Ragpickers: The Bottom Rung in the Waste Trade
Ladder
By Bharati Chaturved, Specialist in Organizing Rag-Pickers
in CHINTAN, INDIA
In India, recycling is
a funny business. It’s been around for years. Much before
the term itself seeped into everyday vocabulary, women separated
newspapers and sold them to weekend buyers – the kabaris
(from kabar, approximately meaning dry waste) who still cycle
along on weekends with a weighing scale and loose change to
pay with. Bottles were reused them till they broke and tins
just never got thrown a
way.
As a 13 year old, I could still see tins of baby food from my
baby years, storing dals and rice. It happens even today, but
its’ been pruned down by the uncontrolled introduction
of the non-recyclable, non-reusable sachet and metalized plastic
packaging. Now, as then, when something is either broken or
entirely unfit, even to store away for a rainy day, it is thrown
all mixed up into a dustbin. That’s when recycling begins.
For every hundred residents of Delhi, there
is one person engaged in recycling.
All recycling in India is undertaken by (and via) the informal
sector. This sector includes ragpickers, small middlemen, transporters,
larger middlemen and finally, reprocessors. In terms of human
resources this sector is arranged in a table top pyramid with
ragpickers at the bottom of the pyramid and forming the backbone
of waste collection. At the thinner end of the wedge are the
small middlemen, who buy the waste from these ragpickers and
sell it to larger middlemen who deal with specific items and
materials. Above them are factories, who procure supplies from
these godowns through omnipresent agents.
Delhi is a particularly interesting case in point, because it
has one of the biggest and most vibrant recycling bases in the
country. The wastepickers, of whom there are 100,000 in Delhi,
are therefore, the base of a large recycling pyramid, handling
between 9 to 15 percent of the solid waste generated in a city.
In Delhi, which generated over 7000 MT waste daily, this comes
to a substantial amount. There are a range of material which
are picked up and recycled by this sector. These include plastics,
paper, glass, and metals. Studies estimate that the amounts
this informal labour forces saves the three Municipalities is
a minimum of Rs. 6 lakhs (appx. 12,000 USD) daily. It is also
seen that a piece of plastic, for example, increases 700% in
value along the recycling chain, before it is even reprocessed.
For
every hundred residents of Delhi, there is one person engaged
in recycling.
But the point is : is recycling a green activity ?
Think just of the ragpicker – typically, a young person
(though not a child) with a large woven HDPE sack flung on his
shoulder. A ragpicker would have to begin work as early as 4
am, because otherwise, s/he’ll miss the waste. As a resident,
you could begin to recognize your own ragpicker, because the
routes are totally territorial. By the late afternoon, or whenever
the bag is full, a ragpicker will return to the store of a middleman,
also called a kabari, and sell. Even as he sells the waste should
be sorted out according to almost 30 different types of plastics,
paper, metals. They must be clean and dry, or the kabari can’t
accept them. So you have little segregation patches in secret
corners of the city, where thousands of the poorest sort out
waste. From makeshift water sources, they might even wash them.
Hunched over for hours, the poor undertake what the privileged
preach: segregation of waste. If the privileged had done this
themselves, the poor would have less cuts, burns, backaches,
allergies, dog-bites, respiratory disorders.
The transaction at the selling point is complex : you could
get paid less if your waste is sub-standard and wet, if you
already owe the seller money or if he himself is cash strapped.
Or, you could get a loan, which is likely to trap you in debt
for a long time.
This shop, this site of exploitation and symbiotic living is
the local hangout join, a club in the truest sense, a home for
many in the rain and cold.
Ragpickers mostly live either in slums (usually the shop of
a kabari), on footpaths or inside dustbins. Their access to
basic amenities are poor, and few essential services are provided
for them. The police beats them regularly, and often burns their
bags of waste, leaving them with nothing to show for a day’s
work. The municipal workers make them pay bribes to be allowed
to forage in a bin. If it’s a lucrative bin, with lots
of paper, for example, the rates get higher. Once ensconced,
the municipal worker makes them do some of his work too : sweeping,
loading trucks and all that’s not nice. If the ragpicker
simply walks or cycles around a route, he’s not spared
either. The police can pick him up to clean the police station,
or the municipal sweepress can beat him to being independent.
Long after the ragpicker, workers in the dingy stores of traders
relive this unhappy state in their terms of work. So do factory
workers, who run entire units on only a single 40 watt bulb
and their bare hands. In a nutshell, it’s called survival.
Indian recycling thus runs on the efforts of the poor and the
marginalized.
Meanwhile, this also subsidizes the consumption of various materials
by other citizens. The example of plastics stands as a fine
example. According to a report by the Ministry of Environment
and Forests, the Plastics industry is growing at 10% per annum,
and almost 52% of this is expected to be used in the packaging
sector. Clearly, this is a short life use and will be cleared
up as waste by the informal sector. Sadly, it will be undertaken
in a manner which ensures that ecologically, economically and
socially, the costs will be internalized by this recycling chain.
The informal sector has an important role because it is able
to undertake recycling of most recyclable materials, which the
municipality cannot. Although it is critical to the solid waste
handling in India, the sector is unable to optimize its work
due to lack of awareness and specific skills, as well very poor
working conditions and access to basic facilities. The services
provided by this sector, albeit gratis, are also poorly understood
and hence, it is difficult for any other sector (eg, formal
savings sector/banks, insurance) to support it .
Recycling should therefore be treated as the flip side of the
urban middle class consumption.
Ironically, state attitudes towards this sector displays a schizophrenic
quality.
On one hand, in seminars on Solid Waste Management, the sector
is extensively , though selectively praised. The ragpickers
are complemented (in absentia) for their hard work in cleaning
up the city. NGOs are encouraged to work with them more intensively.
There is at best a silence about the kabaris, bigger middlemen
and factories which actually undertake the reprocessing and
who are a part of the entire chain. This also links to the social/political
imaging of ragpickers in the public mind as against the rest
of the chain. Hence, ragpickers are poor/weak/exploited and
posited against the exploiters: the rich(er) kabaris and middlemen
who are seen as “opponents” rather than being involved
in the symbiotic relationship that really exists between all
these sectors. Despite their invaluable service, this sector
is ignored by planners and policy makers, who do not take them
into consideration at all . The current process of making the
Third Master Plan for Delhi, though still being drafted in secrecy
and not shared, has been acknowledged by the Delhi Development
Authorities and NCR Authorities to have “left out the informal
sectors,” including those in the area of waste. This then
results in actually ignoring this sector and not translating
into practice the theoretical acknowledgement of its services.
Worse still, the lack of planning converts the sector into an
illegal and illegitimate one, which is projected as encroaching
upon the city, rather than serving it.
The situation has worsened since the Lt. Governor of Delhi,
Vijay Kapoor deemed in 2000 that all commercial activities,
such as kabaris, taking place in slums, be stopped and banned.
Meanwhile, implementation of planning activities resulted in
dislocation of several recycling factories, while previous “cleaning
drives” have attacked waste storage stations. Two years
ago, in Delhi, several illegal factories were closed down forcibly,
primarily for environmental and planning reasons. No effort
towards cleaner production or a toxics reduction agenda was
seen as acceptable. Many of them were recycling factories, which
were responsible for reprocessing the city’s waste and
were therefore a part of the environmental agenda of recycling.
Simultaneously, government bodies are encouraging
recycling as a good practice amongst citizens. Notably, this
classification of citizenship does not seem to be inclusive
of the urban poor recyclers, or even less poor denizens, as
their efforts are not encouraged within this domain of recycling.
In India, therefore the recycler becomes undesirable, although
recycling itself is becoming more and more desirable in recent
years .
Chintan is trying to address these issues through its efforts
of organizing wastepickers, enabling them to access information,
knowledge, assitsance from us and each other in times of need
and above all, to see themsleves as they are : people who are
amongst the most important pulses of the city. People with a
right to a clean environment and safe work environment. Just
People. Demanding a break.
CONTACT: Bharati Chaturved, Specialist in
Organizing Rag-Pickers in CHINTAN, INDIA bharatich@hotmail.com
