Chris Boese's Weblog

UK Independent: "In Delhi, recycling has nothing to do with conscience. It is all about survival"

Link: In Delhi, recycling has nothing to do with conscience. It is all about survival.

One of the most amazing trips of my life took me to Delhi, and on one particular adventure there, I found myself out, downtown, in the rain and fog at night trying to find a phone that would reach the U.S., stepping around the people around small fires on the roadside. I fell instantly in love with the country, but I also saw much of what is described below, just not that particular dump.

When I think of all the tech business and call centers located over there now, many in the time since I went in 1998, I find myself wishing some of that cash flow will reach more people, will distribute itself through the country somehow. But the divide between rich and poor is so wide, I don't even know if it could.

One day, I was on the tech support line with one of my ISPs, and I discovered it was a guy in Chenai (Madras, area hit by the recent tsunami). Had the most amazing conversation with him in the middle of the night. I don't know why India got under my skin the way it did, but it is never coming out.

Anyway, this article just blew my mind, brought it all back again.

Chris

In Delhi, recycling has nothing to do with conscience. It is all about survival

The hundreds of children sifting through the stinking mountain of rubbish on the outskirts of the Indian capital represent the bottom of a bizarre hierarchical heap. Justin Huggler reports.

25 February 2005

A sad-eyed boy in a red jacket stands on top of a rotting mountain of rubbish, his feet slowly sinking into the filth. Nearby, and oblivious to the overpowering smell, Musida Sheikh, 14, is happily chatting with her friends as she too picks through the debris. Musida has been scavenging up here since she was eight years old. She has never been to school.

Hundreds of Delhi children climb this rubbish mound every day. More than 1,000 people make their entire living scavenging here at the Ghazipur dump in down-at-heel north Delhi, where the city's refuse is consigned. They are recyclers of sorts. But, for them, recycling has nothing to do with environmentalism or the green movement - it is about daily survival.

Musida, for instance, is picking through the filth for plastic bottles. The fashionable guidebooks to India pontificate about the damage that plastic bottles are doing to India's environment, and urge tourists to refuse to buy them. But children like Musida depend on the bottles for their livelihood. They can sell them on at one rupee per kilogram - 1p.

The story of Delhi's rubbish is a tale of chaos, rule-bending and entrepren-eurial ingenuity among the plastic bottles, old clothes and food scraps.

[...]

It is hardly credible, when your rubbish reaches Ghazipur, that anything is left to scavenge at all. But it is. Ghazipur towers several hundred feet in the air, and stretches a mile or more across. It rots and oozes. Trails of slime seep down the sides. The vulture-like kites, ever-present scavengers over the city, circle overhead in a dense flock like Hitchcock's Birds. Stray dogs wander about, nosing in the filth for scraps.

When you try to climb onto it, you have to be wary of the places where the rubbish is like quicksand, and your leg slips up to the knee into the oozing filth. The stench is almost unbearable.

And at the top, the scene laid out before you is from the 19th century. Hundreds of children in bright and colourful rags pick over the surface of the mountain. Every few minutes or so they have to scurry out of the way as the bulldozers advance, trying to flatten the mountain.

It is a scene from Dickens' London, especially in the winter when thick fogs swirl in and the poor huddle around makeshift fires along countless roadsides. Like Dickens' London, Delhi is a city of the very rich and the very poor, where the former live in grand townhouses attended by retinues of servants, and the latter scavenge outside for whatever they can find. Ghazipur is the dust-heap of the Golden Dustman in Our Mutual Friend.

Delhi also has the rag-and-bottle shops of Bleak House. In fact, one stands at the end of the main road outside my house, run by Riyasat Ali, a 22-year-old who has inherited the family business. It is a small warehouse open at one end onto the street, filled with heaps of bottles, glass and plastic, and a large pair of scales to weigh it all in. The rag merchants like Mr Ali deal by the kilogram.

The room is also stacked to the rafters with 20-foot-high piles of old manuscripts and documents, dog-eared books and pages of accounting. It is impossible to say what valuable documents may lurk among these towers that teeter over Mr Ali's head. But it does not matter, as he can sell them to the recycling plant at seven rupees (8p) a kilogram.

And so I decided to follow what happens to the rubbish when it is thrown out of my house in the old Sufi suburb of Nizamuddin. In India, the rich do not have to put out their dustbins - and the rich includes Westerners. Rubbish is money, and someone comes round to collect your trash for you, usually in the early hours before you've even roused yourself out of bed.

Babu Choudry, the 18-year-old who collects our rubbish, comes on a cycle-cart, like a cycle-rickshaw for carrying rubbish instead of passengers. "I sort through the rubbish and separate paper, plastic, bottles, computer parts and iron," he says. "I sell those to the scrap-dealers, and only send the rest to the dump."

He works for Ramkrishnan and Mamta Balmaki, but they are known universally in the neighbourhood as Auntie and Uncle. They are responsible for keeping the street clean, and seeing that the rubbish is collected. It's not an official post, no one appointed them. They inherited it. But they get 4,000 rupees (£50) a month from the city council, plus 100 rupees (£1.20) a month from each house on the street.

[...]

From my back door, the rubbish is taken by cycle-cart to the municipal bins in Nizamuddin. There, city employees are supposed to sort it out for the blue and green trucks but, since they are on a city wage, they sub-contract a lot of this work to local boys, and act as overseers. Again, the rubbish is sifted through meticulously, and anything that Mr Choudry or the Balmatis missed is fished out and sold to the scrap dealers.

It's at this point that it ends up in rag-and-bottle shops like Mr Ali's. Iron is the most valuable commodity for the rag-pickers, so when they find some they really celebrate. Dealers like Mr Ali will buy it off them for 11 rupees (13p) a kilo. He then sells it on at 14 rupees (17p) a kilo.

Computer parts are valuable for the specialists who recycle them, but the rag-pickers rarely find a single item in good enough condition to fetch a good price, and they don't know what is valuable and what isn't.

After all this, what is left of the rubbish goes to Ghazipur. Though none of them will admit it, many of the ragged children who scavenge through the rubbish at Ghazipur are Bangladeshis. No individual rag-picker will ever admit to it, but they'll all tell you that many of the others are. It's because they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, who've overstayed their visa or never had one, and this is the only work they can get.

[...]

Up on the mountainside, a team of men are humping loads of old clothes into a flat-bed truck. These men are rag-pickers, literally. When everything else has been exhausted, the paper, the plastic, even dead animals' heads, they recycle old rags. The tattered remnants of clothing are sold to factories where they are used as free fuel to keep the boilers going.

Poondev Ram and his team collect a ton of rags a day here. The stench from the rotting rubbish where they are working is awful. "What can we do? We have no other job," says Mr Ram. "We have to work to make a living."

[...]

Mr Ram has been doing this job since he was 11 years old - now he is 44. "I came to Delhi to make money," he says. "I came with my father's permission." But he is adamant that his children will not follow in his footsteps. "My children are studying," he says. "I want my children to be educated and have a better job."

Because of men like Mr Ram, India has a recycling record that should be the envy of the West. Nothing is casually thrown away here. Nothing goes to waste, because the people simply can't afford it. But no one wants to do the dirty job of picking through the filth to find what can be recycled.