Greenwashing Lexis, Invisibilising Caste: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Indian Environmental Policy

‘A just society is that society in which ascending sense of reverence and descending sense of contempt is dissolved into the creation of a compassionate society’ – B.R. Ambedkar.

There has been extensive literature that establishes the alienation between two of the most powerful social movements in India – the anti-caste movement and the environment movement (Omvedt, 1997), along with a call for inculcating Dalit critique of matters of the environment and natural resources into explicitly environmental language (Sharma, 2012). There is also a growing body of work that delves into the specificities of Dalits’ access and relationship with natural resources, allowing for an exploration of micro-realities, which are often overlooked. However, the deepest form of discrimination is often hidden in plain sight. Be it through subtle semiotics or the carefully crafted parlance of progress and urban development.

Mainstream environmental discourses in India are crowded with the soft vocabulary of “green growth”,” eco-friendly cities”, and “clean development”. These terms coupled with popular images that appear in reports, newspapers, and policy documents consist of skyscrapers, criss-crossing flyovers, and gleaming streets with loud street lights. This romanticised imagery, projected as that of progress and sustainability is in fact a greenwashing of the true nature of such a landscape; excessive consumption of energy, lifestyle, goods, resources, and spaces. This futuristic urbanism advertises itself as a space of inclusivity, and efficiency. However, if looked at critically, there is a dearth of accountability for mixed-income neighborhoods, equitable housing, street vendors, women's and children’s security, and integrated municipal development. Predominantly, these cities are being envisioned in a manner that has no space for the marginalized. It raises fundamental questions like, who are these cities for? What truly counts as clean, green, organic, and even natural?

The Purity-Pollution of Urban Planning

‘Indifferentism is the worst kind of disease that can affect people’ – B.R. Ambedkar.

The very language of green planning of the cities in India is interwoven with the socio-political fabric of caste hierarchies that manage the power relations and construct our cities and urban lives. India’s pursuit of urban environmentalism in its essence is not a neutral endeavor but rather a rearticulated and reinforced version of the age-old purity-pollution narratives of the caste system. Ambedkar showed how caste is not a simple division of labor but a system profoundly rooted in notions of purity and impurity. It is this very historical logic of Savarna oppression that determines who benefits and who is invisible to the considerations of the “green” cities.

For instance, the Area-Based Development (ABD) approach of the Smart Cities Mission, states that each of the 100 cities has selected a defined area for targeted interventions. These ABD areas, chosen through citizen participation, are being developed as replicable models for other parts of the city. This suggests that only specific regions within a city will be worthy of being redeveloped, beautified, cleaned up, and ’improved’ while the ‘lesser’, or ‘dirtier’ areas are shoved aside. The discourse of slum redevelopment has many contradictions– some opposing, and others self contradictory. Similarly, the selection criteria for various regions in each state are determined by a list of consulting firms from all over the country and globe, which could not be further from the grassroot realities. Secondly and more importantly, the policy is based on replicating these models for other parts of the city. However, even within a single pincode, acts of mico-violence can still occur in pockets.

The inequality is made more obvious by the focus of 80% of funds on a small area (i.e. Area-based development), which has 40% of holdings by private investors and no influence from local municipal institutions (Maurya, 2020).To further fuel this, research reveals that the smart city arrives as a top-down directive from the central government where the existing problems of the city are reconfigured to fit nationally envisioned smart city agendas (Prakash, 2025), which defeats the purpose of the Mission in the first place. But at a deeper level, this confirms that these policies are not planned, proposed, or passed to uplift the marginalized.

A core aspect of the Smart Cities Mission is also to leverage “Smart Solutions” through technological intervention. However, the basic question of who gets to interact with, and get access to these ‘smart’ solutions not only remains but is a far-fetched reality for Dalits and other minorities. The irony is that the basic technology and equipment Dalits need to stop manual scavenging has barely been implemented or provided, but the Nation dreams on. Terminology like implementing “sensors”, and “dashboards” to enable “data-gathering” and “data analytics” (Prakash, 2025) signals progress, but is an end in itself due to the exclusionary nature of these. Who gets seen and counted into these data points and who gets left out?

These words, phrases, and language seemingly for the advocacy of a more inclusionary and integrated city, however, as Bourdieu’s notion of linguistic capital as a form of cultural capital points to, these tactics allude to maintaining the social power relations.

The Unseen Labor of the City

‘The misery of being exploited ... is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all’ – Joan Robinson (1962).

Consider how Shailja Paika’s seminal work Vulgarity of Caste (2019) reveals brutally how caste is far from being a social ladder. It is performed, inscribed, and cast on the lower caste bodies and their essential labor. Even today, 92% of the Sewer and Septic Tank Workers (SSWs) profiled by the Social Justice Ministry belong to the Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), or Other Backward Class (OBC) communities. Caste renders these bodies as vulgar or ashleel and therefore the justified stripping away of their dignity or manuski follows to perpetuate the stigma and subject them to dehumanizing conditions.

This act of salvaging, sorting, sequestering, and re-fabricating the unending waste that is daily generated in cities, is critical to the production of urban spaces (Gidwani, 2015). Their ‘infra-structural labor’ repairs and renews the city, continuously re-creating the conditions of possibility for urban life and capitalist enterprise (Gidwani, 2015).In such a system then, the drive for “clean” urban spaces operates via the invisibilization as well as the stigmatization of these very bodies that have been historically associated with impurity. Ironically, it is these bodies that clean, don’t find a space in the fabric of the urban green. This epistemological enthusiasm extends beyond the spatial segregation to our national iconography. Let’s think of the most commonly occupied images of the green and clean in the Savarna environmental discourse- “Bharat Mata” (Mother India) and “Gau Mata” (Mother Cow). Both are powerful nationalist, moralistic, and sacred imagery that resonate strongly with the popular consciousness of India today. They transcend their positions as mere cultural symbols as they are circulated with a deeper, more malicious intent; that of serving as strong identity markers for a ‘true Indian’.

Spatial Segregation and the Gaze of Power

These discourses dominated by the figures of Gau Mata and Bharat Mata transcend the ideological realm. Foucault argues that power percolates into the spatial dimension by being able to reconstruct and organise it. Therefore, both the figures come to dictate the very ideal that city planners use to set up urban residencies, arrangements and municipal behaviour. Under the gaze of such a state, the outcome is only one- power flows in nefarious routes to create spatial segregation. Informal settlements, migrants, street vendors and other contributing communities do not fit into the ideal of a sanitised, pure and green city. Thus setting up a foundation for which areas in a city have access to resources that can sanitise it and clean it, and which communities and their localities are far from the reach of the municipality and state.

The need of the times is a reparative form of sustainability and technological innovation. Until their nuances don’t align with realities of Dalits, and religious minorities, city spaces will always have the dissonance that merely frustrates us today, whilst erasing the lived experiences of those on the marginal social locations.

“Space is fundamental in any exercise of power” – Foucault (1982)

City planning through a Foucauldian lens, is never power neutral and is controlled by a certain kind of authority. These relations are reproduced not just in a discursive sense, where vocabulary is white washed, but also extend to the lived realities and spatial relations within the city.

Language transcends the everyday to play an important role in shaping communal participation and civic planning. As a nation, we can only truly call ourselves accessible and inclusive by invisibilising caste, when those on the peripheries are erased. ‘Green’ progress is not the conventional image of glossy floral communities and urban neighbourhoods, envisaged for our urban spaces, but one that ensures reparative social justice for communities that have been rendered impure, lowly and even, “un-green”.

References

Lawlor, L., & Nale, J. (Eds.). (2014). Space. In The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon (pp. 466–471). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India. (2015, June). Smart City Mission Statement and Guidelines. https://smartcities.gov.in/sites/default/files/SmartCityGuidelines.pdf
Omvedt, G. (1997, June 24). Why dalits dislike environmentalists. The Hindu, pp. 12–12. Retrieved June 2025, from https://wgbis.ces.iisc.ac.in/envis/doc97html/envenv627.html.
Paik, S. (2019). The vulgarity of caste: Dalits, sexuality, and humanity in modern India. Stanford University Press.
Prakash, D. (2025). Why do smart city projects fail to create impact? understanding decision-making in Smart City policy implementation. Urban Governance, 5(1), 45–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ugj.2025.02.004
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