The economy and politics of solid waste in Delhi
A Rotten deal for ragpickers
It’s a part of the CCC, folks. I am referring to Delhi’s Colossal Commonwealth Clean-Up drive, that has been launched by the state government to give India’s capital a scrubbed look before the international hot shots begin to arrive.
Not surprisingly, one of the first steps that the state government has taken to declare a fresh policy to manage the gigantic mounds of solid waste that the city generates, an unhealthily large portion of which is seen strewn in the streets every day. Why? Because the Indian laws might make it obligatory for the municipal corporations to arrange for disposal of waste, but there are no provisions at all to make it compulsory for these urban local bodies to collect it from the dhalao or the community dumpsters. Now, the Delhi Municipal Corporation (DMC) has decided to hire private companies to do the job. These operators pick up garbage from the neighbourhood dumps, and then transport the load to the nearest landfills. They are also responsible for segregating the various types of waste and arrange for recycling the ones that can be salvaged. In a nutshell, the entire load now belongs to them.
A pretty neat arrangement to deal with a lot of rubbish, right? Wrong! This system cuts off access to the garbage for everyone else. This includes 3,50,000 rag pickers who scour the streets to earn their living. They retrieve as much as 30 per cent of the total waste produced. Of course, they save the municipal authorities several millions a year in collection, transport and disposal costs. In reality, however, their service is worth much, much more than this.
How much? Lets get down of the 'dirt'y details.
Delhites presently generate about 7000 tonnes/day of municipal solid waste (MSW) according to the official reports, which is projected to rise to 17,000–25,000 tonnes/day by the year 2021.As per a recent study, in Delhi not more than about 70 per cent of MSW is collected and the rest remains unattended on streets or in small open dumps. Only nine per cent of the collected MSW is treated through composting, the only treatment option, and rest is disposed in open landfills at the outskirts of the city. The existing composting plants are unable to operate to their intended treatment capacity because they lack basic operational infrastructure. Not a very clean scenario.
Now let’s hear what our neighborhood kabadiwala (waste collector) has to say about all this junk. “Delhi produces 10,000 tonnes of waste daily, and government is not wrong in putting the figure at 7000 because we take away 3000 tonnes of it even before the authorities can measure it.”, informs Shashi Pandit of the All India Kabadi Mazdoor Mahasang (AIKMM), one of the few representative organisations of this huge informal workforce.
So what does the kabadiwala do to with 30 per cent of our waste? Well he reuses and recycles it. Yes, our garbage is a big money spinner. Exactly how big is this economy? Let’s take an example, NDMC (New Delhi Municipal Council) which governs just about 2.5 per cent of Delhi, and generates about 250 tonnes/day of MSW. Shashi say, “80 tonnes of MSW is recyclable and if sold at the flat rate of Rs.5 per kg, amounts for Rs.14,40,00,000/- in a year”
Yes, Rs.14.4 crores from just 2.5 per cent of Delhi’s garbage annually. And this treasure is being literally dug out by the rag pickers for survival.
Indispensable. But Invisible
Rag picking is not a new profession in India. Every Indian city has had its own band of pickers for many years. They help keep the city clean, unofficially joining forces with the municipal staffers. But they receive no kudos for their services. Nor are they offered any constructive support by the local government or the people. Besides having to work in dangerously dirty, often hazardous conditions, they are plagued by constantly fluctuating daily earnings. A good day at work can fetch as much as Rs.200 (rare), but most of the days the ‘take home’ is somewhere between Rs.10-100. Approximately 99 per cent of the rag pickers are migrant labourers, mostly hailing from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh. “Nobody wants to get into the business of garbage if given a choice. It’s only for us who have no option, do this”, says the candid Abid Malik, a 20 year old kabadiwala from Ber Sarai in South Delhi.
With no government policy or legal recognition to make their lot a little easier, these rag pickers are constantly bullied by the police. “Not only is there no help or support from the government, we are so often treated like criminals. We have no legal right over the waste. So we are labelled as thieves and thrown out of the city for the slightest reasons”, says Shashi. “It’s funny how the middle class and the upper class looks at these people as a different species altogether. We are so good at ignoring their entrepreneurship”, points out Richa Joshi, an architect based in the capital.
Not high on health
Rag pickers make up more than one per cent of Delhi’s population. And they are doing a job which the Supreme Court of India in 2000 described as ‘good’ for health and environment. Ironically, their own work environment is anything but good.
The people picking through the waste come in several types: there are those who go door to door, collecting and disposing of waste from individual homes; there are the street children who collect waste left in the road; and there are whole families who make their living by sifting through urban dumps to reclaim garbage.Most suffer from chronic respiratory or skin diseases. “Government benefits and (health) policies are for the working class and we are not even recognized as a work force. Its criminal for us to even fall sick or tend to our ailing kids at home.” says Abid.
Pains of privatisation
Now it is going to get even worse, fear Shashi and his supporters. Because the Delhi government is looking at privatisation as the solution to its waste woes. It began by handing over transportation of MSW from dhalao (community dumpster) to the landfill site, but now it has expanded the role of the private players to door to door waste collection. “This is bad news for the rag pickers,” says Bharati Chaturvedi, Director of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, a New Delhi-based NGO, “because it ensures that there is no room for the urban poor to still find a living in privatisation.”
The transport of garbage from ones household to dhalao (community dumpster), has traditionally been a common citizen’s job. This provided the informal workers access and opportunity to segregate the waste before it became the legal property of the municipal bodies. With the door to door collection being tendered out to 
private companies, the rag pickers are being completely ousted from the waste cycle. With no legal access to garbage at any stage from collection to disposal, these people are being literally stripped off their livelihood.”I think what’s going to happen, is exactly what we’ve seen till now. The rag pickers will continue to work under even greater threat and worse conditions,” warns Bharati. “People who pick up the trash are poorest and most vulnerable. Now suddenly from being an ‘informal’ worker the person has slid down to the ‘illegal’ category.
How has entry of the private operators into the arena exposed the rag pickers to graver dangers? The government pays the private companies according to the amount of waste they transport to the landfill, and since our scavenging rag pickers reduce the load, they are unwanted elements for these companies. Let’s take the example of the New Delhi Municipal Corporation zone, the VIP-abode, where the garbage collection and transportation was privatised in 2006. By 2008, the assigned company had begun to extract hafta vasoli or ‘compensation’ money from these rag pickers for reducing its garbage. This amount ranged from Rs.3000 to Rs.15000 per dhalao per month depending upon the locality. Around Rs.1,30,000 per month was being collected from these poor rag pickers.
Interestingly, this waste which the companies are claiming as their property was never accounted for, as it never reached the municipal landfills. Shashi adds, “It’s not just the waste, the companies are also trying to capture the recycling sector. The NDMC is paying Rs.4.59 crores to the company for its services, but our study says the recyclable waste itself is worth Rs.14.5 crores. So hafta is just a way to push the rag pickers out of the business and to monopolize waste.”
Market Structure
The waste market has three levels. Bottom of this chain are the rag pickers who segregate and collect the recyclable waste from municipal garbage. Above them comes the local kabadiwala (the specialized scrap collector). Then there are the dealer who sells this waste to the recycling units and factories.
The dirt spreads
This trend is not just limited to Delhi any more, but has spread to other cities too, which have followed its initiative of privatisation. In Vadodara, it was recently reported that the company tendered for MSW collection and transport, had spent more energy in selling the recyclables, than in the job it was entrusted with.
The MCD launched its door-to-door garbage collection scheme in two of the 12 municipal zones in March 2009. The scheme involves collection of waste from residential colonies by green and blue auto tippers after primary segregation into bio-degradable and non-biodegradable categories. The waste is then meant to be transferred to the processing plants for recycling or for compost production. But the initiative has proved to be a non starter. First of all, despite the several orientation workshops being organised by the government,
the residents have failed to segregate dry and wet waste. Then again, MCD officials have confessed that the Corporation does not have available land for setting up processing sites, transfer stations or for segregated disposal. So the collected waste gets invariably mixed up when it is dumped at the landfill sites!?
Tera packs
Almost indestructible, Tetra Pak containers could be a serious hazard to the environment if not recycled. Now, Tetra Pak has started picking up the rubbish it has created, and then some more! Tetra Pak uses recycling technology developed in Germany to clean up its mess. Tetra Pak carton boards are substituted for plywood, and used for items, like picture frames, desk organisers and small furniture.
First, packs are shredded. The shredded pieces are then soaked in water and placed in a mold of the size of a full length board before passing through a machine that dries the board. Boards from the packs contain the same elements the original cartons had. No chemicals are added during the process. The shreds are bound together by a plastic that was already a component of the original package. When heated, the plastic melts and spreads, binding other components. The material is cheaper than plywood, will not warp, and resistant to termites. Painting the board is unnecessary as it retains the colours of the packages used, giving the finished products built-in designs and colors. The boards were used by Tetra Pak to make durable, quickly built and low cost houses for the quake hit in Latur and for buildings in other parts of India. Next time you drink from a Tetra Pak, remember to recycle!
“Waste-to-energy" vs recycling
Waste-to-energy vs recycling UN is promoting and setting up of big incinerators in developing countries, as a mode of checking Climate change. Delhi is all set to get three such incinerators. But there is a problem: Incineration and landfill gas schemes conflict directly with recycling and composting, competing for similar materials: paper, cardboard, plastics and organics. Yet recycling reduces emissions 25 times more than incineration does. And incinerators emit more CO2 per unit of electricity than do coal-fired power plants.
The resilient rag tag brigade
But these tough and street smart man and women are not ready to give up. In fact they are gearing up to fight for their rights. Not with force but with logic and reason. Shashi reveals their strategy, “There are three kinds of waste, wet or bio-degradable waste (50 per cent), recyclable waste (30 per cent) and unusable waste (20 per cent). We are already taking care of the 30 per cent (the recyclables), and we are willing to compost the 50 per cent (the wet waste) also.
We have the man power to make sure that 80 per cent of the waste would not be required to be taken to the landfill. If authorities just allow us, the workers of informal sector, to do our job. We are not asking for money and we’ll never ask for it. Just give us right to access the garbage and some space to segregate and compost. All of this can be done at a decentralised community level.”
Privatisation does have its pluses. It saves significant amount of taxpayers’ money as indicated by a World Bank report. The Bank found that the cost of transportation by private companies is always 20-40 per cent lower as compared to government agencies. In the case of Delhi, it amounts to Rs.210 as compared to Rs.700 by the DMC or Rs.900 by the NDMC. However, the Bank report also adds that the relatively lower costs incurred by the contractors is due to the fact that they tend to pay lower than minimum wages to their sanitary workers,” something which the government cannot indulge in.
The best waste way? 
Richa says, “We need a regulatory mechanism which identifies this as a formal sector. Also legalizing and giving autonomy to them is important. In this, all government has to step in to ensure safety and healthy arameters. More or less I think the system is already there, the policy makers just need to understand it, and include it in their policy framework.”
Bharati Chaturvedi demands action. “Waste was handled by the MCD as part of its duty to the citizens of Delhi, to whom it is accountable and whose interest it is supposed to represent. Unfortunately, it has failed in its duty.
Instead, it has fenced and given away common public resources, i.e., waste and waste dhalaos, to private owners. This must be reversed.”
Shashi Pandit Representative (AIKMM)
Shashi is clear about his demands. He does not want government jobs for his fellow pickers and entrepreneurs.He wants partnership and recognition. Instead of employing the informal sector collectors and recyclers, let the government include them as private sector partners, he reasons, thus honouring and recognizing their entrepreneurship.
Avikal Somvanshi
“We (rag pickers) have no issues with companies taking away the garbage; we just want to segregate it before they do so,” he declares.
