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By MRIDU KHULLAR
February 2010
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Banav
Bibi's hands tell her story. A scratch for each time she’s been beaten
and abused. A cut for every time she’s had to bail her sons out of jail. A
bruise for the many times she thought she couldn’t take it any more.
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There are, too, the wounds that no one can see. The wounds of loss that fail
to heal. The son who died, the son who left, the physically abused daughter
who returned from her husband’s home. The children who never went to school,
the children who never will.
“There are glass pieces, blades, and other sharp material that have been
thrown into the dustbin,” she says, observing the marks on her hands as if
for the first time. “I sort very carefully, but once or twice a day, we’ll
miss something, and get a cut.”
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,
and there is always someone willing to buy it. A specialised scrap collector
is a staple of every neighbourhood and community, buying from home owners old
newspapers, glass and plastic bottles, and metals, to sell to even more
specialised wholesale buyers. Below him are the waste collectors like Bibi,
who get the other trash from the residents. 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 the 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 percent of the city’s population, they are forced by poverty
and discrimination onto the dhalaos and landfills, where they start work
early, making between 150 to 300 rupees a day. Some start as young as age
six.
Every morning, 45-year-old Bibi leaves home at five am so she can reach the
upper middle-class Sunder Nagar neighbourhood before most of the residents
leave for their offices. Many will put their garbage bags outside their front
door from where Bibi will take them, throwing the contents in her cart,
putting in a bag what she thinks will sell, segregating the rest to the side
to be later thrown into the dhalao, the community dumpster. While the rich residents
have drivers, live-in household help, and spend a large amount of their
disposable incomes on entertainment, no one pays Bibi for this service of
door-to-door collection. Instead, whatever money she makes will depend on
what she’s found in the residents’ garbage that day. Paper is good, plastic
is better. Metal is the best.
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 madam-ji 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 neighbourhood
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.
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“Bangladesh is an entirely different country,” she says. “They have a
different way of talking. We are from Kolkata, which is in India.”
Bibi, a door-to-door
garbage collector and wastepicker, sorts through trash near the Seemapuri
slum in East Delhi. She’s collected it and transported it 16 kilometres from
one of the homes on her route in the D-block of the posh Sunder Nagar colony,
in South 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
kilogram. Tin, two rupees. Packet of chips. No. Some kinds of plastic just
won’t sell.
Bibi, as she is affectionately known, 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 they speak Bengali
and resemble fellow workers from across the border, people like Bibi are
discriminated against, harassed, and often picked up by the police, who take
bribes to release them.
Qurban Ali, Bibi’s 16-year-old son who works with her every day, has just
found a calculator. He hands it to her, takes it back when she’s not
interested, looks it over and presses the buttons to see if it still works.
It does. He moves around the piece of machinery in his hand with a hint of
fascination, finally throwing it in with the rest of the recyclable material.
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 privatise the city’s waste
collection systems.
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Until now
this work has been handled by the informal sector, which is not
recognised by the government and 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. Privatisation has
already begun in seven of the 12 administrative zones.
Once the trash reaches the dhalao, it legally becomes the property of the
municipal body. Bibi collects waste and scrap from people’s homes, taking
what she thinks will sell and depositing the rest in the dhalao. It’s here,
in this dumpster, that most of the door-to-door waste collectors do their
sorting and segregating. A couple of times a day, workers of the municipality
empty out the contents of the dumpster into a truck and transport it to one
of the city’s landfills.
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 felt they weren’t doing very well and have been
trying to privatise 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, where the government started
eyeing doorto- door collection for privatisation 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
privatisation.” There are atleast 150,000 waste recyclers, but around 40,000
municipal workers. “Look at who’s really keeping the city clean,” she says.
According to a Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) presentation, the goal of
the municipal body is to have a ‘dhalao free city’ before the Games, which
would essentially involve taking away the space the wastepickers use for
their segregation, making their businesses difficult, if not impossible, to run.
But officials disagree. “Look around you,” says Ram Pal, councillor at MCD.
“The city is filthy and the government staff reeks of inefficiency. Thirty to
40 percent of the workers never even show up to work because they’re
guaranteed a government job and can’t be fired. Privatisation will allow us
to streamline certain processes and make the city’s trash collection run
smoothly.”
Over the last decade, Delhi’s citizens have voiced their distrust and
dissatisfaction with the way the city handles their waste. “I think Delhi in
particular, but everywhere else as well in India, there’s been this huge
crisis of confidence in municipalities,” says Chaturvedi.
In the 1990s,
India’s urban middle and upper-class began to speak out against this
inadequacy in the form of Public Interest Litigations (PIL), a legal tool
available to citizens to challenge local, state and federal legislations for
public interest reasons. While the PILs offered some tangible results such as
the enactment of laws, their real achievement was in embarrassing top-level
municipal officers, who were required to appear in court and explain their
shoddy performance. This pressured them to find answers to the city’s
compounding waste problem.
The officers, who had, until then, seen waste as a liability and a strain on
city budgets, now envisioned it as a source of wealth. By privatising the
entire system, they transferred the responsibility of cleaning the city to a
private party while capitalising on Delhi’s increased volume of waste. The city’s
trash became the city’s treasure.
But no one considered informal workers who were already cleaning up the
city’s garbage.
Despite the government’s intentions , the private contractors are removing
and recycling less scrap. Wastepickers tend to do intense and thorough scrap
segregation because their next meal depends on it. In contrast, private
contractors hire workers who they pay in cash for a day’s work. These workers
have little incentive to do extensive separation, nor do they have the
experience and the knowledge to do so. They often end up removing the bare
minimum of recyclables to meet the (verbal) contract requirements and dumping
the rest in the landfill.
“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, and I think that’s the big shift that happens. So the only
way to become legal is to become a worker of the municipality.”
Indeed, a 2006 World Bank study, while suggesting that cost differences
between private and municipal entities were in the range of 20-40 percent,
pinned the cause on the fact that “private contractors tend to pay lower than
minimum wages to their sanitary workers.” What corporate privatisation does,
then, is force the wastepickers into these below-minimum wage contracts.
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.
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