A child plays among waste plastic bottles on the outskirts of Chandigarh, northern India. The country has an enormous, informal recycling sector.  As cities like Delhi become increasingly wealthy, they are privatizing trash collection, endangering the livelihood of many. (Photo by Ajay Verma/REUTERS.)

"They don't belong here," says Sultana pointing to three children digging through a mound of wet trash for small bits of paper or plastic. Her own two children, a ten-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy, go to school, and will never come here, ever, she says.

 

"When they want to know where mummy and daddy work we tell them what we do, but we don't bring them here to see it.”

 

Sultana, 25 and her husband are waste pickers, forced by poverty onto this Delhi landfill with 150,000 other men, women, and children. They are part of an informal army of workers — an astounding 1 percent of the city’s population — that make their living by sorting through trash, gathering plastic, paper, pieces of metal, and other scrap, collectively recycling 20 percent of municipal waste. They each pick up between 50 to 60 kilograms of material daily, for earnings of 100 to 200 rupees ($2.15 to $4.30).

 

“No one should have to do this,” Sultana says.

 

It’s a tough life, a squalid daily ordeal of trudging through knee-high waste, digging through sometimes sharp, filthy and dangerous material, and facing condescendence from almost all other segments of society. Nonetheless, they are as eager as any worker to maintain their role in the refuse trade, as it’s the only way they can make a living.

 

Soon, however, they will be out of work. As part of a push to make the city cleaner and greener for the October 2010 Commonwealth Games, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), one of Delhi's three local governing bodies, has privatized seven of the city’s 12 administrative zones, effectively sidelining the waste pickers.

 

Progress versus sustenance

 

Municipalities across India have started to eye privatization as a viable solution to government bureaucracy and ineptitude. "Look around you," says Ram Pal, a councilor in the south zone of the MCD. "The city is filthy and our 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." Privatization, he says, will allow the department to streamline certain processes and make the city's trash collection run smoothly.

 

But the waste pickers are crying for mercy.

 

Their plight has been particularly grim during the Great Recession, as the price of recyclables has dropped by as much as 50 percent globally, leading to a direct loss of income and longer working hours for the waste pickers.

 

In a survey conducted by the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, a nonprofit in New Delhi, eighty percent of waste picker families interviewed said they had cut down on "luxury foods," which they defined as milk, meat, and fruit. Approximately 41 percent had stopped purchasing milk entirely. For its part, the government considers them an informal sector, so they are neither recognized by the government nor entitled to any benefits by the city. This, despite environmental organizations’ estimates that these scavengers save the city 600,000 rupees or about $13,000 each day.

 

The waste hierarchy

 

India has traditionally had a culture of recycling, and a complex informal waste hierarchy has existed for decades. Phooljahan, 45, who has only one name, illustrates how the system works. Every morning she leaves home at 6 a.m. so that she can reach the middle-class neighborhood of Sunder Nagar before most of the residents leave for work. Many will put their garbage bags outside their doorsteps from where Phooljahan will take them, throwing the contents onto her cart, putting what she thinks will sell in a bag, segregating the rest to the side, to be later thrown into the dhalao, the community dumpster.

 

No one pays Phooljahan 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.

 

Once the trash reaches the dhalao, it legally becomes the property of the city. 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.

 

A specialized scrap collector exists in almost every community, buying used newspapers and magazines, as well as glass and plastic bottles from homes and offices. Below him are waste collectors like Phooljahan, who have access to the other trash, such as packets of chips, waste from cooking, and other bits and pieces from everyday living that people throw into their garbage bins. Trash at the landfill has already gone through two layers of sorting. That which remains is what no one else would touch. Yet thousands of waste pickers do just that, looking for scrap the others have missed.

 

Delhi's privatization efforts, if successful, will not only eliminate the role of the waste pickers at the landfill, but also of door-to-door collectors like Phooljahan. According to a Municipal Corporation of Delhi presentation obtained by GlobalPost Passport, the goal of the municipal body is to have a "dhalao free city," before the Commonwealth Games, which would essentially involve taking away the space the waste pickers use for their segregation, making their businesses difficult, if not impossible, to run.

 

 A crisis of confidence

 

Privatization has also been fueled partly by the extreme distrust and dissatisfaction by the citizens in the government's handling of the city's waste. "I think in Delhi in particular, but everywhere else as well in India, there's been this huge crisis of confidence in municipalities," says Chintan's Director Bharati Chaturvedi.

 

In the nineties, India's urban middle- and upper-class began to speak out against this inadequacy in the form of Public Interest Litigations (PILs), a legal tool available to citizens to challenge local, state and federal legislations for public interest reasons.

 

While the PILs had some tangible effects such as the enactment of laws, explains Chaturvedi, their real achievement was in embarrassing top-level officers in the municipalities, who were required to appear in court and explain their lack of performance, and putting pressure on them to find answers to the city's compounding waste.

 

The officers who had, until then, seen waste as a liability and a strain on city budgets, now started seeing it as a source for wealth. By privatizing the entire system, they realized, not only could they transfer the responsibility of cleaning the city to a private party, but also capitalize on this increased volume of waste that the city was producing. 

 

What they neglected to address is what would happen to the 150,000 informal workers who were already cleaning up the city's trash. A senior officer in the MCD who declined to be named because of "lack of authorization to speak with the media," told GlobalPost that the corporation has recommended that the new private players use the services of the existing wastepickers, but has serious doubts that this will actually happen. MCD’s spokesperson declined to comment.

 

The impact of privatization

 

Fifteen-year-old Sheikh Azhar — a lanky, sullen kid who works through the night and sleeps through the day — will never go to school. He went once, in his village near Calcutta, and studied until fifth grade. They taught math, which he liked, and social sciences, which he didn't.

 

They've built one over there, over the mountains of rubbish where the landfill ends, he says. It's a free government-run school. But he doesn't want to go. It's too late. "When I first came, there was no one to teach us. Now they have someone who comes every day, but where is the time?"

 

It might seem difficult to defend the waste picking way of life, with its child labor and health and environmental hazards, but Chaturvedi contends that privatization creates new problems without solving the old ones. "I think what's going to happen is that they'll continue to work under even more terrible conditions," she says. "The people who pick up trash are people with very few options."

 

After privatization, "Suddenly from being an informal person, you've become an illegal person," says Chaturvedi. "The only way to become legal is to get a job with the private companies."

 

Those who do get jobs may not be very lucky. A 2006 World Bank study suggested that private companies were 20 to 40 percent more cost efficient than municipalities, mainly because "private contractors tend to pay lower than minimum wages to their sanitary workers." Privatization, in other words, forces the waste pickers into these below-minimum wage contracts. The current minimum wage in Delhi is between Rs 150-170 ($3.23 to $3.73) per day, depending on the category of employment and skilled or unskilled labor, which means they'd be making considerably less than what most of them are right now.

 

That aside, privatization is also likely to have an impact on the country's environmental future. While waste pickers tend to do intense and thorough scrap segregation — recycling 15 to 59 percent — because their livelihoods depend on it, the private operators are only required to reach 20 percent segregation at the end of their eight-year contract, leading to less recycling and more greenhouse gas emissions.

 

This is important, as gas emissions from waste now account for 6.7 percent of total Indian emissions, a number that is twice the average of other countries in Asia and higher than the global average. "A lot of it is because of organic waste ending up in landfills," says Chaturvedi. "It's not good enough to take all the organic waste to a composting factory because you're still using transportation and fuel. It makes more sense to do decentralized local composting so that there's sustainability."

 

Current private contractors, however, are paid per ton of waste picked up and delivered to the landfill. "If I'm a private contractor, why would I want you to compost your waste? I'm losing 40-50 percent of my earnings," says Chaturvedi. "If you're going to, on the one hand, say we should do more composting and on the other hand, I'm paying you to take more waste, then I think privatization clashes with really basic ideas of reducing your carbon footprint."

 

The state would be better off trying to work within the current system rather than replacing it with a completely new one, she says. "When you say privatization, you presume that no private actors are already in operation, but there are. The waste pickers are entrepreneurs. The point is to recognize their entrepreneurship."

 

In April 2009, Colombia's Constitutional Court did just that. It ruled that the country's waste pickers are entrepreneurs and suspended all fines the city of Cali had levied against them for sorting trash in public and voided a contract for private collection that had cut off their access to the landfill. The city's waste pickers now hope to organize and bid for the collection contract themselves.

 

"We would like identical forms of inclusion in India," says Chaturvedi. 

 

 

http://www.globalpost.com/passport/foreign-desk/100113/one-mans-trash