Scavengers Are India’s Real Recyclers

"Behind the Beautiful Forever" by Katherine Boo describes the life of a ragpicker beautifully. These people are the ultimate recyclers. The problem is that in order to make money, they need to store the pickings until the refuse can be resold: this leads to numerous hoards of dirty trash, and the resulting pest infestation. The sale/collection needs to be daily.

Raghu Karnad has failed to mention, who these "waste-pickers" are. In India they are called the "scavengers", because they belong to the lowest castes of the society - the "Untouchables". Although it's banned by law, in some areas they also collect human waste from house to house.
Ironically there was a campaign in 2000 to save the - feathered - scavengers. Vultures had helped keep the environment clean by eating up rotting animal carcasses, especially those of the cows, which die in millions every year, as Hindus don't eat beef. Yet vultures died in large numbers too, because of pesticides and poisons, or disease.
Unfortunately,

I really like what the Indian Railways is doing with the trash from New Delhi railway station. With a little push from the government, these ragpickers can be organized into cooperatives - small scale businesses. This way they don't have to work in the muck but can still, through the set up of a small scale supply chain, can do their job in a safe environment. Just like what the "dabbawaalas" or tiffin carriers in Mumbai do. These dabbawaalas brave the heat and crowd of Mumbai to deliver home cooked meals (often prepared by housewives or moms) to office goers. Many of them are illiterate but these dabbawaalas are six-sigma compliant!

So let's not brand them as illiterate and disregard what they do. On the other extreme, let's not say that the only option for these people is to gain an education and get forced into a service economy that is straining to provide jobs as it is. Sometimes growth just has to be organic.

What the government can do is to provide incentives for such cooperatives and then through public-private partnerships provide funding for such cooperatives. This will generate jobs, take kids out of the ragpicking business and provide future generations with education and the opportunity to make their lives better.

thanks for this article. I remember as kid collecting everything used once to be used again - the plastic of milk bags, broken plastic buckets along with newspapers for sale to recyclers. it is always heartbreaking that so many Indians (and perhaps people in Africa, Brazil) still making a living out of garbage. but if it wasnt for these people, India's cities would turn into even bigger piles of plastic debris
but also hopeful to see the resourcefulness and resilience among these people - Indians still manage a living at the edges of the material world.

Millions of people move from Indian villages to cities every year in search of a better life. These are some of the first jobs they will get in the cities. The dad may be working on a construction site while the mom works as a maid while the children are rag pickers. It is a society which is very harsh on the poor but also forces people to be resourceful to survive. On my recent visit I saw whole families living under the flyovers, the children were going through the trash but they were all smiling and laughing as they went about their work, having the time of their lives.

I once worked for a huge steel mill in Salvage and Disposal. We sold all the waste and trash that was generated in the factory for cash. The only thing I could never find a market for were used light bulbs. Everything else had a market. We even sold the broken rice thrown away by our company cafeteria.

i read about an ngo called wasteventures based out of India that tries to connect waste workers with waste generators to help the recycling take place closer to the source; that way they won't need to wade through unhealthy trash.

The thing to understand is that in a poor country like India, recycling is actually a money making business and people come to you door to door to buy your recyclable stuff. When I lived in India, the raddi wala would come to our house once a month and buy all our used newspapers, bottles, cans etc. and give us cash after some haggling. All you had to do was store all this stuff for a month. This phenomenon of recyclable stuff ending up in landfills is fairly recent with 2 income families not being home most of the day and people living in gated communities which are out of bounds for the raddi wala. So actually recycling is fairly easy in India and takes very little effort but it is sad to see that people can't be bothered even with this minimal effort. Compare this to the US where recycling is a money losing affair subsidized by the government and one of the victims of the 2008 financial crisis was that recycling stopped being funded in many communities. Did you know a glass bottle of coke is recycled 20 times in India before it is finally discarded.

As an american who began traveling to India in the very early 80's and having spent about 30 plus months of my life in India I find a lot comments silly such as
"How do we know there are millions of ragpickers?"
"Waste is dirty and we need to handle it with great care" Masks and gloves?

Totally uneducated to reality, folks it is there, the ragpickers, street recyclers are there, no doubt reality people. call them what you want, they are survivors, doing their best and are an available resource. This article is right in looking at the possibilities, and reality. These people exist and make a living, there is a need and with creative thinking and some management this is a resource for India and an opportunity.

Separate the pickers from excrement as possible, provide space for the work, yes in 50 years big landfills and fancy machinery for waste ,plastic, glass metal recycling should happen. But Lets look at reality now folks.

Yes, but one ought to proceed with extreme caution in extending the reach of the public or non-profit sector in India. It is unfortunately all too easy to spend lots of money, and empower some low level administrators who then prey on the waste-pickers. A reading of "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" gives one a sense of the real issues in India.

I've travelled to India many times, and it's impossible to go through a day without seeing people picking through trash - everywhere - for something useful. Of course this is a product of underfunded infrastructure and a huge population. India is the most resourceful nation on earth, and its ability to recycle and repurpose almost anything defies imagination, but it will never become cleaner without an investment which the central government is yet unwilling and probably unable to make....

'They are usually referred to as scavengers or ragpickers: words that describe their desperation, but never their value.'

I wonder if the Government has any safety guidelines in place for the health and welfare of the children and parents who work as Pickers ?
I can only imagine the stench and Methane these people are having to breath all the while servicing the Governments agenda ..
We should not waste but waste needs be dealt with accordingly ..

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/let-s-talk-trash/x/8319278#/story
One option but people still consider Garbage a Dirty word ..

The notion of recycling and the proper handling of our waste is a mixed bag not only in India but around the world including our 'enlightened' society.

But two examples from India. Traveling on a bus through India's heartland I handed a wrapper to the well dressed man next to me trusting that he would put it into the plastic bag provided for trash to which he was nearer. He opened the window and threw it out smiling at me all the while.

I visited an Ashram run by women making crafts, tending cows and herb gardens. All were dressed in beautiful saris. One was putting cow dung into a sheet metal container that harvested Methane that was used to power their enclave a clever device built by them and extremely efficient.

The two faces of our world. Which one will we choose as our future.

NY City has its own scavengers and they get zero credit for the work they do. All they get is the redemption value of what they collect. Without these scavengers our waste bins would be overflowing with empty plastic and glass bottles. NY City saves money and claims cleanliness because of these scavengers. An interesting unintended consequence of the rush to use those solid recycle bins (always overflowing) and the BigBelly solar powered bins is that the scavengers cannot see the bottles taking up space inside hence cannot remove anything from them.

As author said India is producing waste at a rate we are nowhere near equipped to handle , so why does he promote scavengers or rag pickers to continue the work in inhumane conditions.There is no single reliable statistic behind this article (Is there any reliable source which says that there are millions of rag pickers and scavengers in India).And he further says Municipality favor corporate contractors and mechanized disposal , that is because we cannot segregate the said mountains of waste with only few rag pickers. I expect India to use more mechanization in this area and show the rag pickers proper livelihood. When foreign media covers India the first visual we see is the rag picker picking the waste in the background of enormous pile of garbage. At least now India should use the state of the art Garbage disposal system used around the world and help the poor by giving them equal opportunity by skill development.

india does'nt have a waste collection system put in place forget about recycling and other advancements towards environmental + pollution controls
-it's politicians look to go to switzerland and singapore for vacations but never seem study how things are done their .. no discipline no order - chaos rules the day ... just like the middleeastern wars are never won in a thousand years -
india's various systems ( legal , wastecollection, transportation, heathy care etc etc etc ) will be still broken for another 100 years - irregardless of BJP or CONGRESS rulers of the day ! its all talk and no action !

As a reader has pointed out, the lives of the so-called "rag pickers" have documented with compassion by Katherine Boo in the Pulitzer winning non-fiction "Behind the Beautiful Forevers."
The scavengers are mostly children and from minority groups, i.e. Muslims. The book reveals some heartbreaking truths about the scavenging children of Annawadi, Mumbai, but the truths are applicable to all scavenging children of India.
Like Victorian London's chimney sweeping children this is a highly exploited labor force that risk their health and lives on a daily basis to the lazy and over-consuming (hence pot bellied) middle class Indian's horrible habit of casting all that are "dirty" products generated by the household onto the streets.
The kids should be going to school instead of scavenging. Moreover, the scavengers are shown to be pitted against each other; Boo tells us that there is no communal cooperation among them, instead the spirit of competitive capitalism has seeped into even this most degrading and exploitative of human labors in India.
The scavenging children mark their territories and are fiercely competitive about their trash. The NYT writer hasn't dug deep enough into the darker aspects of delegating India's recycling challenges to an unorganized, informal, fleet of poor children.

Instead of glorifying the scavengers as the real recyclers of urban waste couldn't we think of guiding these poverty stricken deprived lot of people to better educational and job opportunities, and seek technological solutions for recycling and extracting wealth out of the waste?

When I was in India, especially in Mumbai, there were trash bins full of empty plastic bags. The bags appeared to have been licked clean. There was no other garbage, just empty bags and human excrement, which was picked up at 4 am and taken away on a cart. When I commented on this, the friend I was travelling with assured me that nothing went unused in India. Even cow dung was used for cooking. The problem is population, and Mr. Modi would be wise to focus on that.

As this writer notes, " . . . it is Mr. Modi’s campaign that seems to have been binned. The prime minister is no longer seen sweeping, and absent his example, neither is anyone else."
This says it all. Do we need a Modi or anyone in high office to be seen sweeping so all people will follow? Or isn't it self evident that there is a need to sweep and keep one's neighborhoods clean?
Leaders can set the tone but it is beyond silly to expect them to do the obvious.

1. Delhi generates 10,000 tons of garbage daily. It would not be a scalable solution for 350,000 scavengers to collect, sift through and recycle all the garbage generated. While scavengers should and are a part of India's recycling process, one cannot let go of mechanical means of garbage disposal simply because of the volumes involved. 2. Waste collection is not in the purview of the Federal Government. It is handled by city and town municipalities and comes under the jurisdiction of the individual State governments. To expect the Prime Minister of India to solve garbage problem of India's individual cities and towns is not teneable legally and as absurd as expecting the POTUS to be in charge of the waste disposal of an individual city - say, Baltimore. 3. Many individuals have been inspired by the Prime Minister's call for a clean India. One example is a lady called Temsutula Imsong who is working in the holy city of Varanasi to clean the "Ghats" (gates adjoining a rives) of the river Ganges there. The results are tangible and can be seen in her Twitter feed. Similar initiatives by inspired citizens are happening throughout India.

The artist, Vic Muniz, organized an art project with the "catadores" or trash pickers in the largest landfill in Rio de Janeiro. His personal effort and vision to help the garbage workers is documented in the film, WASTE LAND, directed by Lucy Walker. In the film, the huge scale of the garbage issue is seen though the eyes of the workers themselves and Vic's projectg helps transform their lives. They are not disposable people, untouchables. They are human beings struggling for survival doing the planet a great service. RECYLE. There's money in it...

I think if India were serious about properly disposing of its waste the first hurdle to overcome is public defecating. My goodness! I don't believe there is not one person in India that does not think this is wrong. So what's up?

The nonfiction book, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, has detailed descriptions of the lives of the waste-pickers. Lots of children out there digging through trash instead of going to school. But they're supporting their families and the schools in the slums were often shams to collect money from the government or from charities. The kids are caught in a vicious cycle.

On the surface, this sounds like problem solving; but deep down, it is very troubling to cover up the stench with perfume. Just where are these scavengers coming from when the Indian rich, like their Chinese counterpart, are eager to move oversea. Worse, it is reported elsewhere that Indian population will exceed the Chinese one earlier than originally estimated - by 2022.

To be clear, this is not to say recycling is not a good idea, for it is, whether it is a developed country or a developing country; however, forming a scavenger army is just disturbing

The author is correct about the problem as well as the solutions. The need of the hour is implementation.
When I lived in Viman Nagar, Pune during 2000-2010, the Kagad, Kaach, Patra Kashtakari Panchayat, better known by their acronym KKPKP, association of rag pickers, worked hard to make their occupation legal and respectable. Many middle class citizens felt outraged that the handsomely paid municipal workers did not do the work they were being paid for, instead citizens were being asked to pay these mostly women workers an additional monthly payment.
We need local groups taking charge of the unique sanitation needs of their community, with an umbrella organization to address the problems such groups face. It should be doable in urban areas provided people are willing to put in some volunteer hours to work on such issues. Our senior citizens who have the experience and the free time to address such social problems are an untapped resource for this venture.

All municipalities and institutions in India should have bins everywhere for both recycling and trash, as in western countries. Here in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, the town dump is full and wants land from the Forest Dept, which it won't get, while liquid from it flows into a stream which provides drinking water to villages below!-- last week there was a big demo from villages below about it. At least now in Kodaikanal International School we have recycle bins in all dorms and all around, and students learn to put junk in the right place, and also they sort in the recycling center, and the school earns reasonable money from selling all useable stuff. All schools should be required do this so recycling is not so much considered as a scavenger's job, but as everyone's responsibility.

Grand gestures like "Clean India" or "love your daughter" or all doomed for failure and bound to peter out in a couple of years. Basic infrastructure like a trash bin on every corner and regular trash pick up will go a lot further than any multimillion rupee suit wearing Prime Minister or celebrity awkwardly wielding the broom once a year. Imagine what any major metropolitan city in the US would look like if there were no trash bins every street or no public loos (read McDonald's) to relieve oneself.

Very true. India needs to mobilise these scavengers in order to create a swach bharat.