ON THE OTHER SIDE … PART 2
Hingewadi is the IT hub of Pune. There are nearly twenty IT companies situated in a relatively small area. The huge dazzling offices scattered in a planned manner give a clear indication of the part of India which is growing, is mercilessly competitive and is highly ambitious but otherwise dangerously unconcerned. It wants to earn in dollars, dine in five stars and drive in Mercedes. These KPOs in India have indeed helped many a dreams come true.
Fortunately, my visit to Hingewadi was not limited to just admiring its grandeur, and I also saw a more gross but familiar picture. My article is dedicated to a lady with whom I happened to exchange just a couple of sentences, but never the less, left me feeling so utterly helpless.
In front of a tall white building with shiny slaty green glasses is a huge field which belongs to a farmer. The field is no more used for cultivation but is now used as a dumping site for most of the garbage and debris that the industry produces. There is a complete hierarchy of rag pickers who collect the recyclable waste and sell it. This is their only source of income. There are some rag pickers, who are at the top of the pyramid and they collect garbage directly from the offices. They are very few in number and my project is to try and increase the number of such rag pickers. Currently, not all the companies give garbage directly to the rag picker but they dump it directly in the field.
At the second level are the ones which collect garbage from the dumping site for which they pay the farmer on a per tractor basis. And then there is a third level of those who can not even afford to pay for the tractor and they pick from what ever is left after the second level rag pickers have picked and left the spot.
I was visiting the place with a lady who also works for the same NGO as mine. Her name is Sangita. We talked to the second level of rag pickers. They were a group of men who had come from Uttar Pradesh leaving their families behind. They told me that the rate of garbage had nearly halved in last two weeks (this global meltdown is indeed global) and so they were facing a lot of difficulty. They told me that there were many scrap shop owners who had closed their shops and left for their home towns because they were facing heavy losses.
Then we moved on to talk to another group of rag pickers. They belonged to the third level which I realized only after talking to them. They were not rag pickers by profession but were forced to do so. They were basically construction workers (building another such sparkling office in the same area) and they had no work for past few days as the construction had stopped due to some reason. I asked a woman what she was doing. She relied, “Kuch din se kaam band hai, hum kyaa karenge. Hamare bachche bhookhe hain”. She said this with a beautiful smile but only a blind could have ignored the pain of helplessness hidden in it. Sitting beside the woman, I saw a little girl (her daughter) digging the debris, her hands grey with cement and mud, trying to dig out a small piece of blue polythene bag which the second level of rag pickers would have accidentally overlooked. I felt equally helpless. Sangita told me, “Garibi bas bhookh janti hai, use dhoop chhav ya dhool mitti se koi fark nahee padta.” Then we moved on.
My task is to try and see how more rag pickers can be directly incorporated with the IT companies so that their share of garbage increases. I feel like a consultant working at the lowest level. The only problem is to find motivation to do a project which would help earn some poor woman a little extra at the cost of snatching bread from another rag picker’s hands.
