Spare a thought for people who live amid heaps of urban garbage
₹10,000 in a good month and ₹4,000 in a bad one, depending on how much territory they scrounge. Most cover 30-40 kilometres on foot every day. If they don’t, because of illness, they lose that day’s earning.
Weather conditions are just another obstacle—a downpour, blazing sun or freezing wind can’t stop them, just slow them down. Rain is particularly bad. It makes the waste messier, and its collection and sifting that much harder.
In journeys of dredging the city, day-after-day, year-after-year, those few who have been able to acquire a decrepit cart are in a different league, and even higher are those two or three who possess broken rickshaws. Both enable coverage of larger territory and collection of greater volumes. But none can escape the basic peril of their trade—putting their hands in the bins, dumps and cesspools that we create across the city, with invisible shards of glass, corrosive chemicals, rotting organic material and worse.
Hands with deep and shallow wounds, infected or not, and skin diseases are daily rewards. The first thekedaar got hold of a piece of the site 15 years ago. Others came in over the next three or four years.
The two acres are mired in land-title disputes. The state government and a religious institution are among the many claimants. Titles don’t matter on the ground in such disputes; control does.
Those who control the land can’t sell or build on it without title papers, but they charge rent with impunity. Jockeying for control is continuous. A couple of months ago, in the middle of the night, one of the claimants sent a platoon of thugs to get a portion vacated.
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