Circularity Without Justice: Measurement, Recognition, and Environmental Justice in India's Textile Transition
Mihika Singhania
Abstract
Cities that clean up their industries usually measure success by efficiency: how much water a factory recycles, how much waste it recovers, how clean its own outflow runs. This paper asks what those measures leave out. In Kanpur, a centre of India's textile and leather industry, circular-economy policy reports steady progress, yet the pollution burden on the settlements beside the factories has not eased. The reason, the paper argues, is that the system measures efficiency but never measures who bears the leftover harm, or where; even the city's air monitors sit away from the worst-affected areas. What a government does not measure it cannot see, and cannot correct, sanctioning the burden to persist, unrecorded, on the poorest and most marginalised residents. The paper's central recommendation is to measure the burden, and put the instruments where the people are.