City Improbable- Writings on Delhi
Page 24
What would this dramatic exit mean? In a flourishing company that’s folded up, there’s anxiety and rancour; the fear of unemployment. Santosh’s departure left no such residue. Santu Kabari played magnet and magnate: Santosh’s ‘full labour’ relocated themselves to his shop barely a kilometre away, and went back to hunching and sorting.
Santu, Santosh, Wasim, Ramesh—all feed off Gol Market, Connaught Place and its environs, as do about forty other kabaris. The waste that the city’s 100,000-odd ragpickers mine out from the city’s garbage dumps is all bought by men like these: the kabaris. If you can put your hand into a pile of garbage and pull out the saleables, you’re likely to be able to feed yourself in Delhi. The kabaris ensure that much.
Of the 6,000 tonnes of solid waste generated each day, between nine and fifteen per cent is recyclable stuff that a kabari’s shop is lined with. Every day approximately 20,000 small shanty shops, roofs piled high with junk and columns of baled, sorted materials inside, receive this waste across the city. You are unlikely to find a single big jhuggi cluster in Delhi that does not offer space for the waste thrown out by the pucca world.
It’s been termed the informal sector of waste: the agglomerate of ragpickers, kabaris, middlemen and recyclers. It is, in fact, the only recycling mechanism that exists in India. In Delhi it is particularly vibrant because the waste-to-recycled product chain is completed more or less within the city’s boundaries. In theory, you can have your plastic waste from the month before last find its way back into your hands as a fragile little toy. Your can of Diet Coke and twisted cutlery from an obscure dhaba will come together quite democratically in crude smelters to be transformed into aluminium rods for your shower curtains.
It all begins with the ragpickers—the men, women and children you often see with big HDPE woven sacks slung on their backs. (Contrary to popular perception, a majority of the ragpickers in Delhi are not children, though this might be true in a city like Bangalore.) They walk around day after day, scrutinizing the same beat, because the work of a ragpicker is highly territorial. Your own waste will end up in these bags, where some of it will retain its familiar name: loha and peetal, for example. But a lot is rechristened and will sound entirely unfamilar. You just threw these out in your trash can: karak, panni, doodh, reecut, Colgate. It’s colloquial nomenclature, dictated by the recycling industry, so that the ragpickers and the kabaris are able to distinguish between one type of waste and another and deliver neatly segregated sub-species to those above them in the recycling chain. So karak is any crackly, brittle plastic, the category dominated by polypropylene; panni is plastic bags, mostly low-density polyethylene; and doodh is milk sachets—the most expensive of them all. Reecut is printed paper with a glossy finish, like labels; and Colgate is near extinct, because it refers to metallic tubes of ointments and toothpaste that went out of fashion around the time toothpaste became fluorescent.
A ragpicker collects, cleans and sorts out this waste, and must sell all of it the same day, regardless of the price offered, because he or she rarely has any monetary reserves and needs that money—Rs 30 or less on a bad day, Rs 80 to 100 on an exceptionally good one—to get into the next day of work. Besides, there is nowhere to store the waste. Most ragpickers are homeless, sleeping under flyovers, on pavements or railway platforms.
When ragpickers sell their goods, it is to a small middleman, a kabari like Santosh. He’s different from the kabaris who cycle around on Sundays buying newspapers. In fact, given the subtle distinction between ‘saaf’ and ‘ganda’ among kabaris, it is unlikely that our kabari of central Delhi will be the recipient of clean goods straight from middle-class homes—neatly folded newspapers and crisp magazines, intact bottles of Rooh Afza or Black Label whisky. The no-trouble-no-mess respectable waste is a bit like a disposable diaper, a privilege that comes with money and birth. It will go to a kabari who, in a strange way, matches the waste he receives. A ‘saaf kabari’ is likely to be a caste Hindu, a man with all the trappings of respectability—a pucca house to live in, a shopful of dry waste that requires no messy cleaning up, pen in pocket, and pocket on clean, first-hand clothes. This is business and he could have traded in any other material. ‘Hum log gandi panni ko nahin chhootey hain. Hamara sirf saaf maal ka buisness hai (We won’t touch dirty plastic. We only deal in clean stuff),’ Ashok, a ‘respectable’ west-Delhi kabari told me during a survey. ‘Hum un logon ki tarah nahin hain (We’re not like those people),’ he added scornfully.
A kabari—saaf or ganda—is a kabari because he is able to find a little space and capital so he can further sort and sell when it is best, a bit like the stock market in the old days. He’ll make roughly one rupee for every kilo of sorted solid waste. And since the volumes he sells aren’t huge, he’s unlikely to make very much more than it will cost him to keep his little business going and a roof over his head. Like his own regular clientele, the ragpickers, he is highly territorial—a Pitampura kabari will cast his net in Pitampura, an Uttam Nagar kabari in Uttam Nagar. When Santu had to close his shop for a few days because of trouble with the police, all he could do was to tie up with kin in Parliament Street and Paharganj to buy up his old stocks and the rolling stocks of his ragpickers.
His ragpickers—I use the pronoun deliberately. First, because I’ve never seen a shop primarily run by women. And second, because there is a deep, symbiotic bond between a kabari and the ragickers who sell to him. Most outsiders intuitively declare it as exploitation, occasionally taking upon themselves the task of freeing ragpickers from their evil kabaris. The ragpickers often resent this, because there are important needs that kabariwalas meet.
Planners of cities here lay great emphasis these days on recreational spaces—hang-out joints like clubs, shopping plazas and gyms. The Ansal Plazas and Habitat Centres aren’t, of course, built with the street people and the jhuggi-jhompriwalas in mind. So where do the ragpickers go? They could hang out in side lanes, service lanes, or corners of parks, but only as long as they don’t make themselves visible, because none of these spaces were designed for them either. The only safe place, then, where they can gather to gossip and relax is the kabari’s shop. When they’re feverish, the kabari will give them Crocins, though his own access to medical aid is poor. Often he will also offer them loans—which can be recovered at profits only to him, true, but in their condition of loanworthiness it is unlikely anyone else will help the ragpickers hobble through.
Kinship is another factor. When the middleman is from Almora, many ragpickers will be from there too. Sometimes an extended family of ragpickers scavenges an entire area. In parts of Chanakyapuri, a plethora of aunts, uncles, nephews and cousins guard the bins like minotaurs guarding secret treasures. They are all from near Salem, and their kabari is a relative too. Obviously, contacts are useful everywhere. There’s a dependance of a strange kind here: the kabari as provider and protector, however vulnerable he himself might be.
There must be something very alluring about being a kabariwala. Consider Akram Bhai, sitting proudly atop a huge mound of plastic waste from two to five each afternoon, supervising almost two dozen ragpickers cramped into a ten-square-feet space. This may look like a sweatshop to some, but they are not bonded labour; in this part of south Delhi (or any other part of the city, for that matter) they’ve found no other space big enough to segregate waste—something that should have been done by households in their own kitchens and bins. However squalid Akram’s little fiefdom may appear, however tenuous his position, I have never known him to look anything but contented. Whenever I think of him, the image that comes instantly to mind is this: Akram, neatly dressed—in kurta-pajamas that, magically, never wrinkle—perched on his absurd, spongy throne of plastic, slapping his oversized rubber chappals against the soles of his feet. ‘Dekho, madam. Hamara to sab yahin pe hai … Aap jab bhi aao, hum to yahin milenge (Everything I have is here, madam … come anytime, you’ll always find me here),’ he says, waving an arm around and chuckling like a merry child.
‘Hum samaan uthate hain, isiliye humein chor bolte hain (Our job is to pick up stuff, that’s why people call us thieves),’ Guddan, a ragpicker, told me one afternoon. We were sitting on higher ground behind a public men’s loo at the back of the kabari shop. Just a couple of days ago a shopkeeper had lodged a complaint with the police about a missing bicycle, and Guddan and three others from his group had been picked up for questioning. This had happened before. And it happens regularly to many others like Guddan. Bearing and cleaning the city’s stinking load is a job fraught with risk, and not just of disease.
Contrary to what most people believe, rapickers usually sell waste picked up off the streets, not valuable stolen goods from middle-class homes. In the absence of brass artefacts and Nike shoes to sell, their daily income rarely exceeds a hundred rupees on a good day; they really are as poor as they look. But stereotypes persist.
When a complaint of theft is lodged, one of the first things the police do is to barge into and search a kabari shop selected usually after not very gentle, or even lawful, interrogation of a terrified thief-in-waiting. Sometimes, the police just take the inititaive. Even if there has been no complaint, a policeman will examine a ragpicker’s bags at random. Occasionally he will burn the bags. A kabariwala is pretty much on the same side of the fence as the ragpickers. ‘We’re not thieves, we don’t steal,’ says Santu Kabari bitterly. ‘We have stopped dealing in all items that might be stolen. Still the police troubles us.’
In a single week, Santu’s shop, eight feet by ten, witnessed a spate of events:
Mohar Singh, Sub-Inspector, Delhi Police, demanded Rs 17,000 to allow Santu to continue his work. Threatened to return the next evening.
Mohar Singh beat up Pappu, assistant to Santu, three days later and in a fit of twisted sadism, poked his arm with a pointed needle which caused a huge swelling and a nasty blister.
Another policeman turned up three days later, unrecognizable without a uniform, and demanded money. Since there was none, he slapped two ragpickers, checked out their bags and went off in a huff.
A sudden increase in the number of beatings of ragpickers. Sometimes they were woken up at night to be shoved around and slapped. Some evenings, their bags, full of material that would get them a day’s wages, were burnt.
A posse of policemen showed up at the jhuggi and asked for money. Foolish Santu resisted. This was unusual, but he’d had a setback recently. The police returned a while later and tried to take Santu’s uncle and a neighbour off to the police station. All the women of the jhuggi followed the policemen, stood around the police van and forced them to release the men.
The shop closed down for six weeks after this incident.
Such harassment happens almost every day. Sometimes the pressures and losses become too much to bear, and the kabari has no option but to wind up his business. Perhaps this was what had edged Santosh out.
Talking about ragpickers, a cynical senior police officer once mentioned how it was imperative for his men to ‘ruthlessly search their bags—there is no harm if sometimes they burn the bags even. If you don’t teach them a lesson, they’ll never learn.’ A lesson for what? For being poor, looking scruffy and being the Other of the Hygienic Middle Class? There are some in the police department who do not subscribe to these old prejudices, but many still do. Their view of the ragpickers and kabaris is this: They are all thieves. You can try and improve them, but such people never change. Those who are not yet thieves will become thieves. You have to keep them in check.
‘Let them go to jail once at least,’ men in uniform suggest repeatedly, ‘they don’t have to work there, just eat and sleep. It’s the best way to become healthy, even drug addicts get cured. They’ll be so fat, you won’t recognize them.’ Indeed, I almost didn’t recognize one of them last week after his stint in a police station. He had put on inches on his cheeks and neck, but it was from being beaten
This is not mere individual bias, it is a whole society’s inability, or rather, unwillingness to understand marginalized groups like the ragpickers. Understanding the underdog has no tangible profits, so it is not required. Even senior government officers force the police to thrash suspects—from the ‘lower-class’ invariably—to get them to tell the truth. ‘You are talking to the wrong people of society,’ a petty shopokeeper would advise me grimly whenever he saw me with a group of ragpickers in the lane outside his shop. Now that I have learnt nothing from his admonitions and continue to deal with the scum, he often shouts at me, righteously wagging his stubby forefinger. Depite its large membership, the anti-poor brigade never gives up indoctrination.
Things are much better higher up on the recycling industry ladder. Above the kabaris in the pyramid are a completely different lot—the asset-owning, rich baby-tycoons. They buy up multiple kabari-loads of recyclables in a go, which they sell to the factory dalals (middlemen, again). Their margins are low, but the phenomenal bulk makes them rich. These are the kings, the true lords of waste. They live well. They look the middle-class madam in the eye. ‘Try Italian socks,’ Mr Sharma, chief dealer in waste glass, advised me when I complained of aching feet in his air-conditioned office. ‘I never miss my Vitamin B complex,’ Mr Mittal, big buyer of plastics, informed me pityingly as I caught my breath after four flights of stairs on the way to his plush cabin. They have reason to feel smug. At their level, waste is still just being cleaned, sorted, baled. And yet its value has shot up. Before it is finally reprocessed, the value of a single kilo of plastic is up 700 per cent from the time it was picked up on the street.
At this level, there is no shame, no embarrassment, no mess at all. It is pure business. Success is success, no matter its humble origins in a bin. ‘Botalon ke badshah (The Emperor of Bottles),’ young Mr Gupta boasted of his uncle in his store in Idgah. His uncle was reputed in the early 1990s to receive at his godown every single old bottle that went into circulation in the Delhi kabari circuit. Every bottle of Dettol was cleaned, its label intact, and added to a giant heap in Uttam Nagar, west Delhi. These bottles were extremely popular, beaten only by the brown cough syrup bottles—de-labelled, these still looked officially medical and respectable, attracting customers to the dubious local brews they’d been refilled with.
But business is not as great these days. Perhaps the Badshah and his brother, the King of Kabaris (a title, alas, bestowed only by a loving son), face competition now from the Badarpur border, where huge markets for glass bottles have come up recently.
Not surprisingly, Delhi can be mapped by its waste centres. East, west, north, south—a special kind of waste activitiy plots a city graph. In the extreme north, at Mundka, huge plastic waste mandis keep hearth-sized reprocessing factories running: spaghetti-like melted plastic rolls out, to be cooled by fans and cut into pellets by shredders. The northwest is a fractured remnant of its pre-1995 glory. Then there was Jwalapuri, the biggest PVC market in India. When it was gutted in a fire that year, the shops disaggregated into individual hillocks of plastic, separated by gates and boundary walls. Not all of it is Delhi waste—the owner of one such mountain told me as we stood wobbling at the peak, ‘It’s hard to get the best—this is foreign maal, clean, shredded and high grade.’ Stamping his foot on the hillock, he added, ‘German maal,’ but I had no means to acertain this by just glancing at the finely shredded pieces.
Loha Mandi, also in west Delhi, the last site in the world to still preserve an iron curtain, is old hat. Even bus terminal points are named after it. Outsiders are kept under strict vigilance, though, and thrown out if they don
’t follow the rules: shut up and leave soon. Sometimes they subject you to a few minutes of questioning. When you see the amounts of iron scrap, you understand their paranoia: what if you’re from the tax authorities?
In the neighbourhood of Welcome Colony, trans-Yamuna, old materials of all kinds stand transformed. Computer monitors are converted into fourteen-inch television sets, old wooden junk into usable furniture. Paper arrives in reams, to be reused for packing fruit or to be recycled on GB Road. And before the clean-up behind the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the reuse of medical waste was a routine and flourishing activity. Syringes, tubes, needles, all cleaned with caustic soda and sold downstream into the hinterland. ‘The test is that if you inject one of these recycled syringes into your arm, it will burn like mad. But don’t try it—you have to be really desperate,’ a substance-abusing co-researcher explained. Before he vanished, genie-like, Santosh was the sole retailer for bandages from the LNJP-MAMC complex. ‘Just stay away,’ he said to me one day standing beside a heap of dirty bandages, enjoying his macho-martyr talk. ‘If you come near you’ll get a terrible disease. I’m fine, I can manage. I’ve almost died so many times, but I just go to the hospital through the other gate and meet the doctor.’
Most of these recycling activities take place either in bastis or in factories and plots on the peripheries of the city. In fact, several Delhi bastis were settled where they are in order to provide important services to the city. In Regarpura the regars or leather recyclers were expected to clear solid waste, including waste from the nearby dargah. The Balmiki Bastis were for the sweepers who would provide sanitation services. The oldest basti in Delhi, Basti Harphool Singh, settled in 1932, offered similar services. These were critical, because Delhi’s wholesale markets or mandis, then as now, created huge amounts of waste as they catered to most of north India. The bastis ensured the smooth functioning of these mandis by keeping them useable and clean.