by Mridu Khullar Relph
–India-
Banav Bibi is not a Bangladeshi. She wants everyone to know this. She shouted it to the policeman who accused her son of being an illegal immigrant, arrested him, and beat him up. She said it to the rich madamji in one of the homes from which she picks up trash, when she was accused of stealing and not allowed to enter. And she told the jamadarni, the neighborhood head of the waste collectors, who hired goons to run her out of the area.
If they want proof, they can look at her identity card. “Bangladesh is an entirely different country,” she says. “They have a different way of talking. We are from Calcutta, which is in India.”
As a door-to-door garbage collector and wastepicker, Bibi, as she is affectionately known, sorts through the trash she’s just collected near the Seemapuri slum in East Delhi. Plastic bag, yes. It will sell for five rupees per kilogram. Scraps of paper, yes. 1.25 rupees per kilogram. Glass, one rupee per kg. Tin, two rupees. Packet of chips, no. Some kinds of plastic just won’t sell.
Bibi belongs to West Bengal’s Muslim minority. While her family, and many others like them, migrated to Delhi right after Independence in 1947, there are also a large number of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in the wastepicking business here. Because West Bengal’s Muslim minority speak Bengali and resemble fellow workers from across the border, they are discriminated against, harassed, and often picked up by the police, who take bribes to release them.
Bibi is part of an informal wastepicking hierarchy that has existed in the country for decades. In India’s culture of recycling nothing goes to waste. There is always someone willing to buy. A specialized scrap collector is a staple of every neighborhood and community. Buying old newspapers, glass and plastic bottles, and metals from homeowners, he then sells to even more specialized wholesale buyers.
Below the specialized scrap collector are the waste collectors like Bibi who sort the remaining trash from residents. And, at the bottom of the chain are the wastepickers at the landfill – sorting through what has already gone through two layers of peeling, and is usually material that others have missed.
There are approximately 150,000 wastepickers in Delhi alone, who collect the garbage the city throws out, and sort through it for recyclable material. Constituting one per cent of the city’s population, they are forced by poverty and discrimination onto the dhalaos (community dumpsters) and landfills, where some start work as young as age six, making between 150 and 300 rupees a day.
In an attempt to make the city greener and cleaner for the Commonwealth Games to be held in New Delhi in October, the government has been experimenting with several new ventures, including a plan to privatize the city’s waste collection systems. Until now this work has been handled by the informal sector which is not recognized by the government. It includes people who pick trash in the landfills, the door-to-door collectors, and two levels of middlemen, who sell plastic, paper, and metal to factories to be recycled. Privatization has already begun in seven out of the twelve administrative zones.
Once the trash reaches the dhalao it legally becomes the property of the municipal body. Traditionally the role of the municipality in cleaning the city, apart from sweeping the streets, has been to transport the garbage from the dumpster to the landfill – something they have been trying to privatize for years. All the other steps in the process have been handled by the informal wastepickers. But there’s a new thing that started a few months ago in a couple of zones in Delhi. The government started eyeing door-to-door collection for privatization as well.
“This is bad news for the wastepickers,” says Bharati Chaturvedi, Director of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, a New Delhi-based NGO, “because it ensures that there is no room for the urban poor to still find a living in privatization.”
But officials disagree. “Look around you,” says Ram Pal, councilor at the MCD. “The city is filthy and the government staff reeks of inefficiency. Thirty to forty per cent of the workers never even show up to work because they’re guaranteed a government job and can’t be fired. Privatization will allow us to streamline certain processes and make the city’s trash collection run smoothly.”
“I think what’s going to happen, is exactly what we’ve seen till now, is that [the wastepickers] will continue to work under even more terrible conditions,” Chaturvedi says. “People who pick up the trash are people with very few options. Suddenly from being an informal person you’ve become an illegal person. So the only way to become legal is to become a worker of the municipality.”
Bibi has little hope of finding a government or private job. She’ll continue to work here, she says, no matter what she earns. There doesn’t seem to be any other choice.
According to Chintan estimates, more than 82 percent of the women and 84 percent of the children who work as wastepickers are severely anemic. Most of them are prone to respiratory illnesses caused by exposure to dust and gastrointestinal diseases caused by eating in unclean surroundings – or eating food from the landfill itself. There is also the unknown fever and nausea that Chaturvedi says many of the workers complain about, which is likely the result of working and living in hazardous conditions and being malnourished.
Every few minutes, day and night, trucks from the MCD, the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), and the private companies come to the Ghazipur landfill, one of the biggest in the city. Each time a truck comes in, it brings with it the smell of rotting food, discarded nappies, and medical supplies. Every time it leaves, there is silence again. Fragments of people’s lives crunch below scampering feet – a roll of film, a wedding invitation, wood shavings, an empty bag of chips, a broken piece of coconut, a pink purse, part of a glass bangle, half a toilet seat, photographs of people who once meant something to someone.
It seems easy to understand why the government would want to, quite literally, clean up its act and start hiring outside agencies to alleviate the headaches of child labor, environmental hazards, and health problems. But NGOs contend that privatization would create new problems without really solving the old ones. “We all have this notion that privatization means efficiency and a solution, but we don’t realize that privatization has an economic impact, a social impact, and an ecological impact,” says Vimlendu Jha, founder of the environmental and social welfare non-profit group Swechha.
It’s been a particularly difficult year for recyclers and wastepickers across the spectrum, with prices of recyclable waste materials tanking by as much as fifty percent worldwide because of the recession. In a survey conducted by Chintan eighty per cent of wastepicker families interviewed said they had cut down on “luxury foods,” which they defined as milk, meat, and fruit. Approximately 41 percent said they had stopped purchasing milk entirely.
“It’s total desperation here,” says a worker of the MCD as he looks at the municipal truck dumping its garbage, watching a swarm of wastepickers rushing forward to get what they can find. “These people are so poor, they’ll take anything that might even sell for one rupee – shoes, bags, even cloth. The government doesn’t really care what happens to them, as long as the city gets clean for the Games.”
“When you say privatization you presume that no private actors are already in operation,” the MCD worker says. “But there are. The wastepickers are entrepreneurs. The point is to recognize their entrepreneurship.”
In April 2009, Colombia’s Constitutional Court did just that, voiding a contract for private collection that had cut off wastepickers’ access to the landfill. Brazil has also recently recognized the legitimacy of informal waste collection. “We would like identical forms of inclusion in India,” Chaturvedi says.
It’s almost noon and Bibi is finally finished for the day. She’s going home, but her sons will continue to collect more waste and scrap until late in the afternoon.
She describes her home as a place where, if someone died, there’s no space to take out the body. Eleven people live in her small house in the Seemapuri slum where, with an income of 150 rupees a day, she’s the richest resident. Government workers burned down Bibi’s thatched home many times, saying the slum-dwellers had encroached upon the state’s land, so the family has now constructed a pukka home with concrete walls. The entire family works in the scrap business and only her youngest daughter has ever gone to school.
Inside Bibi’s home, on the lap of a social worker, lies her three-day-old grandson. “He will not get into this trade,” she says. “He will study and go to school and not do the dirty work of his grandmother.”
Outside, the sorting continues.
About the Author
Mridu Khullar Relph is an independent award-winning journalist from New Delhi, India. For the past eight years, she has written extensively about human rights and women’s issues in Asia, Africa, and North America. She’s a regular contributor to Time, the International Herald Tribune, Global Post, and Ms. magazine, among others. Visit her website at www.mridukhullar.com.
Very interesting article. Way too often the “little people(read the poor, women, children, anybody whose voice is not valued)” get left behind in a rush to “modernize.”
I certainly hope India follows the path of Colombia and Brazil, and at the same time works to better the lives of the wastepickers, but it seems unlikely.
The comment from the MCD worker is what really stuck with me, “The wastepickers are entrepreneurs. The point is to recognize their entrepreneurship.”
Perhaps now the Indian government needs to address the worrisome issues mentioned (child labor, health problems, etc.) without pushing further privatization and removing the livelihood of 150,000 people.
The question is, how?