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Professor Sharma鈥檚 research is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork across two iconic but under-examined industrial sites: brick kilns in Jhajjar district, Haryana, and leather tanneries in Jajmau, an industrial suburb of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh. 

India’s industrial growth story is often told through impressive numbers,  240 billion bricks produced every year, leather exports worth hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of factories powering a rising economy. Professor Mukul Sharma’s research, however, brings forth what lies behind these impressive numbers: the human labour that sustains these industries, everyday and majority of workers employed across certain industries are Dalits. These workers from lower-caste communities, generation after generation, work in physically demanding and environmentally hazardous conditions. Yet the connection between caste identity and exposure to environmental hazard is rarely mentioned directly in policy, research and public debate. 

Such patterns of employment are typically treated as coincidence, or reduced to the broader condition of poverty. Professor Sharma鈥檚  research argues that it is neither.

The central question driving this research work was: is the unequal distribution of environmental risk in Indian industry accidental, or is it deliberately structured by caste? To answer the same, a new analytical framework, named the castescape was developed. It is defined as the spatialised and embodied manifestation of caste power, where industrial landscapes are actively shaped by caste hierarchies, histories of exclusion, and the systematic assignment of bodily harm to marginalised communities.

Theoretically, the castescape framework weaves together Arjun Appadurai’s notion of fragmented and unequal cultural “scapes” with Henri Lefebvre’s foundational argument that space is never neutral – it is always produced through social relations, ideology, and power. Applied to India’s industrial zones, this means the arrangement of land, labour, machinery, and bodies is never accidental but cast-engineered. 

For the brick kiln sector, fieldwork was conducted across villages including Passour, Badli, Kablana, Khungai, and Kanonda in Jhajjar district of Haryana. The study employed extensive and in-depth interviews with Dalit workers, their families, contractors, and community members.

The study further draws upon a diverse range of secondary sources including district census records, long-term climate projections for Haryana, government and NGO reports. Additionally, it engages with a wide body of scholarship spanning political ecology, labour geography, and critical caste studies. 

The Jhajjar district has over 400 kilns – the highest concentration in Haryana – and an annual seasonal workforce of around 50,000. The shift in recent decades to larger, coal-powered zigzag kilns looks on the surface like modernisation and technological progress. But this upgrade has not reduced the need for labour but has intensified it. Workers continue to mix and mould clay by hand, carry heavy loads of sun-dried bricks across vast furnace-heated open yards, stack kilns in precise formations, and unload fired bricks in temperatures that regularly exceed 45掳C between May and July. Workers described their experience in raw, visceral terms: “It is hot as hell,” and “it boils inside” etc. Heat strokes, rashes, dizziness, eye burns, and chronic respiratory illness from coal and biomass emissions are not exceptional events but routine features of the working day. 

Jhajjar is dominated by landowners who have steadily converted their agricultural fields into kiln clusters since the 1990s, capturing revenue and profit, while workers – who make up nearly 18% of the district’s population but own virtually no agricultural land – absorb all the physical and environmental costs.

In Kanpur’s leather tanneries at Jajmau, the same logic operates through a different industry. Jajmau was deliberately located away from the upper-caste, elite parts of the city. Its pollution, acrid odour, stagnant chemical wastewater, and heavy industrial waste.

Despite over a century of industrial evolution, the tanning process continues to depend on Dalit hands for its most hazardous tasks: soaking hides, fleshing, liming, chemical pickling, dyeing, and finishing. The industry justifies its reliance on manual Dalit labour through appeals to “craft,” “quality,” and the complexity of working with natural materials. But the research shows these are not neutral technical arguments. They naturalise the association between Dalit bodies and degraded, dangerous work, making exploitation appear as tradition.

Taken together, these two sites reveal something of wide significance. The concept of castescape offers a way to see what development statistics routinely obscure. When the research asks why Dalit workers disproportionately bear the burden of India’s industrial pollution, extreme heat exposure, and toxic occupational environments, the answer is not simply poverty or market forces. It is caste – operating simultaneously as a spatial logic, a labour regime, and an ecological assignment. These workers in kilns, tanneries, construction sites, and sanitation systems are the first ones to be affected by hazardous conditions.  

Any serious conversation about just industrial growth, occupational safety, or climate adaptation in India must name caste explicitly and address it structurally. A more equitable and environmentally-just future demands not only cleaner technologies and better regulations, but a fundamental dismantling of caste as the hidden infrastructure of Indian industry itself.

鈥� Edited by Priyanka (Research and Development Office).

This blog has been adapted from the original article, available .