My Experience of Kolkata’s Rag Picker Communities and Tiljala SHED’s Amazing Work there
I visit Kolkata and Tiljala SHED two or three times a year. I love to catch up with old friends and spend time exploring my favourite city. But most of all I love to be part of the great work Tiljala SHED is doing amongst the city’s most vulnerable communities. Those who live in the canal-side and railway squatter camps of East and East Central Kolkata lead the most difficult lives. Originally landless poor from rural Bihar and West Bengal, these families would have come to the big city for a better life. And in some respects, that’s what they have: the chance to collect, sort and sell other people’s waste enables them to eat. They build illegal shelters on government owned land but are mostly left alone. Occasional home-destroying fires, disease, lack of toilets and sanitation, drinking water rationed to a few hours a day are probably seen as a reasonable trade-off for leaving the hunger and backwardness of their former rural lives....