Wealth from Waste & Rags to Riches.

Such are the catchy titles used to introduce social-upliftment based waste management projects in India. Recycling, composting and "going-green" are hot words that generate much social and financial capital for the various NGO's, companies, and corporations trying to get a slice of the waste-management pie. Here's a basic look at the situation in India.

Of course, everyone attempting waste-management here has their own theory of what is best for the environment, best for the waste-workers, and best for the city. It seems to be a trend that some of the larger NGO's waste –management programs’ are positioned more towards making adjustments in the lives of the rag-pickers, rather than working with the rag-pickers to capitalize on the available opportunities to increase their livelihoods. Building self-respect is more of a focus than building capacity. However, I believe, it is only through capacity building that waste-pickers will be empowered and will be able to develop their self-respect.

Helping a waste-picker establish a formal identity (voter ID card, ration card, etc.) is certainly a step in the right direction, but not one that provides a waste-picker with the right tools to increasing his/ her meager income. To talk of identity and self-image is of little use, if that individual continues to live in the same abject poverty from the day before, but today with a piece of paper with their name on it.

Certain NGO's seem to focus entirely on the waste-workers identity, his/her dealings with the municipal corporation, and to create a pseudo-cooperative of these waste-pickers. They shun the idea of raising capital to help the waste-pickers mechanize some of their activities or to make efficient their sorting and processing of recyclables appears to be a second priority to the focus on the workers identity. Mechanization is opposed as it is seen as an off-shoot of capitalization, which they deem exploitative and inherently against sustainability. Then how do they propose to make a dent (environmentally) in the tremendous problem of waste-management, if they lack the resources to collect, sort, process and dispose hundreds of metric tonnes of waste per day? They don't, and they cannot. Such activities are beyond their scope, since physical labour is no longer adequate to tackle waste production in any Indian city. This raises an important question: are they making a difference in the waste management sector, or making a difference in terms of human rights and counseling?

On the flip side of these operations are India's major waste management companies. They have multi-billion rupee contracts in various Indian cities, with heavy mechanization and tremendous capital investments. They can afford to pay their base employees salaries almost double the minimum wage.  Their operations are efficient, environmentally significant, and economically positive for all concerned. However, they displace and destroy the livelihoods of the destitute that are engaged in waste-picking in the areas where they operate.

So neither of these two major models target the waste-pickers in terms of increasing the amount of money they get to take home. 93% of India's employed population is employed in the informal sector. Of that, waste-picking and scavenging is the meanest job with almost no skill sets required.

I've been placed with Nidan, in Patna, Bihar. In 2002, Nidan started a cooperative of waste-pickers. It aimed to bring together the people engaged in this work and attempt to uplift their status in society (helping them get a formal identity), get access to micro-finance, social security, insurance, and most importantly- a higher income from the work they did. Over time, it realized that the only way to increase the average waste-pickers income was to allow the waste-pickers to bid for municipal waste management contracts. The only way to do this was to have these waste-pickers (called safai mitras- friends of cleanliness) create their own company. Nidan Swachhdhara Private Limited was created in August 2008 to tackle the problem of waste management in Patna, while uplifting the poor that clean it.

I'm focusing on scaling up and making efficient Nidan's composting operations. Almost 50% of Patna's waste is decomposable organic matter. 12.5% is recyclable. To be able to remove this 62% from ending up in Patna's dumps is the goal. But like all environmental goals in India, it is littered with obstacles: a lack of land, logistical problems in transporting waste, and the greatest problem, a huge lack of public awareness of the acute need to segregate waste at source. India, like the rest of the world has not yet realized the tremendous impact it has on the environment, and the terrible repercussions we shall face in the near future.

Posted by Behzad Larry