Pigeon Nets and Caste Based Practices of Environmental Purification

Pigeons are widely recognised as an urban menace due to their overpopulation and associated health risks such as hypersensitivity pneumonitis (a serious lung disease), cryptococcal meningitis (a fungal infection that spreads from lungs to the brain with symptoms that include confusion or changes in behaviour) and psittacosis (a bacterial infection with pneumonia-like condition) [1]. Increasingly, gated communities are employing the use of pigeon nets as a material barrier to protect themselves from the health risks pigeons perpetuate. The very concept of gated communities indicates a kind of spatial segregation within urban spaces wherein only certain people are able to afford certain services and amenities. With gated communities being predominantly occupied by upper castes and classes, the practice of pigeon netting finds itself at the intersection of caste and environment through its wider social impacts and the broader social situations these practices echo and reflect. The aim of this essay is not to judge such practices and classify them as negative but rather to explore their socio environmental impacts on the broader social level. I shall do so by first reflecting on the problem of pigeons and the materiality of pigeon nets and then broadening my discussion to the various practices of purification available to the upper castes and classes.

There is an overpopulation of pigeons in urban spaces. This overpopulation is caused by four main factors. First, pigeons find plenty of suitable replicas of their ledges, their natural nesting site, in urban spaces [1]. Second, they are able to have easy access to food due to their generalist diet [1]. Third, the lack of natural predators [1]. The fourth, is their ability to nest throughout the year unlike other birds [1]. The most important contributing factor to pigeon overpopulation is human feeding. When humans feed pigeons, they do not allow for the process of natural selection to take place. Instead all pigeons get access to food boosting the already overpopulated population. This means the urban problem of pigeons has been highly exacerbated by humans [1]. Methods of removing pigeons include spikes on nesting sites, bio-environmental modification through the removal of food sources, forced contraception for pigeons and most commonly, pigeon nets, since they are considered a sustainable and humane way to get rid of pigeons [2]. Pigeon nets are thus representative of a tangible, human made intervention that forms a “physical barrier” as a method of exclusion within environmental spaces to “solve” a problem humans have played a role in creating. Their inherent limitation however is that they fail to tackle the root problem and provide a temporary solution by displacing the pigeons elsewhere rather than tackling their overpopulation. When pigeons are “removed” from affluent neighbourhoods, they simply move to locations where marginalized people reside, who may not be able to afford to put up their own pigeon nets, which on average tend to cost 8000 rupees at minimum, a price that is not easily affordable [3]. This displacement effect is key to reflect on the material impacts of pigeon nets, which are not inert objects but become active agents in the distribution of urban environmental burdens and benefits. This highlights a systemic issue where environmental quality and the ability to live in safe and healthy environments is a power granted to upper classes and castes based on historic socio-economic power and access to resources.

The upper classes exert this power through their economic ability to conduct practices of purification on their surrounding environment. In earlier times, the upper castes were the only ones to be able to “purify” themselves through access to the gods like the Brahmins or the ability to leverage economic resources to attain purification like the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas in the traditional pyramid. In modern times, with the advent of capitalism and a continuation of systemic discrimination and inequality, both upper castes and classes are able to leverage their economic status to extend practices of purification from the spiritual to the material. This includes the consumption of “pure” food through practices like “clean” eating, “organic” food, consumption of “pure” water through use of water purifiers. Most relevant to our discussion is the consumption of “pure” air through usage of air purifiers/ filters and eradication of polluted and bad air. Even though some of these practices can be considered essential due to urban environmental degradation, I am discussing these practices to point out and reflect on a wider phenomenon where it is only certain people who are able to access these practices of environmental purification, and thus live “pure” lives. The upper castes are able to leverage their economic status attained through their historic position within the caste system and thus the communities who practice environmental purification are almost always people that are either upper caste, upper class or both. Consequently, we see in the modern age that only certain classes can afford climate protection and resilience due to their wealth and status while most are unable to do so. The “purification” of one environment for the privileged directly leads to the degradation of another environmental site, making pigeon nets and the wider practice of environmental purification a tangible site of environmental segregation. This mirrors the “Not In My Backyard” phenomenon, which is when there is community resistance to sites of undesirable facilities like landfills or sewage plants and other environmental health burdens. The undesirable is always shifted to a different more vulnerable “backyard” and externalized from privileged spaces to those with less socio economic power and political power to resist.

Research has shown that India’s more marginal caste groups are vulnerable to greater urban heat exposure due to systemic inequalities within housing through caste based segregation and the continued persistence of caste based occupation segregation [4]. A paper on residential segregation in Indian urban cities finds that residential segregation based on caste and tribe has only increased over time and that in most major cities, Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) populations are found to be concentrated in wards where most households do not have an indoor latrine and access to in house running water [5]. Research has further shown that these marginal populations remain the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, with the least climate resilience as their local, social and economic vulnerabilities place greater strain on their adaptive capacity [6]. This is not a distant dystopian future but the reality of the present—that the pigeons are witness to and the pigeon nets are proof of. It is the reality of caste based segregation, where environmental benefits are a function available to the rich and environmental costs are disproportionately borne by the already vulnerable, who cannot afford to protect themselves, extending and pushing them further into a vicious cycle of inequality and vulnerability.

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