation and recycling on the ground.

III. Comparative Perspective: Colombia’s Constitutional Court

Colombia offers a jurisprudential model. In T-724/03 and T-291/09, the Court compelled municipal authorities to include waste picker cooperatives in public sanitation tenders. The Court converted policy recognition into enforceable economic access. This demonstrates how judicial remedies can reshape procurement in favour of inclusion. Colombia’s Constitutional Court confronted similar tensions between procurement, competition, and the rights of recicladores(Spanish term for waste pickers/ recyclers). In T-724/03[xviii] it held Bogotá’s sanitation tender illegal for excluding waste-picker organisations from bidding; it required set-asides and transitional measures. In T-291/09,[xix] the Court reaffirmed positive obligations to include waste pickers in the public service of sanitation, shaping a jurisprudence that has informed inclusive contracting and licensing in Latin America. India’s constitutional structure is different, but Article 14’s equality principle and Articles 19(1)(g) and 21 provide comparable traction for demanding social-clauses and licensing pathways that do not foreclose participation by existing worker organisations.[xx] The lesson is doctrinally modest but practically potent: inclusion can be judicially supervised as a requirement of lawful tender design where exclusion produces foreseeable rights harms.

IV. Scheme Promise to Enforceable Standards

Empirical and policy reports catalog the hazards that waste pickers face sharps, pathogens, toxic fumes, traffic injuries, and heat exposure paired with low or zero access to PPE, vaccination, and sanitation. NAMASTE’s 2024 updates mandate PPE and ID provisioning and envisage MIS-based tracking; municipal contractors and Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs) can, today, incorporate those as binding OSH conditions in contracts, with audit and penalty mechanisms aligned to the EPR portal’s verification architecture. PWM 2024’s compliance registry and the CPCB portal already require granular disclosures by producers and recyclers; adding labour-standard attestations for the collection and aggregation tiers would be a minimally invasive way to align environmental compliance with constitutional labour norms. Literature on “rules-in-use”[xxi] warns that sudden formalisation often manifests as dispossession: IDs, uniforms, and GPS routes are issued to private contractors’ employees while long-standing waste pickers are fenced out of bins and materials-recovery nodes. A legality-first approach suggests a different sequence: (1) recognise waste pickers’ organisations under SWM 2016 Rule 15; (2) create city-level licensing that confers route access, safety training, aggregation rights, and price-information transparency; (3) write municipal and PRO contracts with social-clauses requiring inclusion of registered waste pickers’ collectives as subcontractors or co-bid partners; (4) channel NAMASTE PPE/ID provisioning through those organisations to reduce leakage; and (5) anchor remuneration floors to local minimum wages for analogous work (collection/sorting), invoking PUDR’s logic against sub-minimum pay in public contracts.

The Indian framework recognises waste pickers administratively but fails to guarantee enforceable rights. Future evolution depends on whether courts interpret SWM 2016 and PWM 2024 as creating duties of inclusion. Labour Codes such as the OSH Code, 2020 and Social Security Code, 2020 may offer pathways if fully implemented. Read together, the jurisprudence from PUDR, Bandhua, and Olga Tellis lays down three control points for the next phase of circular-economy regulation: (i) public and quasi-public actors cannot structure waste services in ways that predictably force labour below lawful minima or strip workers of livelihood without due process; (ii) where a delegated-legislation regime (SWM 2016) commands “recognition and integration,” exclusionary tender design is ultra vires; and (iii) rehabilitation and transition measures are constitutionally relevant when re-engineering service delivery. The PWM 2024 amendments, by tightening EPR compliance and traceability, incidentally give regulators a lever to demand labour-condition attestations along collection chains; CPCB and MoEFCC can, by notification or portal terms, require producers/PROs to evidence inclusion of registered waste-picker organisations in their collection plans, much as the Colombian Constitutional Court forced inclusion through judicial control of procurement.

V. Conclusion

India’s recent measures provide a scaffold for inclusion, but without statutory labour rights, waste pickers remain in precarity. Judicial enforcement, drawing lessons from Colombia, could bridge the gap between welfare schemes and constitutional guarantees of equality and dignity.The question posed at the outset can be answered with cautious optimism. On paper, India already has the bones of an inclusive model: SWM 2016 compels municipal integration; PWM 2024 and the CPCB portal can carry labour-attestation payloads; and NAMASTE (2024) recognises waste pickers for PPE, ID, and livelihood support. In practice, however, rights-consistent outcomes will turn on procurement design and enforceability. If ULBs and PROs treat waste pickers as rights-holders and co-producers of environmental compliance rather than as obstacles to privatisation the constitutional arc from Olga Tellis through PUDR and Bandhua can finally bend toward dignified, safe, and fairly paid work in India’s circular economy. The law already points the way; contracts and rules-in-use must now follow.

[i] Barbara Harriss-White, Formality and Informality in an Indian Urban Waste Economy, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 37(7/8): 417–434 (2017).

[ii] Lidia Juárez Pastor, Vrishali Subramanian, Stefano Cucurachi & Amineh Ghorbani, Caste, mistrust and municipal inaction: The interwoven barriers for the integration of waste pickers in India, Journal of Environmental Management, Vol. 356, 120513 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2024.120513 (empirical institutional analysis showing how policy recognition has not translated into legal protection and integration).

[iii] “An equally important facet of that right [to life] is the right to livelihood because no person can live without the means of living, that is, the means of livelihood.” — Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corp., AIR 1986 SC 180, ¶ 32 (India).

[iv] PWM 2016 (Amendment) Rules, 2024, Gazette of India (Mar. 15, 2024) (amending PWM 2016 Rules, 2016, to strengthen EPR provisions and clarify obligations of producers, importers, and brand owners).

[v] National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE) Scheme: Guidelines for inclusion of Waste Pickers (effective 2024–25), Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment, Govt. of India (June 2024) (expanding the scheme to include waste pickers with provisions for occupational IDs, PPE, health insurance, and database enumeration).

[vi] How Can Indian Cities Boost Sustainable SWM 2016 Practices? at 1 (Council on Energy, Environment and Water [CEEW], 2024) (reporting that in FY 2021–22, India generated 170,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste per day, of which approximately 156,000 tonnes were collected, about 54% treated, and 24% left unaccounted for).

[vii] SWM 2016 Rules, 2016, Gazette of India, Rule 3(58).

[viii] Govindan Raveendran & Joann Vanek, Informal Workers in India: A Statistical Profile, WIEGO Statistical Brief No. 24, at 3–5 (Aug. 2020).

[ix] In the Plastic Waste Management Rules, 2016 (as amended in 2022, 2023, and 2024), EPR compliance refers to the legal obligation of Producers, Importers, and Brand-Owners (PIBOs) to ensure the environmentally sound management of plastic packaging waste  including collection, segregation, recycling, reuse, and end-of-life disposal  through registration and reporting on the Centralized EPR Portal of the CPCB.

[x] Lidia Juárez Pastor, Vrishali Subramanian, Stefano Cucurachi & Amineh Ghorbani, Caste, Mistrust and Municipal Inaction: The Interwoven Barriers for the Integration of Waste Pickers in India, 356 J. Envtl. Mgmt. 120513, 2–4 (2024)- This article, based on an institutional network analysis of waste governance in Chennai, highlights the gap between “rules-in-form” (formal legal provisions such as the SWM 2016 Rules, 2016 mandating inclusion of waste pickers) and “rules-in-use” (actual municipal practices). The study found that tendering terms, unfair pricing, denial of ID cards, and municipal inaction create barriers that systematically exclude informal waste pickers from integration, despite laws recognizing them. The authors link these barriers to caste-based discrimination, bureaucratic misalignment, and lack of local enforcement, underscoring that mere legislative recognition is insufficient without institutional reform

[xi] PWM 2016 Rules, 2016, Gazette of India, §§ 9–10 (India) (introducing Extended Producer Responsibility obligations for producers, importers, and brand-owners in relation to plastic packaging); PWM 2016 (Amendment) Rules, 2024, Gazette of India, § 16 (India) (rationalising registration and compliance through the Centralized EPR Portal administered by the CPCB); Central Pollution Control Board, Centralized EPR Portal for Plastic Packaging, https://eprplastic.cpcb.gov.in (last visited Aug. 21, 2025).

[xii] The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, No. 37 of 2020, India Code (2020).

[xiii] The Code on Social Security, No. 36 of 2020, India Code (2020) (received presidential assent Sept. 28, 2020, but not yet fully commenced; consolidating nine central labour laws on social security); see also Ministry of Labour & Employment, e-Shram: National Database of Unorganised Workers, https://eshram.gov.in (last visited Aug. 21, 2025).

[xiv] People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India, (Asiad case) AIR 1982 SC 1473, 491–92 (holding that payment below the statutory minimum wage may constitute “forced labour” under Article 23); see also id. at 486–87 (condemning subcontracting arrangements – via jamadars—that siphon wages from workers as violative of Article 23).The Supreme Court in the Asiad case interpreted Article 23 of the Constitution broadly to forbid not only unpaid labour but also payment below the legal minimum. The Court held that wage deprivation caused by intermediaries (such as jamadars) who deduct portions of mandated minimum wages, effectively amounts to forced labour. It emphasized that where economic compulsion—stemming from poverty and destitution—forces a person to work for less than legally prescribed wages, the compulsion qualifies as forced labour under Article 23 (491–92) and that subcontracting practices that enable such wage siphoning must be condemned (486–87).

[xv] Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India, (Asiad case extension) (Bandhua Mukti Morcha), (1984) 3 SCC 161, 186–87.the Supreme Court extended its rights-protective stance from the Asiad case to bonded labour. It affirmed that: Articles 21 (Right to Life) and 23 (Prohibition of Forced Labour) impose an obligation on the State not merely to refrain from exploiting labour but positively to identify, release, and rehabilitate bonded labourers recognizing that economic compulsion and bondage violate a person’s right to human dignity and freedom and particularly insisted on State rehabilitation obligations, ordering formation of vigilance committees, systematic identification of bonded individuals, and post-release support framing these not as discretionary welfare, but as indispensable constitutional duties.

[xvi] In India, an Urban Local Body (ULB) is a constitutionally recognized local government institution under Part IXA of the Constitution (74th Amendment, 1992)  including municipal corporations, municipalities, and nagar panchayats. ULB contractors are private agencies or entities engaged by Urban Local Bodies through tenders/agreements to carry out municipal functions such as door-to-door waste collection, transportation, street sweeping, and material recovery facility (MRF) operations.

[xvii] Almitra H. Patel v. Union of India, (2000) 2 SCC 678, ¶¶ — (holding that municipal compliance with solid waste management laws is not “aspirational” but subject to judicial oversight, mandating statutory authorities to “discharge their statutory duties” to keep cities “reasonably clean”). the Supreme Court reiterated that municipal obligations under the Solid Waste Management framework are mandatory and enforceable -not mere policy goals. The Court held that while it does not prescribe how local bodies should perform their duty, it emphatically directed them to discharge their statutory responsibilities for keeping cities clean, invoking judicial supervision to ensure actual implementation.

[xviii] Corte Constitucional de Colombia [Constitutional Court of Colombia], Judgment T-724/03 (Oct. 28, 2003), translated in Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing & Organizing (WIEGO), Waste Pickers and the Law: Bogotá’s Recycling Cooperatives Case Summary (2003), https://globalrec.org/law-report/india/ (holding that Bogotá’s municipal sanitation tender was unconstitutional for excluding waste-picker cooperatives from participation, and requiring transitional measures and bid set-asides to guarantee their inclusion).  In Judgment T-724/03, the Colombian Constitutional Court struck down Bogotá’s sanitation procurement process for violating waste pickers’ constitutional rights to equality and livelihood. The Court held that excluding waste-picker cooperatives from tendering amounted to indirect discrimination, given their historical role in recycling and the city’s dependence on their labour. It ordered the municipality to adopt affirmative measures, including bid set-asides, transitional contracts, and training, to integrate waste pickers into formal service delivery. This case is internationally cited as a precedent for recognising waste pickers as rights-bearing workers rather than as informal dependents.

[xix] Corte Constitucional de Colombia [Constitutional Court of Colombia], Judgment T-291/09 (Apr. 21, 2009), summarized in Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing & Organizing (WIEGO), Waste Pickers and the Law: Bogotá’s Recycling Cooperatives Case Summary (2009), https://globalrec.org/law-report/colombia/ (reaffirming that waste pickers must be included in Bogotá’s public sanitation service, and directing authorities to adopt affirmative measures for their participation in formal waste management systems).In T-291/09, the Constitutional Court of Colombia extended its earlier ruling in T-724/03 by holding that the right to equality and livelihood of waste pickers imposes positive obligations on municipalities. The Court declared that waste pickers were not mere beneficiaries but legitimate service providers whose organisations must be formally integrated into the public sanitation system. This jurisprudence established binding duties for cities to design inclusive contracting, licensing, and transitional arrangements, and has since shaped Latin American municipal frameworks that combine public service delivery with social inclusion of informal workers.

[xx] See INDIA CONST. art. 14 (guaranteeing equality before the law and equal protection of the laws); id. art. 19(1)(g) (securing the right to practice any profession, occupation, trade or business, subject to reasonable restrictions); id. art. 21 (protecting the right to life and personal liberty, expansively interpreted to include the right to livelihood and dignity); cf. Olga Tellis v. Bombay Mun. Corp., (1985) 3 SCC 545, 572–74 (reading the right to livelihood into Article 21); People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India (Asiad Workers’ Case), AIR 1982 SC 1473, 491–92 (holding that sub-minimum wages in public works constitute “forced labour” under Article 23 and affirming protective obligations in contractual settings).

[xxi] International Labour Organization (ILO), Promoting Decent Work for Waste Pickers in India (ILO Country Office Report, 2017).Documents working conditions of waste pickers, barriers to formalisation, and recommends policy pathways linking waste management frameworks with labour rights.