The Hindu    16.08.2012

Waste management neglects rag pickers

As governments grapple with mounting quantities of waste
and draft policies to tackle it, waste pickers who earn their
livelihood from collection, segregation and disposal of waste still
remain neglected, reveals a new study by a non-government organisation.

Accessing
the welfare programmes and the prevalent rules for waste management in
14 major cities, Chintan, an environment action and research group, in
its report ‘Failing the Grade’ has claimed that there was no city that
has fully implemented the rules and policies for waste pickers.

Citing
the case of Delhi, the report says the New Delhi Municipal Council has
included waste pickers for doorstep collection, but the three new
Municipal Corporations have set up a series of waste-to-energy plants,
and contracting out waste handling and collection to private companies,
thus displacing waste pickers and waste traders.

“In
March 2007, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) released a
Performance Audit of Management of Waste in India. Amongst the
observations, one was related to the lack of recognition of the informal
sector. The report stated, ‘Only 17 per cent of the sampled States had
recognised the role of the waste pickers.’ Five years on, there are new
rules and new policies in place that refer to the informal sector, but
their implementation remains, as the CAG noted then, unmonitored,” the
report claims.

Studies conducted in Patna, Ahmadabad,
Faridabad, Varanasi, Mathura, Allahabad, Hyderabad, Indore, Bangalore,
Nagpur, Rajkot, Cochin, Pune and Delhi revealed non adherence to rules
and lack of programmes for the rehabilitation of waster pickers.

“Chintan
is shocked at the condition, despite the CAG orders the poor continue
to be marginalised. Non implementation of the CAG’s orders on waste
pickers is an act of acute impunity,” pointed out Bharati Chaturvedi,
director of Chintan.

Good practices

The
report claims good practices like the doorstep collection of waste as
is followed in Bhopal, Delhi and Pune and Bangalore’s I-card system
exist, but there are “glaring deviations”.

“In Pune,
inclusive collection of waste from the doorstep co-exists with mass
displacement of waste pickers from a Hanjer run landfill. Though I-Cards
and collection centres for waste pickers are amongst the most
encouraging new trends in India amongst all the cities, there is little
evidence of doorstep collection that includes waste pickers on a
city-wide level in Bangalore.

Several cities, such as
Patna and Nagpur, have displaced waste-picker inclusive systems instead
of nurturing and upgrading these,” the report cites.

The
lack of seriousness with regards to the rehabilitation of waste pickers
can be gauged by the fact that despite finding a mention in the solid
waste management projects in six surveyed cities, the ground realities
were in sharp contrast.

“In Ahmadabad, waste pickers
lost their doorstep collection contract to a small private company. In
Varanasi, a private company, A2Z, was contracted for SWM, including
doorstep collection. The company has been known to not be inclusive
previously,” the report cites as an example.

A reason
why some cities have failed to address the issues of waste pickers, the
reports says, is their failure to recognise the role of the sector
(waste pickers) as important actors in collection, segregation,
transportation, reuse and recycling.

“Given the large
quantities, several municipalities believe that only a large facility,
at a centralised level, can handle waste. Waste-pickers operate
efficiently locally, but are squeezed out. Privatization at multiple
levels of SWM; large companies are entrusted with running several
processes related to collection and processing of solid waste. Lack of
understanding of the informal recycling sector; most often, policy
makers are unable to understand the critical role of various chains of
informal sector, or the quantum of their work,” the report says.

Suggesting
interventions that can address the concerns of the waste pickers,
Chintan has recommended fostering the inclusion of the informal sector
in the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. “Chintan urges
that the rules [for waste pickers] be implemented and policies embedded
in decision making within one year. The next phase of JNNURM must
incorporate inclusion and doorstep collection to be carried out only by
waste pickers or organisations working with them.”