According to a recent report on the informal garbage sector, India generates 62 million tonnes of waste each year.
A score of men relentlessly remove the waste unloaded by hundreds of trucks, in search of a piece of plastic or the unlikely glass bottle to resell, in a massive pile of garbage in the Indian capital.
It is one of the more than 3,000 large landfills that dot Indian cities, and that the government promised this month to eliminate with an investment of 1.4 trillion rupees (about 18.9 billion dollars), and replace them with waste treatment plants.
25 years of trash
Lachiram unloads his truck up to four times a day, loaded with garbage from all over South Delhi, cautiously climbing the equivalent of sixteen stories high from the Okhla landfill.
It’s twenty-five years of accumulated garbage, overlooking the ruins of the massive 14th-century Tughlaqbad Fort, a hospital right below it, and a nearby shantytown.
“We receive between three hundred and five hundred trucks a day,” the junior engineer of the landfill, Ravi Kumar, explains to Efe from his office in the shadow of the mountain of garbage.
The trucks climb to the top, dump tons of garbage and a score of collectors try to find a piece of plastic, although according to Kumar their presence is technically prohibited by order of a specialized environmental court.
Informal workers
They are part of the lowest link in the army of informal workers who live off garbage treatment, estimated between 1.5 and 4 million people who collect and segregate garbage without, in many cases no, type of protection, and reselling plastic, metal, glass and cardboard to survive.
“This workforce that we know as informal and that basically lives by collecting garbage is the reason why we have not drowned under our own waste,” the director of the urban solid waste program of the Center for Science and the Environment acknowledges to Efe. (CSE), Atin Biswas.
Stigmatized for working with garbage, the CSE briefly noted in a recent report that most are “untouchables” or Dalits, members of the lowest echelons of the Hindu caste system.
“Few dispute the omnipresence of garbage that is unique to India,” writes academic Anand Teltumbde in “Republic of Caste” (2018), in a society that “stigmatizes sanitation work as impure and sanitation workers as untouchable” .
Trash explosion and low segregation
Although nearly 70% of the population still lives in rural areas, according to the last national census carried out in 2011, this country of about 1.3 billion inhabitants has experienced an urban explosion in recent decades.
The amount of garbage generated each day has grown accordingly, and according to a recent CSE report on the informal garbage sector, the country generates 62 million tons each year.
Only 19% of all waste is treated in waste management plants, and the rest ends up in one of the 3,159 landfills that, according to the Indian government, already accumulate more than 800 million tons of garbage.
“If we have to focus on the origin of all the problems, it is because there is a very low level of waste segregation,” explains Biswas.
Despite the laws in force, Indian households and large garbage producers such as the hotel industry or offices frequently mix organic garbage with recyclables.
According to the expert, “as soon as food is mixed with any other waste, the value of both is lost (…) and the only option is to collect it all and dump it somewhere outside the city.”
The Indian government claims, however, that the country “processes” 70% of the garbage generated. But Biswas regrets that it is a much broader term than segregation, a fact that authorities have stopped sharing since last year.
Still, “things are changing, albeit much slower than we need to,” according to Biswas.
Ridding indian cities of rubbish
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on October 1 a new phase of the “Swachh Bharat” (Clean India) mission to boost garbage management, initially dedicated to building millions of toilets to end air defecations. free.
In total, this is about $ 18.9 billion of spending over the next five years with the elimination of mountains of garbage as a “key objective”, with “special attention” on informal workers.
Bharati Chaturvedi, founder of the environmental NGO Chintan, believes that one of the strengths of the program is that “they are really driving home segregation.”
“It’s about time,” says Chaturvedi, “it can’t be that there are citizens who do nothing and only complain that they already pay taxes.”
But the activist is reserved about the effectiveness of the campaign, which although it is born from the Government will fall on the municipalities.
“Some municipalities do a very good job and others a very bad job,” she explains resignedly.
An urgent job
The slope of the Ghazipur Garbage Mountain in eastern New Delhi collapsed in 2017, killing two people and pushing several others into a nearby canal, an event that attracted significant media attention.
But beyond the specific tragedies, landfills pose an immediate threat to the health of those who live in their vicinity.
“When it is windy or there is a storm, the smell is terrible (…) and when the monsoon rains arrive the situation is very complicated,” explains Vipin Shakya, a 26-year-old young man who after a lifetime living At the foot of the Okhla landfill in a small shanty town, he says he is used to it.
“We have been living here for a long time and the landfill has always been there,” Shakya laments. (I)
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
