The Dump

I've been trying to journal every day, and doing it most of the time. Usually my thoughts go down with pen on paper - there's something unique about how I process that way. I have to write more slowly, and my imperfect language and the variation among my scribbles reveal some things that might get lost with typing. Sometimes a computer can help me get my thoughts down all in a flurry, though, which helps my writing keep pace with my thinking better - and can thereby achieve a more direct transfer from brain to screen.

Either way, that first-impression kind of writing hasn't ever made it on to this blog. Today, I'm going to try changing that. I suppose the main reason is that I want to write about a very powerful experience, and hopefully some other folks can get a sense of what the experience was like, too, if I publish the blog this way.

We visited the Gazipur dump yesterday. I should have journalled last night, or even better yesterday in the afternoon. But it got late and I was too tired. Maybe things will still feel fresh.

As Delhi expanded from 1 million to 16 in the last fifty-five years, smaller towns and villages got taken over, enveloped into the folds of the greater Delhi region. And as the municipality's governance expanded, displacement was a common theme: what was once farmland suddenly became valuable real estate, part of a mega-city where land was money and factories or condos were better investments than rice or wheat. So Delhi's government put zoning in place and literally piled hundreds of thousands of occupants into trucks to be relocated on the city's border. I've heard a few times that leading up to the 2010 Commonwealth games, within 3 days at least 90,000 people had been relocated.

Yesterday, we visited one settlement that has yet to be displaced. This is where some of Delhi's waste-pickers carry out their work - and will continue to do so until the 24-hour eviction notification comes from the government and the bulldozers roll in.

We stepped out of our air conditioned taxi cabs into what looked like a nice, calm, middle class neighborhood: the new Radisson hotel towered over the exit off the highway. Dozens of four-story condo developments rose up around us, filled with homes and doctors' offices and one dance studio that advertised classes for beginners.

Screen shot of that Radisson's website; the settlement would be off to the right

I smelled something intense and all around us - was it sewage?

We walked two blocks to the settlement. About 850 people live here, they said. They are Delhi's waste-pickers - but only a few of them. An estimated 1% of India's workforce, or 200,000 individual human beings, do this work. So there are probably a few tens of thousands in Delhi alone. (I'll update this post with photos when I can - a Google search of "Delhi landfill" will give you some idea, if also a sensationalist one.)

We saw one little cell of the settlement, where about 20 people live. It was a rectangle of tents surrounding the pile of trash. Each day, said one of the three men we were talking with, he goes to about 300 homes and takes their trash. He sorts the recyclables and the non-recyclables, which go to the dump (about a 30 minute ride on his bike cart).

The recyclables get sorted into paper, plastic, and bottles. Each he sells to a middleman for one or two rupees (about a penny) per kilogram, and then they go on to a factory to be recycled. Working at this rate, he can usually pay rent to the faceless man who claims ownership of this plot of land (actually the government does, but that seems irrelevant), send home 1,500 rupees each week to his family, and have about 1,000 rupees left for himself each month - that's about 20 dollars, well above the poverty line of 20 rupees (about 40 cents) per day. That's why he can't qualify for any of the government assistance programs targeted at the "poor."

So the men, women, children, and a surprising number of dogs live or work at this site. It's hard to describe the feeling of being there...

I could feel myself having some hypochondriac feelings. My eyes were surely stinging. I thought I could sense a cough developing. I was subconsciously not opening my mouth to breathe, lest the fumes enter. But people live here, I thought to myself.

So there was an element that was very depressing. One of the men I talked with (through a translator) came here when he was 10, dropping out of third grade to join his sister once her income was no longer enough to keep the family afloat back home in Vihar. For the last seven years, this has been his livelihood. And he doesn't think upward mobility would ever be particularly possible - no factory would ever hire him. He will never have a chance to learn any other skills, even literacy. Maybe, just maybe he would one day be able to become one of the "middlemen" who pools the recyclables together to transport them to factories. Probably not.

His kids might have a chance of working for a factory in Delhi, but he doesn't want them to grow up here. There is no water (for that, you take your bike cart several kilometers away and lug it back for drinking, bathing, and washing), and electricity is available only sporadically. Medical care is a joke - a few private hospitals cater to wealthier residents nearby, but they said that the nearest public hospital is probably half an hour away even in a car. The real breaking point is the schools, though: there are none here. There are in Vihar.

Children played with some toys, probably cast away into the garbage, in and around the pile. There's a ball, and a two-foot plastic car to sit in, and a rocking horse with one ear missing. The toddler toddled around one pile. One kid had a bit of crust over his eye. Dogs were everywhere, a few very cute puppies sitting atop one pile of bottles and one mother dog that had actually gotten territorial over a particular mound. One man stopped for lunch a few feet away.

So there was a part of me that felt somber. Depressed, really. Angry, maybe, but more confused and fatalistic about what seemed to be...what? A denial of basic human rights? The definition of "poor living conditions," low quality of life? A raw psychological reaction to things I want to protect - cute puppies and cute babies - in the midst of all the waste and excess and discarded items and stuff we think of as junk or health hazards but which constitute their livelihood? A discomfort with being intrusive, with having no place?

Yet I also felt an undeniable sense of awe and inspiration. I couldn't help but respect the craftiness, resourcefulness, hard work, and attitude of the men we were talking with (and the women, too, but our guide was male and I think he only chose a handful of men to speak with yesterday). This is a much better option than the unemployment or hard physical labor that would greet them in Vihar, apparently. And they can send meaningful amounts of cash home. Cell phones allow them to keep in touch with family, and there seems to be a definite social dynamic of camaraderie around the site. Lots of laughing, and gossiping about the visitors.

The man we spoke with the most was one of the most smiley human beings I have ever met (I would love to post a picture but can't say he would be comfortable with that - so his anonymity will continue), and he excitedly and jollily answered all our questions. India probably recycles a higher percentage of its waste than any European country with this system, and the long hours and repeated determination described by these workers - who were funny and articulate, and wore perfectly normal clothes that would be indistinguishable from the other 16 million people living here if you saw them walking out on the street - frankly colored the experience of hearing about their day-to-day work with a surprisingly sense of banality.

If men with clipboards in logo'd polo shirts come from the city planning commission to talk with real estate developers, why would they not come and speak here too? If students take field trips to see a city, why not jot notes and doodles in brightly colored notebooks at this site?

I felt a little raw, a little sombre for the rest of the day. I was also exhausted, drained - but in a way that felt inexplicably satisfying, as though I knew I was exhausted from thinking about things that I knew were meaningful and important.

But important for what? What makes this experience any different from slum tourism? Is the satisfaction I feel really narcissism? Why do the abstract notions of awareness and global citizenship and political cognizance and mutual understanding and empathy and everything else that one might say would come of this experience...why do they suddenly seem like insufficient justifications for going on this trip?

Could I have learned this by just watching the documentary of an IHP alumna who felt so moved by what she saw here two years ago that she is launching a global campaign to raise awareness about these issues? I guess she found one way to make this all important "for" something.

And why is it that I almost left out of this blog entirely the side comment that one man made, that most of their income ends up going towards booze - my hesitance to publicize anything that might provide evidence of a culture of poverty?

We drove from the settlement around the Gazipur dump itself, land bought by the Delhi government from the village once the city's first three landfills were past capacity. These landfills are supposed to be filled up once they reach ground level, we heard - but these are the "Himalayas of Delhi" and they tower a few hundred feet over the city instead. Approaching them is positively ominous - thousands and thousands of birds circled above. None of us had ever seen anything like it; there were sections of the sky blotted out pure black by the wings. We circled around, saw where the municipality is supposed to take all the trash - including the recycling sorted by the waste-pickers - and saw the trucks circling up its ramps. There's another settlement that lives here, scouring the landfill itself for anything that can be recycled.

It sounds like a hard way to make a living, and city officials could possibly be given the benefit of the doubt that they want to put an end to it by finishing the two incinerators now under construction, abolishing this whole system in favor of an organized, formal one. The city is giving free land and subsidizing the construction of these incinerators accordingly; the UN is giving them carbon credits.

But there is concern that this will do little more than take money paid by German auto companies to reduce their carbon footprint, and pay it to German tech manufacturers who are building these incinerators through the UN.

Imagine instead another proposal: Strengthen the existing system. Recognize the waste-pickers as legitimate workers, and pay them to collect trash for the city. Provide them with secure employment and benefits. Develop roads to make them more navigable for the bike carts that transport trash, instead of for cars and cars alone. Don't threaten to evict them from their worksite - allow them to feel secure wherever they are living, so that they have reason to actually invest in a home that is more than a shack made out of the trash they sort through every day. Improve the 200,000 jobs of this industry instead of displacing them.

A Delhi where nobody has to pick through trash piece by piece to eek out a living, where all the trash is neatly collected and either recycled or burned, sounds like a nice dream for the future. But connecting that future dream with the reality of today is another question entirely.

My congratulations to those of you who have read this to its end - that is quite a feat. I hope you understand the conflicting sentiments and the controversial ones too, even if you disagree or feel troubled by them, or by the images I have described. It is my sincere hope that I have articulated what I had the extreme privilege to witness yesterday with as much clarity as possible, and as much dignity and honesty towards everybody involved - including myself. But I have purposefully left my writing as raw and original as possible. I hope it's made us all think.

Namaste.