Becoming a part of the formal system has helped rag-pickers improve their lot financially and socially, says Team Viva
Vijay, a former rag-picker, used to travel from Noida to Faridabad to clean up the city’s trash where he earned a mere Rs 2 every day. Today, he earns Rs 60,000-70,000 a month. He enhanced his skills and made a shift from the informal to the formal sector. His life has improved in sundry other ways. He takes on private contracts from housing complexes like Amrapali and Supertech for garbage collection. With his income, he sends his daughter to a private school and pays fees for that while his son, a disabled child, goes to a school for special children free of charge.
Vijay is just one of the success stories who gained with a collaboration with the Indian Pollution Control Association. The organisation was started as an initiative to save environment and to clean delhi with the help of rag-pickers. Approximately 2,000 rag-pickers from north India and primarily Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon are now on board for waste management projects.
It is important to note that India has one of the highest recycling rates for plastic PET container. This dynamic and surprisingly efficient system of waste management stands solid on the shoulders of ragpickers and kabadiwalas who belong to the informal sector. Despite their crucial service of keeping urban waste management in place, India’s ragpickers keep on struggling for survival in dire conditions — exposure to harmful substances, poor wages and lack of basic civic amenities.
Ashish Jain, founder and director of the company, says, “Ragpickers are living a hard life. They sustain themselves by collecting, sorting and segregating waste. They work without any job security, salary or dignity, and are frequently exposed to diseases and tuberculosis apart from poverty, humiliation, and abuse on the streets.”
After segregation, any recyclable item is sold to the kabadiwala while the wet waste is sold as cattle feed at very nominal price. One of the major problems they face is the underlying bribing and outsourcing arrangements that have been formed in the neighbourhood. Having access to waste has become a challenge as MCD has started collecting waste from residential societies in Delhi. So now, they have to pay the MCD officials to buy waste from them in order to collect valuable scraps, and even when they go to collect from the open waste bins, the MCD officials demand a commission.
In an attempt to improve their lot and tide over these problems, these ragpickers on the streets have been brought from the informal to formal sector. There is usually a lot of uncertainty associated with their lives as to how much quantity they would be able to pick in a day. “We had done a study which indicated that it was enough for a rag picker to collect waste from 200 houses as it would result in an income of approximately Rs 20,000-25,000 which was good for unskilled labourer. This means some amount of certainty in their life as the number of houses that they need to collect waste from is fixed. They can plan their expenditure in a month. If they have a fixed income, they can naturally plan their lives better,” says Jain.
What the IPCA has done is to train them in segregation and also tie up with going from collections from door to door to places like residential colonies and markets.
Besides improving the lot of the rag-pickers, there is also the ecological impact. Through different activities, they are taught about the value of environment and prepared to act as “environment warriors”. Once the waste has been collected from households and colonies, it is brought to one of the 40 segregation centres that have been established throughout Delhi NCR.
Earlier, during segregation the rag-pickers often came in contact with hazardous materials, including soiled clothes, needles, broken glass, sanitary waste and batteries. In fact, much of the hazardous waste is in the form of medicine bottles, insecticide spray bottles, toilet cleaners and injections. This mixed waste creates several health issues like fever and skin rashes. Many in the community take to drugs in order to cope with the living conditions and the difficult task of sorting through the mixed waste. With them being organised in the formal sector, not only are they better trained to protect themselves against the hazard but also know the measures to take in case of any mishaps.
Moreover, regular health camps are held where doctors from Guru Teg Bahadur hospital are invited to address their health issues.
“These rag-pickers earn their livelihood by collecting waste material from different sources. This is done collectively by each family member including children. Therefore, their children do not get the opportunity to go to school for education,” says Jain. And as is common knowledge, without education, their lifestyle and social status can’t be improved. Keeping this in mind, a primary education programme for rag-pickers’ children has begun in Delhi/NCR in 2012 in association with India Development Service (IDS), USA.
A motivation programme was also launched two years back for the children. Primary education was provided to them through fun learning activities, developing moral and social responsibility and trying to improve the lifestyle and social status in order ensure that no child becomes a rag-picker due to lack of opportunities. Currently there are five education centres running in Delhi-NCR. “An attempt was also made to admit them to formal school system and 17 of them got admission to private and public schools in Delhi NCR,” says Jain.
The success of the programme can be gauged from the fact that since the time they started the programme in 2001 with two rag pickers on board. “With the improvement in their condition of work, more people came to know of it by word of mouth. Other rag pickers now approach us as they can see the improvement in income and the lives of people associated with IPCA. The number gas now gone up from two to approximately 2,000 rag pickers across the north India,” says Jain.