In Praise of India's Rag Pickers on International Women's Day 2018

So, according to this week’s The Economist (March 3^rd 2018), India’s “armies of ragpickers” are responsible for the fact that India does not feature in the world’s top ten biggest plastic polluters.  Despite having the world’s second biggest population at 1.3 billion.

India is poor enough, it goes on to say, for ragpickers to exist, unlike Asia’s biggest polluters, like Vietnam, which isn’t.   Well, good for India.  Good for those entrepreneurial souls who can literally make a living from rubbish. 

Producing a meal from the proceeds of ragpicking

I should also mention on this International Women’s Day that the vast majority of those rag pickers are women.  Illiterate, destitute, and living in illegal makeshift shelters beside railway tracks, canals (open sewers) or on the streets, they scour the streets for waste that they can sell on to dealers.  They are looking for plastics, paper, cardboard, metals – anything they can sell.

My interest in India’s waste processing goes back to the mid -1990s when I lived in Calcutta (as it then was) in a grand “bungalow” in Alipore. My husband, David, was manager of the Standard Chartered Bank and I managed a household of 15 individuals all employed to serve the needs of the young manager, his wife and two small children.  Daily, after delivering the Burra Sahib to the office, Ali, our lovely driver, would collect me and the children and take us to the Calcutta International School where Harriet attended Kindergarten (with the redoubtable Mrs Das and Mrs Majumdar).

On the way to school every day we would pass a small rubbish dump at the end of a residential road.  On our first pass waste was piled up, unsorted. By the time we passed for the second time on our way home, dogs and crows were picking over the food waste.  Ragpickers arrived somewhat later and began to sort through the remains.  Tins, bottles, plastics and newspapers were being neatly stacked up ready for collection.  By the time we were on our way home after collecting Harriet at the end of her school day (about 11 am) all the sorted waste and the ragpickers had gone: a small pile of waste, unwanted by any of the other scavengers was being loaded into metal barrows and the dump was empty again.  I marvelled at this.  As I marvelled at our kitchen bin at home – it was tiny, like a bathroom pedal bin.  Where was all the rubbish?  I found out that the staff sorted and sold all our newspapers, tin cans, coffee jars, beer bottles.  And looking in the larder, all the dry groceries were in paper bags made from newspaper.  All our boiled and filtered drinking water was kept in old whisky bottles in the fridge.

“Gosh!”  I would say to anyone who would listen “We in the West have a lot to learn from India.” 

And in a sense we do.  But for the ragpicker, sorting, reusing and recycling waste is not about preventing pollution, or about protecting marine life or even about beautifying the streets.  It’s about survival.  India has “armies of ragpickers” because they are desperately poor.  And as India becomes wealthier and the ragpicker communities are gradually lifted out of poverty; as the daughters of ragpickers are educated, marry later and take up useful employment, perhaps they will enjoy the rebellious act of throwing away a used coke can, leaving an empty water bottle on the street.  Just because they can. 

Topsia Canalside Squatter Camp - Many here are rag pickers

So, in fact its not so much the West who should have learned from India – it is India (and the rest of the world) who should be taking the lesson from the ragpickers.  And before it is too late.  In 2013 the Kolkata Municipal Corporation started introducing waste compactors – huge vats into which KMC operatives throw all the city’s waste, unsorted.  There are now over 170 of these compactors across the whole city.  Unsorted waste is compacted and then delivered to the city dump.

Waste Compactor

And what has been the effect of the compactors?  Recently, in January this year, two friends joined me for a few days in Kolkata after travelling in Delhi and parts of Rajasthan. Almost their first reaction as we drove from the airport was how much cleaner Kolkata was than other places they had visited.  And it is true, Kolkata is much cleaner.  Nation and state-wide clean up campaigns have clearly been effective.  But what about the waste?  It still exists – it just isn’t being sorted.  Compactors have simply parked the problem.

Meanwhile what about the ragpickers?

Well the ragpickers are suffering.  So much unsorted waste now goes into the KMC’s compactors that the ragpickers have to start work at 2 or 3 am in order to collect enough solid waste to be able to feed their families. They also complain that the dealers are paying just half what they used to.  And when a mother goes out to work at 2 am, that means that the children go without breakfast and won’t be taken to school. Older children are drawn into rag picking (the absolute worst form of child labour) because of the immediate daily need to earn enough to eat.

However, a life spent turning rubbish into hard cash makes you very resourceful.  Given some training and a little seed funding, we have found that ragpicker women can make a real success in other parts of the informal economy. 

And yet, and yet… they have real skills when it comes to sorting waste:  they know instantly what can be recycled or reused: they can strip the valuable metals from an old toaster; they can turn an old newspaper into 30 paper bags; they know someone who can fix your broken mobile phone for 100 rupees.

They are hard-working, brave and strong. They could answer the questions we ask ourselves daily as we debate whether the yogurt pot should go into the green or the blue recycling bin. On International Women’s Day, 2018, spare a thought for the women at the very bottom of the heap in Kolkata, the women pushed to the back of the queue for water because they are ragpickers, the women who drag themselves from their beds at 2 am because that is the only way to earn enough to feed their children. The women who have no idea that they have some of the answers to the world’s most pressing problems – but who will never be acknowledged.  

Tiljala SHED has worked with the ragpicker commnunities of central Kolkata for 30 years. You can help a ragpicker woman set up a small business through Tiljala SHED's Livelihood Programme