Ragpickers so critical in waste management

The Ajmer Shatabdi pulls into the New Delhi station every night at around 11 pm. During the six-hour journey from Ajmer, the train serves tea, snacks, soup, dinner and dessert more food than an average person can eat in that time.

As soon as passengers start getting off the train, ragpickers jump in and start scrounging for waste material and leftovers – samosas, biscuits, plastic bottle, wraps and so on. They are a part of India's massive reserve of ragpickers – their numbers are estimated between 1.5 million and 4 million; Delhi itself has over 500,000.

Ragpickers sustain themselves by collecting, sorting and segregating waste and then trading it. In doing so, they help clean up a significant proportion of the 62 million tonnes of waste generated annually in India.

Given that rag-picking is a totally informal sector it is hard to quantify how much waste is collected in this manner, but there are rough indicators: Only 75-80 per cent of the waste generated is collected by municipal bodies. And more than 90 per cent of India does not have a proper waste disposal system.

A lot of garbage clearing thus is the done informally, by ragpickers who work without any job security, salary or dignity. Not just that, they are regularly exposed to cuts, infections, respiratory diseases and tuberculosis – apart from poverty, humiliation, harassment, and sexual abuse on the streets.

"This informal sector has saved the country. They are doing a good job and I have decided to recognise their efforts. We will grant (a) national award," former Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar had declared in 2015 at an event on waste management in New Delhi.

It was declared that a cash prize of Rs 1,50,000 ($2,330) would be given to three ragpickers and three associations involved in innovative waste management. More than a year later there is no information available about the scheme.

Javadekar has stated that India will, in another couple of decades, generate nearly thrice the waste it currently does – "165 million tonnes by 2030 and 450 million tonnes by 2050.” Only 22-28 per cent of the waste now collected is processed or treated.

Ragpickers actually complement the work of civic bodies, Shashi Bhushan Pandit, who runs the All India Kabadi Mazdoor Mahasangh, pointed out in a March 2016 interview.

"According to the law under which a municipality is set up, it places dustbins according to the size of the population. It is assumed that the generator of the waste will drop it in the bin. After that, it is the responsibility of the municipality to collect it from there (the transfer station) and treat it at the landfill," Pandit said. "However, it is not the responsibility of the municipality to pick up the garbage from the source. That's why the informal sector has filled this gap."

Papiya Sarkar, Senior Programme Officer (Chemicals and Health), Toxics Link, a New-Delhi based NGO, classifies waste pickers into four categories: Those who carry sacks and collect anything of resale value from open drains and bins; the kabadi or bhangar men on bicycles who collect from households and then segregate glass, paper, and bottles from plastics; those who ride tricycles and collect almost 50 kg of waste each day and travel long distances to sell them, and finally, those who work for scrap dealers.

Darkness Under the Lamps was a study undertaken by Harsh Mander and V. Manikandan in 2011 at the Centre for Equity Studies in Madanpur Khadar, an urban village in south Delhi where many ragpickers live. They complained that they were treated "with suspicion and derision, because of their extreme poverty, vocation of rag-picking, minority faith and suspicions that they are from Bangladesh by the middle-class community living around (sic)". The children of ragpickers often carry on with the same occupation and are rarely educated.

The government treats them no differently. Pandit has demanded inclusive rights, health benefits, safety gear and social security for ragpickers because they provide services that benefit the environment. "In Bogota, Columbia, every ragpicker is paid $2 per day by the municipality. In Brazil, they have made sure that only the ragpicker can pick the waste (from the source). Why can't India do it?" he asked.

Several men we spoke to agreed that they had tried their hand at other things but came back to rag-picking because it paid better. Migrants here also help their kin to move to Delhi and join the trade. This meant that most people in the basti (neighbourhood) came from two states: Bihar and West Bengal.

The women we met do not go out for picking, but are expected to sort waste at home. Even eight- or 10-year-old children join their parents in sorting waste. "If you work 12-14 hours a day, you can make a living. But rates have gone down significantly. A sack of rag that fetched us Rs 300 five years ago now gets us no more than Rs 175-200. See how much rice and vegetables cost now – it is impossible to survive," complained Kundan.

Police harassment is a common complaint. Young boys are picked up on false allegations and beaten up in police stations, said the residents. Sometimes they pick up mobile phones or other lost or stolen goods and then get arrested for committing a crime. Hair and plastic fetch the best rates but sorting waste is a difficult and hazardous job.

"We open sacks and there are soiled sanitary napkins in newspapers, human excreta in polythene, shards of glass, syringes or nails. We cut ourselves, develop rashes and infection. Rotten food makes us sick. But we have no pension, no recognition, no medical facilities," said a ragpicker.

We asked a few women hailing from Uttar Pradesh for the one thing they would ask from the government. Disposal bins for the waste leftover from sorting, they said. Without bins, this waste simply piles up in their homes and lanes.

"Give us that and access to water. We buy two buckets of water every other day and pay Rs 1,000-2,000 a month to the one person who has a hand pump. If we can get a tanker, we could bathe properly. Yes we deal with garbage, but we want to be able to live in a space that is clean," the women said. (In arrangement with IndiaSpend.org)

By Rajanya Bose & Anirban Bhattacharya