Waiting for welfare: experiences of street traders from Delhi, India

ABSTRACT

This article explores the nuances of the experiences of waiting for state-issued documents and state welfare. Waiting as an everyday experience forms an important aspect of the relationship between socio-economically marginalised groups and the state institutions. In order to examine this relationship, this paper draws upon eight interviews, conducted during December 2017 to February 2018 and in January 2019, among pheriwale. Pheriwale are self-employed traders, in Delhi, India, who collect huge amounts of second-hand/used-clothes and sell them forward to make a living. They largely work in highly precarious informal work environments, lack social security and depend on irregular income. However, as residents of India, they are also regulated through various state measures such as being registered within the national biometric database, as bank account holders and as recipients of public welfare provisions. By focusing on the experiences of pheriwale, findings show that waiting is shaped through intersecting hierarchies of gender, class and caste in the context of India. This article elucidates that a conceptualisation of waiting cannot overlook how the act of waiting for state-issued documents is tied into politics of recognition and redistribution.

KEYWORDS:

• Waiting
• welfare
• intersectionality
• caste
• informal economy

Introduction

Like most residents in India, pheriwale encounter state employees when they visit the state institutions, including central and local municipal offices, state-owned or public banks and public hospitals. They associate the experience of visiting a state office with expressions such as ‘spending one whole day in the queue’ and of being ‘pushed around’. These visits which are marked by episodes of waiting thus, illustrate the relationship between the pheriwale and the state institutions. Throughout my interactions with the pheriwale, they often recounted the expressions used by the state officials during their visits, which include: when ‘a document/ID-card/pension has not yet arrived’ (‘abhi tak nahi mila’); when a public official tells them to ‘visit another time or to come later’ (‘baad mein aana’); or that ‘it will happen next time’ (‘agli baar hoga’), thus keeping open a window of hope in the process of waiting. For example, during one of my visits to pheriwale’s marketplace, Jyoti, who is in her thirties, tells me how she obtained her national identity card (Aadhaar): ‘We spent one whole day in the queue to get the Aadhaar card at the local office. A whole day of not being able to work!’. Ritu who is sitting next to Jyoti reflects with a sigh, ‘In government [offices] they keep pushing us around’ (in Hindi: ‘dhakka khilwate hain’).

Anthropologists, Andreas Bandak and Manpreet Janeja note that studying ‘waiting’ as a sociological phenomenon can invoke and capture experiences of ‘hope, doubt and uncertainty’ (Bandak & Janeja, 2018, p. 5). Waiting enfolds within it an arbitrary sense of the duration of time, which then results in being pushed around from desk to desk, from office to office and from time to time. Hence, ‘waiting’ captures these articulations since they indicate the experience of ‘delayed arrival’, for example the wait for one’s ID-card. As Jyoti points out, spending a whole day in the queue implies loss of daily pay. Missing a day’s pay is significant for workers in the informal economy such as pheriwale, who are dependent on irregular incomes. However, waiting in the queue for a document which will provide Jyoti and her peers formal recognition by the state, and an ID-card, which is linked to all their other welfare benefits, also makes the process of applying and waiting vital.

On the one hand, pheriwale, like other street vendors and waste collectors, are situated within low-income, informal work patterns which are physically and mentally exhausting and lack social security tied to formal jobs such as sick leave, health insurance, pensions, etc (cf. Bhowmik, 2010). Yet on the other hand, as residents within India, pheriwale are part of several formalised databases and welfare measures such as the Aadhaar card database (biometric-ID with social-security number), the census, as registered bank account holders and as recipients of welfare or of affirmative action. Welfare becomes particularly vital for low-income single-earning households, the elderly, people with disabilities and those who are unable to work in physically strenuous work environments for extended periods of time. Thus, pheriwale’s encounters with the state institutions provides valuable insights into how low-income groups build subsistence for themselves and their families through daily trade and welfare support.

Similar to experiences of pheriwale in this study, findings from previous scholarship highlights that socio-economically marginalised groups within Delhi and beyond, have to endure longer periods of waiting in their interactions with state institutions. Thus, intersectional hierarchies such as class, caste, race, gender, migration-status, among others, underline the experiences of waiting (cf. Auyero, 2012; Bandak & Janeja, 2018; Ghertner, 2017; Gupta, 2012; Mulinari, 2021; Procupez, 2015). Therefore, focusing on the relationship between the state and the pheriwale can help illuminate a myriad of locations they come to inhabit in everyday life vis-à-vis the socio-economic structures in contemporary India.

The two main aims of this paper are, firstly to present pheriwale’s experiences of waiting and secondly, to acknowledge some of the conflicting complexities of why low-income groups continue to wait in their relation with the state institutions. The research questions which guide this article are: What are pheriwale’s experiences of waiting in their encounters with the state? Moreover, how can we study the nuances of how and why socio-economically marginalised groups continue to wait for welfare?

In the first section below, I provide a brief description of pheriwale’s trade and outline some of the specificities of welfare in the Indian context. Here, I also elaborate on the theorisation of waiting relevant for this paper. The second section presents an overview of the methods utilised in this study and I bring in some of the experiences of waiting which pheriwale shared with me. The third section addresses the second research question mentioned above and explores the complexities of waiting, particularly by socio-economically marginalised groups. I draw upon previous scholarship to further explore why people wait for welfare and illustrate the link between formal recognition and redistribution. In the concluding section, I summarise the main contributions of this paper. Throughout this paper, I draw upon the analytical lens of intersectionality to highlight that waiting as a sociological concept can be further examined by contextualising how intersectional hierarchies frame experiences of waiting.

Relationship through waiting

Pheriwale are a visibly women-dominated trading group in Delhi and form part of a wide variety of street vendors and used-goods/waste collectors and traders in the city (Norris, 2010). Like most workers in India’s informal economy, the pheriwale are a low-income group and overwhelmingly belong to lower-caste groups. They largely belong to the Waghri caste, a community from the western state of Gujarat (Bapat, 2018; Gidwani, 2002; Norris, 2010). They offer the residents of Delhi and the suburbs door-to-door service of getting rid of their second-hand clothes in exchange for new kitchen utensils. By collecting, sorting and reselling used-clothes, pheriwale play a central role in the textile recycling markets of the city (Crang et al., 2013; Norris, 2010). The pheriwale’s open marketplace, located in West Delhi, provides used-clothes, as raw material for export factories and offers cheap and affordable clothes to Delhi’s low-income groups and working classes. Their regular working day can span between 12 and 14 hours. I further elaborate on pheriwale’s marketplace in the next section.

In their conversations with me, the pheriwale often shared their experiences of visiting state institutions. They had fresh memories of some of the policy initiatives implemented in the recent past, such as applying for the Aadhaar card and registering for bank accounts. The Aadhaar card is an identification document initiated in 2009 and is ongoing. It is issued by Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Government of India (GOI), and contains biometric data of the cardholder as well as identity markers such as age, gender and address (Chaudhuri & König, 2018; Dayal & Singh, 2016). All residents of India are entitled to the Aadhaar card especially since the unique social security number is linked to welfare provisions such as food subsidy, banking, voting card, employment schemes, including phone numbers. The rationale for the Aadhaar card has been to ease the number of documents for both residents and the Indian state, and to provide digital integration, ease of distribution and access to welfare benefits (Rao & Nair, 2019). Along with the Aadhaar card initiative, now there are many more social policies and welfare measures which utilise digital platforms.

Despite several decades of poverty alleviation schemes and welfare initiatives the groups that remain often excluded from registrations for welfare, and subsequently that lack access to subsidised food and other welfare, are Dalits (who include the most oppressed caste groups, considered ‘untouchables’), adivasis (indigenous population), other economically marginalised groups and women belonging to these groups, like most pheriwale. According to a survey from 2016, carried out by Lok Manch (‘People’s Platform’),¹ which was conducted in several states in India, data shows that 19.5% of the sample population did not possess ration cards (for subsidised food), only 64.3% had access to secondary school and 60.7% to high school (Lok Manch, 2016). Therefore, it is vital to consider how important it is to access and receive welfare for socio-economically marginalised groups.

The presence of the Indian state in everyday life is not unique to marginalised communities, nor is it a recent phenomenon. In his study on Indian bureaucracy, anthropologist, Akhil Gupta notes that the post-independent, postcolonial Indian state has always been present in the everyday lives of India’s residents, as a provider of welfare, subsidised fuel for cooking, public transportation provisions, getting a telephone landline, education and healthcare (cf. Gupta, 2012). Subsequently, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen the implementation of policies and measures that digitise and mark the technological turn of governance and banking in India (cf. Chaudhuri & König, 2018). The establishment of Aadhaar card, the biometric ID-card, is an illustration of this drive to modernise and digitise India. Another example mentioned by pheriwale was the Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY), an initiative to provide financial infrastructure to low-income groups and encourage people to register and open bank accounts. An increase in the number of people with bank accounts can potentially result in the expansion of digital finance services. In the next section I elaborate on the conceptualisation of waiting.

Waiting in the everyday

Within previous scholarship on waiting, specifically which note the everyday encounters between the state and marginalised groups, expressions such as ‘being pushed around’ are often recurrent and resonate with the experiences of pheriwale in my study (cf. Auyero, 2012; Gupta, 2012). Bandak and Janeja (2018, p. 5) note how ‘structurally and institutionally imposed forms of waiting’ determine the relationship between the state and subjects. For example, in the migration process waiting defines multiple stages from the time of movement to finding a safe refuge or getting rights to asylum or finding a job (cf. Bendixsen & Eriksen, 2018; Khosravi, 2017; Mulinari, 2021; Sager, 2011). This characteristic of the relation with the state can also be observed in the case of low-income groups such as street vendors, urban poor and slum-dwellers (cf. Appadurai, 2013; Auyero, 2012; Ghertner, 2017; Gupta, 2012; Procupez, 2015).

According to sociologist, Javier Auyero, the relation built on ‘waiting (re)creates subordination’ of poor people (Auyero, 2012, p. 19). Similarly, for Gupta, the uncertainty and arbitrariness of waiting and whether a welfare benefit will arrive or not marks the inaccessibility of welfare for the poor. Therefore, he defines this as ‘structural violence’, which is everyday violence perpetuated by the state through indirect harm, meaning that it is operationalised through the ‘faceless’ bureaucracy or a policy (Gupta, 2012, pp. 48–72). Whereas, for anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai waiting is also shaped by the politics of hope, within social movements and in strategies to make claims to the state by marginalised communities (Appadurai, 2013). Thus, waiting as a socio-temporal phenomenon emerges within the complexities of compliance of being ‘forced’ to wait by the state as well as one’s experience of negotiating when to wait. In this article, I elaborate on this tension, between the experience of arduous waiting and the hope for the arrival of welfare (cf. Ghertner, 2017). This tension thus highlights the complexity of the experiences of waiting as well as frames the relation between marginalised groups and the state institutions. To further explore these tensions within an experience of waiting, I employ intersectionality as a lens, which enables me to contextualise and visibilise intersections of gender, caste and class. In this article, I am inspired by the feminist scholarship on intersectionality who have theorised intersectionality within the Indian context to take into account caste and how it intersects with gender, work and class (John, 2013; Pan, 2021; Rege, 1998).

In the next section, I primarily focus on experiences of waiting which pheriwale shared with me. Though, the similarity of narratives across various politico-socio-cultural and economic contexts illustrates how the positionality of low-income groups vis-à-vis the state is not only unique to pheriwale and the Indian state but invokes larger structural tendencies regardless of the context of the state and certain categories of subjects (cf. Appadurai, 2013; Auyero, 2012; Bandak & Janeja, 2018; Bendixsen & Eriksen, 2018; Ghertner, 2017; Hage, 2018; Mulinari, 2021).

Shared experiences

To centre the experiences of pheriwale, I draw upon interviews which I conducted as part of my doctoral research. My PhD dissertation revolved around pheriwale’s trade and their everyday experiences at work. I carried out four months of fieldwork at pheriwale’s marketplace in Delhi, India (December 2017 to February 2018 and in January 2019). I had multiple conversations with twenty-eight pheriwale and spent hours hanging out and noting down observations. However, in this article I only include excerpts from my interviews with eight pheriwale, who explicitly shared their experiences of waiting on several occasions. The participants included in this article are all women, between the ages of thirty to sixty-five years. This article draws on interviews from a limited sample size, though due to the nature of qualitative research the empirical material included in this study are rich and illustrate the complex entanglements of why and how people wait for welfare.

As I was born and raised in Delhi, I was very comfortable with the city and the language, Hindi. I was often read as a university student from the city when I met the traders for the first time. Before conducting any interview, I always shared details concerning my study and carefully informed the participants that they could leave or stop the interview at any time. All the participants gave their consent for recorded interviews and are anonymised. All the interviews were conducted in Hindi and translated by me during analysis. Largely, a semi-structured interview format was followed, though depending on how people responded I adapted or removed the questions from the interview guide. None of the questions in the guide indicated any notion or keyword of ‘waiting’. Thus, reflections on the experiences of waiting emerged in the conversations which pheriwale had with me. The women’s narratives included as experiences of waiting here, were recounted whenever I asked them about their daily routines or working hours.

All the interview transcripts were carefully coded and themes were extrapolated to highlight and capture the everyday working lives of pheriwale. With regard to the overarching theme of waiting, the recurrent expressions included: experiences of long and arduous forms of waiting, being pushed around, and arbitrariness and inconsistency of information at several stages of the bureaucratic procedures.

Waiting for digital India

State welfare provision can be a vital support for low-income groups who may not have stable jobs or regular incomes (cf. Mulinari, 2021). While discussing their frustrating visits to local bureaucratic offices, Jyoti, Ritu and Sita talk about their experiences of opening accounts in public banks as part of a recently implemented financial inclusion programme by the Indian government. The Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) (‘Prime Minister’s People’s Wealth Scheme’) was launched in 2014 and is designed to provide access to banking services and financial inclusion for the population in India who do not have bank accounts (PMJDY, 2014). The programme aims to ensure bank account ownership for the vast majority of the population, in order to expand formal banking structures and digitise finance.

Jyoti: ‘they said from the national banks […] that for people who are illiterate, who are [formally] unemployed like us. For them there is an account. […] They took 200 rupees [from us to open the account]. Only we know how we saved those 200 rupees [approx. EUR 2.26].’

Ritu: ‘They keep saying they’ll put 20, 40, 50 [in the account].’

Sita: ‘Nothing has come so far.’

The idea behind such a scheme is to encourage low-income groups to get accounts in public banks. This would enable the state, at the central and local levels, to directly transfer welfare benefits into these bank accounts, including the allowance for low-income and unemployed people, pension, widow’s pension, childcare support, etc. Jyoti, Ritu and Sita had opened their accounts over a year before I met them. When I spoke to them in January 2018, at that point they had already waited for more than a year for ‘people’s wealth’ (Jan-Dhan). According to the 2017 World Bank Global Findex, while the Jan-Dhan Yojana has brought 80% of the population into the fold of formal financial infrastructure, 48% of the accounts had been inactive for more than a year. Moreover, 54% of the accounts held by women were more inactive than those held by men (43%) (Demirgüc-Kunt et al. 2018). While there are many welfare provisions for the poor, they are not always efficient (cf. Gupta, 2012). In the case of these bank accounts, the lack of inactivity is not only from the bank account holder’s side but also from the state’s, which promised direct transfer of benefits.

In the shift towards digitised banking and financial systems, the low-income groups are unable to fully participate in it. Thus, the durations of waiting for state welfare, or the degree of its accessibility, is directly tied to the intersections of class, caste and gender (cf. Auyero, 2012; Gupta, 2012; Harriss-White, 2003; Pan, 2021). For instance, many pheriwale do not have smartphones, even though they work in a highly urbanised city (which has better provision of internet than rural areas); sometimes the older traders barely had access to a phone at all. Sadna, who is in her sixties, mentions that she shares a phone with her younger son, since she does not feel confident to use it on her own. Due to the lack of proper, affordable and accessible digital infrastructures, low-income groups, who are mostly from lower castes, tend to immediately face exclusion in a world of virtual transactions of money (cf. Ghosh et al., 2017; Sen, 2020; Sen et al., 2020). Despite the success of the Indian information technology (IT) industry, it largely remains a provider to global markets and services. However, this has not meant deep dissemination of internet and IT services within India itself (Ghosh et al., 2017). Therefore, due to the low levels of digital literacy among the majority of the Indian population and lack of accessible technology, the use of internet services remains marginal, further decreasing their ability to access their right to welfare.

Unequal waiting

Apart from the lack of affordable and universalised forms of digital and welfare infrastructure, pheriwale women’s accounts also reflect experiences of everyday discrimination based on how they are treated when they interact with professionals and authorities. Jyoti, Ritu and Sita elaborate on this:

Sita: ‘The government hospitals […] ask us to “bring this, bring that” – many documents. They push us around to the point where we fall.’

Jyoti: ‘Oh, the government people don’t talk to us well at all.’

Sita: ‘That’s what I mean: when one has money, then there is everything. Then one can go to private [hospital] as well.’

Jyoti: ‘For example, if I ask them to tell me what the medicines are about, then they just talk rudely at us. If I ask the name of a prescribed medicine, they give us a lecture.’

Sita: ‘They just lecture us. Who listens to the poor? If someone were rich, there would be a line behind them: “Here, madam! Your medicines.” They will work for them fast, but not for us.’

Public healthcare in India is accessible, at least in urban areas, due to low costs of health services, but it can also involve being ‘pushed around’, unclear information and waiting. Sita, Jyoti and Ritu remark that it is presumed by the healthcare professionals that as street traders they may not know anything about healthcare and hence are ‘lectured’, reiterating the feeling of inferiority instead of receiving clear information. The recurrence of the feeling and experience of being ‘pushed around’ indicates not only that they are asked to visit the public offices multiple times, but also reveals how hierarchies are experienced in a particular moment of the encounter which invoke an asymmetrical relationship between professionals embodying a representation of the state and marginalised groups. Studies on healthcare in India show that low-income and lower-caste groups face discrimination in their interactions with healthcare professionals. Findings from a study on grassroots-level healthcare providers highlight that healthcare workers spend less time with lower-caste groups, speak more rudely and refuse to touch them while administering medicines (George, 2015). The legacy of untouchability, rooted in the caste system within the subcontinent, is invoked in such everyday experiences (John, 2013; Pan, 2021; Rege, 1998).

When Sita rhetorically asks, ‘Who listens to the poor?’, she captures how intersections of class and caste hierarchies seep into the ways in which public officials encounter low-income groups. Here, class, caste and temporality are interlinked to illustrate that the rich can afford to wait less than i am unsure whether there needs to be a ‘can’ here? people like the pheriwale. As Sita notes, the experience of unequal waiting is felt when the ‘poor are not heard’ and the ‘rich are attended to in less time and provided services’. Thus, accessibility alone cannot guarantee the inclusion of low-income groups within public services because the spatiality of bureaucratic encounters creates such hierarchies of temporality. While waiting does not necessarily mean that people may not receive healthcare, however, what Sita, Jyoti and Ritu point out is that the poor, and the lower caste in the context of India, are forced to perform the labour of waiting longer vis-à-vis privileged groups.

Despite the fact that pheriwale’s narratives are from a specific context, it is suggestive of larger structural tendencies of hierarchies, within Indian society and even beyond, when Sita’s experiences resonate with accounts in other studies. For example, in Auyero’s study of waiting rooms of public offices in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he captures the socio-economically unequal processes of waiting. Leticia, for instance, a participant in Auyero’s study, notes that ‘We are all equals; there shouldn’t be a difference. But, well, if you have money, everything is quicker […] if not, you have to wait’ (Auyero, 2012, p. 20). Although Sita and Leticia are waiting for public services within two completely different contexts and continents, the similarity of their experiences and the use of these specific expressions elucidates how inequalities are felt and underlined on a daily basis for marginalised groups.

In his study on the informal economy, sociologist, Jan Breman (2013, p. 34) argues that the Indian urban centres become one large ‘waiting room’ for newly arrived migrant workers from rural areas and for the generations who have been part of the urban informal economy. Waiting here signifies how the urban economy becomes a space that provides hope for upward economic mobility and more options to gain skills or engage in semi-skilled and unskilled labour (Breman, 2013). However, due to the precarity of the urban informal economies (declining labour laws, regressive labour contracts and rising inequality), this waiting can be never-ending.

Arbitrary waiting

When I met Sadna for the first time in December 2017, she had just turned 61 years of age. She tells me her experiences of trying to obtain her pension card.

Sadna: ‘Till now I have not received my pension. […] You know, I went 10 times [to the municipal offices], running around to get a pension. […] My friend is 70 years old, but she has not been able to get her pension either – she is very upset. […] We have gone so many times together. […] They told us that [pension] papers cannot be made in that particular office but in another one. And then, there they told us to go back [to the first office]. They just push us around. And how much can we be pushed around? Just going and coming to these offices is around Rs. 40 [for transportation].’

Like Ritu, Sita and Jyoti, Sadna also experiences being ‘pushed around’ from one office to another, spatially and temporally, in addition to being provided inconsistent and arbitrary information. Sadna’s friend, who is technically and officially entitled to a pension as she is well above 60 years old, also encountered difficulties when trying to apply for her pension. Along with waiting, or the hope of arrival of one’s pension or ID-card, the arbitrariness of instructions also shapes waiting. The first instance of this arbitrariness is inherently present in the process of waiting itself, because while state welfare benefits may take a long time to arrive, sometimes they may arrive in a shorter timeframe (cf. Auyero, 2012).

While the Aadhaar-biometric card is linked to all services, such as one’s phone number, access to banks, etc. and can ease the struggles of having to collect multiple state-recognised documents; it can also cause hindrance in daily life if one is unable to secure it (cf. Bhatia et al., 2020; Khera, 2019). Meena, who is in her thirties, shared with me how she had been unable to prove to the authorities that her identity is attached to a permanent address, and so she is unable to secure her Aadhaar card. This process emerges as gendered because similar to many young women in India, especially among lower-caste and low-income groups, Meena does not have access to ownership of assets that can aid in securing formal documents (cf. Agarwal et al., 2020). Technically, to get the Aadhaar card one does not need to own assets (cf. Chaudhuri & König, 2018). However, Meena’s residential status completely relies now on her in-laws (her identity being tied to her husband’s parents’ house), as it does for many women in India (cf. Agarwal et al., 2020). Formally, she is unable to prove that she has a ‘stable’ residential address, and in consequence is unable to get her Aadhaar card. Meena’s account shows how securing even basic documents such as the ID-card can become a challenge for marginalised groups who may not have stable residential addresses and that it can be even more difficult for women to access state-issued documents.

Moreover, possessing the required documents and having done the prerequisites may not ensure access to resources. For example, despite digitised banking solutions, Jyoti, Sita and Ritu have been waiting for this particular welfare benefit for over a year. As can be observed in the experiences mentioned above, temporality and arbitrariness of waiting are inextricably interlinked with the intersections of class, caste, profession, gender and age.

Patience or patients?

So, how can we address the complexities involved within people’s experiences of waiting for welfare? For Auyero, who is inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, waiting is a form of domination imposed by the state procedural mechanisms which specifically subjugate and exploit poor people. Therefore, ‘the urban poor, in their frequent encounters with politicians, bureaucrats and officials, learn to be patients of the state’ (Auyero, 2012, p. 9). Through Auyero’s conceptualisation, it can be seen how Jyoti, Sita and Ritu are patients at public hospitals while also ‘patiently’ being turned into waiting subjects of the poverty-alleviation scheme, as they continue to wait for direct transfer of welfare benefits into their state-initiated bank accounts.

If we follow Bourdieu’s logic, waiting is premised on the basis of hope. Bourdieu argues that making someone wait is a way to exercise power over their time and this is realised through ‘hope’ (Bourdieu, 1997/2000, p. 228). For Bourdieu, ‘waiting implies submission […] making people wait, of delaying without destroying hope, of adjourning without totally disappointing, which would have the effect of killing the waiting itself, is an integral part of the exercise of power’ (Bourdieu, 1997/2000, p. 228). Hence, there is always hope of receiving the ID-card or benefits one is waiting for (Auyero, 2012). This is clearly visible in the accounts of Sadna, Jyoti, Ritu and Sita. They denote this through the expression of ‘not yet arrived’ (abhi tak nahi mila), whereas the terminology used by local state officials includes expressions such as ‘it will arrive later’ (baad mein aaega) and ‘you will have to revisit [the office]’ (phirse aana padega). Though, the act of waiting as submission is only one aspect of the everyday experiences of waiting. Below, I highlight how taking into account gender, caste and class can further unpack the complex reasons enfolded into waiting.

Redistributive value in formal recognition

In the quote presented at the beginning of this article, Jyoti exclaims: ‘A whole day of not being able to work!’ when she has had to wait in queues for her biometric ID-card. Waiting in a queue means missing a day’s work, which then leads to not being able to secure one’s daily pay. Whereas, Sadna is waiting for her pension which can provide some relief, as she could work less in her old age, especially during times when she is sick and unable to work. The link between waiting and loss of money is where the materiality of waiting is the most tangible. In his 1967 article, historian, E.P. Thompson studies changing state policies and local work regulations of private companies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain to show how time became a mode of control and discipline by employers. For example, the setting-up of a big clock on the factory floor allowed the floor manager to keep tabs on breaks taken by workers (Thompson, 1967).

In Thompson’s study, time also became an element for the workers to mobilise around during that period, which culminated in their demand for a ten-hour workday and payment for overtime (Thompson, 1967). Time and money came to be intertwined, especially in work environments. The zeitgeist of ‘time is money’ remains valid in the twenty-first century to understand Jyoti’s experiences as well (Thompson, 1967, p. 86). In other words, waiting for welfare or state documents, in the case of informal workers, costs money, literally. For pheriwale women in my study, a workday spans twelve to fourteen hours, which may exclude social reproductive activities (including housework and care work) in addition to paid labour. Therefore, time is of essential value precisely due to the lack of it. Hence, to assume that pheriwale wait in vain, or are simply manipulated to wait, would overlook the nuances behind why people wait, including how people wait, or the activities that occur while waiting (Procupez, 2015). In the case of pheriwale women who have small children, childcare may occur during an ongoing process of waiting in a queue (cf. Auyero, 2012, p. 93). Hence, even the act of waiting itself can include multiple dimensions and activities, including childcare.

While Bourdieu’s theorisation of temporality and its intertwinements with one’s social and economic capital offers a frame to name and contextualise the phenomenon experienced by the pheriwale in this study. However, to annotate and understand their waiting solely through the lens of structural domination, or structural violence, tends to miss the nuances of people’s lived experiences (cf. Ghertner, 2017; Ortner, 2016; Procupez, 2015). The reasons behind waiting are worth conceptualising in a more dynamic manner rather than simply assuming that the urban poor become ‘patients’ of the state or that ‘waiting’ only ‘implies submission’. For instance, it may overlook the various reasons why people wait. Pheriwale, especially older women, would often tell me about the documents which they possessed, such as Aadhaar cards or bank accounts.² For 1950s and 1960s generation in India, who received most of their official documents later in their lives, the possession of such documentation is seen as an accomplishment. The ways in which people secure and care for their Aadhaar cards and other state-issued documents reveal what they mean for people in India. Even in its most tangible and materialist form – pension cards, national ID-cards, voter’s ID-cards, bank cards – formal recognition is enmeshed into the intangible political claims inscribed into those state issued documents and cards, as these documents are a requirement to access various institutions and welfare provisions. This materiality of waiting also emerges through: the time, money, patience and emotions that people invest into the processes of acquiring these documents.

To fully engage with and understand the complexity of why pheriwale, along with other marginalised groups, continue to hope and wait in their relationship with the state, it is crucial to acknowledge their everyday working lives as well as the socio-economic positionality of informalised work in a hierarchy of economic relations. Appadurai (2013) points out how urban poor make claims to the state, during which waiting is folded into such processes. In a context of precarious incomes and insecure jobs, the aspirations of formal inclusion (through ID-cards, enrolment in welfare schemes, establishing a bank account) form a part of the reason behind Jyoti spending a day without pay by waiting in a queue. This is not to romanticise the promise of formal membership but rather to highlight the everyday subjectivities of human conditions and to avoid the conceptualisation of waiting by marginalised groups simply as compliance or submission.

When the pheriwale women in my study wait for public welfare provisions, it is not motivated only by the materiality of the resources that can have a direct impact upon their livelihoods and survival. Seeking, applying and waiting for welfare provisions are entangled explicitly or implicitly within their claims as political subjects. Thus, in its materiality (pensions, ID-cards, etc.), the value of such documents is intricately interlinked with socio-political values, ‘between redistribution and recognition’ (Appadurai, 2013; see also Butler, 1997; Fraser, 1995). The importance that formal documents hold for pheriwale and the acts of patience and feelings of hope that are scripted into the relationship with the state illustrate the blurred boundaries of recognition and redistribution. Thus, the claims of full citizenship are deeply rooted in its material consequences. For instance, the right to vote is contained in the form of a voter’s ID-card, which recognises someone as a political subject, even when obtaining a state-issued document may entail long waiting.

For historically marginalised groups, waiting for a state pension, ration card, national ID-card or public housing is not only the way to secure public goods but also the means through which they articulate themselves and lay claim to full citizenship. Therefore, waiting is not simply submission to state manipulation of time but a way in which pheriwale arrange documents and welfare provisions for themselves and their families. For women who belong to lower castes, and work as street traders in the informal economy, the possession of formal documents has meant opportunities to access public goods such as education and pension to which earlier generations never had access. Hence, waiting in the lives of marginalised groups emerges as an inevitable process in their visits to state institutions. However, to frame the act of waiting as ‘valuable’ in itself would also overlook how waiting impedes the economic value-generating process of work. Instead, I suggest that it is more fruitful to acknowledge that waiting for welfare invokes a dimension of value in people’s lives wherein it is complexly interlinked with formal recognition.

Hence, the legacies of the histories of identities that communities carry within themselves are weaved into the experiences of waiting along with the value of obtaining formal recognition for groups that have a history of being excluded from political subjecthood (Appadurai, 2013). As many welfare provision processes can include paperwork that requires information regarding proof of father’s or husband’s identity, and due to the lack of assets such as private property among the majority of Dalits and indigenous population (and lesser still among the women); the possession of formal documentation has been only a recent development in the lives of the marginalised communities, and for women to be autonomous, formal political and economic members (cf. Agarwal et al., 2020; Khera, 2019; Lok Manch, 2016). Understanding the tangible value of documents as well as the implications of inclusion of formal citizenship needs to be acknowledged in any analysis of waiting in relation to the state institutions.

Conclusion

The arbitrariness of waiting and the confusing state instructions restrict the economically and politically marginalised groups. As in the case of pheriwale, they have limited resources which they may invest in the process of claiming welfare. These limited resources include lack of time, money, and constraints such as long working hours, childcare or old age. Nonetheless, to locate marginalised groups’ experiences of waiting only through the lens of submission would be to discount the nuances of experiences encompassed within the entanglements of waiting (Ghertner, 2017; Procupez, 2015). This article illustrates that studying experiences of ‘waiting’ offers a valuable insight into the relation between socio-economically marginalised groups and state institutions. More importantly, this paper argues that to unpack waiting as a sociological phenomenon, it is pertinent to account for the complex and often conflicting nuances of why and how people wait. By focusing on the experiences and accounts of visiting state offices, arranging documents and waiting, this paper highlights how pheriwale navigate different aspects of building livelihoods, from paid labour to arranging welfare for themselves and their families. Furthermore, an intersectional perspective enables this study to acknowledge the gendered, caste- and class-based locations of waiting, within the context of India. This perspective helps in unpacking the contextual specificities of why and how socio-economically marginalised groups wait for welfare.

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Riya Raphael

Riya Raphael is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the ‘Postgrowth Welfare Systems Project’ at the School of Social Work, Lund University. She completed her doctoral thesis in June 2021 at the Department of Gender Studies, Lund University. Riya’s PhD thesis focused upon the conceptualisations of value within social theory and the working lives of pheriwale, a group of second-hand cloth traders in Delhi, India. Her research interests include the fields of work, feminist political economy, critical sociology, intersectionality, queer and postcolonial theories.

Notes

1 The report cited here was conducted in the summer of 2016, with a sample size of 273,802 households across 12 states in India (Lok Manch, 2016).

2 Due to the sensitivity of privacy of the informants, I was careful not to record or document any personal data that the informants showed me or told me, such as ID-cards.