Ragpickers of Mumbai

~by Amish Pal

    “What we get is food and what it takes is our blood” - Shakhru Nisha 

Shakhru Nisha Mansoori, hails from the Ahle Hadees community, Sunni Muslims or Wahabis, she tells me. A mother of four sons and three daughters, her youngest son studies in the second standard and her eldest is 24 years old. She has been living in the slums of Azad Nagar in Bhayandar East for the last 22 years. She makes a living as a ragpicker and wishes her family would help her earn her bread. She needs space to sort out the stuff and pays eight thousand rupees a month as rent. 

The work Shakru Nisha undertakes is very risky. She must crush all the bottles manually with a hammer or with stones and separate all the glass as per colour. While picking up or hammering the glass, she often cuts herself. A few times, glass particles have gone into her skin and lodged there. ‘I try to heal myself, I try to use oil or pinch out the glass fragments but they are sall and sometimes go deeper,’ she says. ‘But who can afford doctors?’  However, she takes a regular anti-tetanus injection. 

Selling a few tonnes of glass bottles, both crushed and intact along with other types of bottles helps them earn a livelihood. To add to her woes, she often has to pay fines to the local body for reasons she describes as foolish. Her cartons of packed bottles also get robbed. A few months ago, a huge fire broke out in the slums, and the place where her first shop was located caught fire and the losses incurred were around 2.5 lakh or so she says. (It seems difficult to understand how she can be earning so little but have material worth lakhs but that is what she told me.)

She reached out to seek aid, but got less than Rs 10,000.  She tried to get further aid but failed. Her business is in jeopardy as the place where she and her husband run the small shop may get demolished and in place of which, a commercial property will be developed in the near future. 

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“Big people are centipedes; if you lose one leg out of 100, it can still walk.” -Akram 

Next to Shakhru Nisha’s shop is a mosque, and in between is a small patch of grass near which Akram Shah, 55, along with a few others piles plastic waste to sell later.  Akram has been living and picking rags in Azad Nagar for nearly 32 years. His children are in a village in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Akram does not see this as a way out of poverty. 

Akram lives in a bamboo shed and the monsoon can make life miserable. However rent for a small area in Bhola Nagar in Bhayandar West, can amount to Rs 4000 to 5000 per month. To make matters worse, sewage can overflow because plastic waste causes bottlenecks. ‘Imagine what would happen if we did not pick up so much of it,’ Akram says.

Akram and many others start their cleaning  rounds during morning hours They do many rounds throughout the day and can make 1000–1500 rupees in a span of two to three days. They are very cautious while working.  While speaking, a slight hesitancy in their speech was evident. As they got more comfortable, they spoke of how the government comes  with umpteen promises and leaves with taking votes but nobody cares about the poor people. Most of the people working in these conditions come from UP, Bengal, and Maharashtra.     *Kavita, Savita, Chanda, and Shambhu Tai are middle-aged widows who live in the slums of Prem Nagar, Worli Naka. They have been ragpicking for a long time, and their lives have become even more challenging after losing their husbands.That apart, life becomes even more difficult when one has children who should help but don’t. For Chanda and Shambhu Tai, their only children are sick, while for other women, their children make their lives miserable by drinking and not contributing to the family.Their day starts at 11:00 AM, with a walk to Mumbai Central to collect rags, which gets  them around 300-400 rupees daily. The current rate for 1 kg of plastic bottles is 10 rupees. For them, trains are not a viable mode of transportation as they are for people who can read and write. Despite their efforts, no one helps them, and they have accepted their fate, thereby continuing to live a life they have always known.These women live in Prem Nagar, where they have to pay at least  a rent of 8,000 rupees per month, which is a significant burden given their income and expenses. Feeding themselves and their families is their daily struggle, and sometimes they return home empty-handed.

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“We don’t have holidays, as waste comes even on holidays,” 

Karim Hussain runs a BMC-rented waste space. Along with four workers, he segregates the waste plastic brought by BMC garbage trucks twice a day. Prior to this, he ran his own shop, but now he works on a contractual basis with the BMC. It’s a relentless job, and he only takes holidays during Eid or once or twice in rotation. Two of his workers sleep on the back side of the space. Originally from Mumbai, he used to run a Scrap dealing shop with his brother. Now, he works at the BMC space while his brother manages the shop.

As the BMC-rented space is on the highway, loading and unloading waste with small trucks is a daily challenge. He often has to pay fines for parking violations. Although the entire business has a systematic approach of only taking work from the BMC and not from local rag pickers, Karim adheres to this rule. Despite the vast amount of waste around him, the profit margins are slim, and he has been operating in the BMC space for the past three months.   People from the lower strata of society enter into such jobs, primarily due to lack of alternatives. It is rather difficult to portend if such  jobs could be eradicated in the near future.  The question rather is of human dignity and whether the government in the long-term hear their pleas for safety precautions and secure contracts.