This article examines the secondhand solar photovoltaic (PV) market of Bhojpur Dharampur, a small town in western Uttar Pradesh, India, where discarded panels are repaired, adapted, and resold to underserved rural households and small businesses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2026, including interviews with wholesalers, resellers, and customers, it shifts the focus from what discarded solar objects become to what their afterlives make. Building on a local history of scrap trading and Muslim biradari kinship ties, traders combine repair, voltage adaptation, storage, warranties, credit, reputation, and resale networks to convert the material ruins of India's energy transition into workshops, commercial streets, jobs, and a specialized regional market. The article contributes to debates on repair, energy justice, and subaltern urbanization by showing that small-town centrality can emerge not only from demographic growth or industrial relocation, but also from the situated reworking of discarded infrastructures produced elsewhere. Yet the same circuits that provide affordable electricity and livelihoods also concentrate materials that cannot be repaired, resold, or safely recycled. Solar repair thus supports urban specialization while redistributing residual ecological exposure onto already marginalized peripheral towns.
The caste system represents a complex structure of social stratification which is perceived as a cultural feature unique to India. The people placed at the bottom of the system are considered impure and traditionally were assigned to perform the demeaning work for the superior castes. The Indian constitution adopted affirmative action guaranteeing proportional representation in different spheres, including public services, to remedy historical disadvantages endured by the lowest castes. The nature of Dalit representation in the bureaucracy indicates that the policy does not guarantee the annihilation of caste and casteism after recruitment into the public services. Drawing on Indian government data on foreign services and the arguments advanced by parliamentarians on the nature of Scheduled Caste representation in the services, this article aims to unravel the (dis)appearance of caste in foreign services, which is mediated through the putative logic of ‘merit’, ‘competence’ and ‘national interest’.
The recently delivered court rulings on reservation provoke the question about the future and (ir) relevance of the policy to accomplish social justice in a liberalized market economy wherein formal state jobs are scantily available, higher education is increasingly privatized and the creation of the EWS category appears to undermine the logic of affirmative action. The moment urges us to reflect on whether we need a new policy framework to achieve the goal of social justice in the changed political economy. Any reflection on the future of reservations should not be ahistorical and detached from the past and changes in contemporary political economy.
