development

Indian Travellers Tale 2: From ‘rags’ to respect

In the streets of any large city in India you will see small groups of women (and sometimes children) around garbage skips, going through them and collecting scraps of paper, tin, plastic, and cloth. These are the ‘rag pickers’, and in India’s pervasive caste system they sit fairly close to the bottom rung. They are a sub-group of Dalits (once known as sudra or untouchables) and are generally marginalised in society, kept to the most menial and unpleasant tasks.

But a remarkable thing has happened with the ragpickers of the city of Pune in Western India: the ragpickers are now a central part of the city’s new waste management system, and had a critical hand in its design. But let us go back to the beginning. Twenty years ago, a couple of people from the SNDT Women’s University in Pune started an ILO-supported project to provide adult literacy to the city’s ragpickers. Very early on, the ragpickers made it clear to them that it was not literacy they wanted but respect and the opportunity to have a safe work environment free from harassment from the police and city government officials. Thus Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP) was formed: the Pune Ragpickers’ Union.

Over the next decade, from 1990 onwards, the Union worked on a campaign to have their rights respected and to have a say in the city’s waste managements, as they performed a critical role in waste recycling. It was a slow struggle but by early 2000s they were in a much stronger position. They were independent of any donor aid support but rather raised their own funds to run the Union themselves, they had a small waste collection centre and a nascent credit Union, and most importantly they received official recognition from the local government with their own identity cards, and an education subsidy for the education of their children (available only to those in recognised ‘unclean’ occupations). That was where things had progressed to on my last visit in 2002 – quite an achievement in its own right.

Since then, however, the Pune ragpickers have not been content to merely sit back. They have had to battle to keep the education subsidy as there is pressure to provide it statewide to all ragpickers, which the Government says it can’t afford, so it would prefer to take it off the women of Pune. They have persuaded the City Council to cover the women’s workers insurance premiums. This has resulted in battles with the insurance company as it tries to avoid paying out claims.

When it was realised that the very poor of the ragpickers were not able to use the Credit Union, they did a small survey and found that these women has purchased very small amounts of gold from money lenders, and used that to secure loans for survival loans and the like. With the help of benefactors, the union went to the money lenders and purchased the gold back on behalf of the women, repaid all outstanding loans, and then set up their own pawn broking service. Using the gold as security, they offered the same loans at two per cent per month rather than the five percent the money lenders were charging. This competition had the effect of forcing the money lenders to match their rates.

But the biggest change was to the basic working conditions of the ragpickers. Seeing that the move to in-house waste segregation (very common in the West) was inevitable, and a threat to the ragpickers livelihoods, the Union proposed to the city council to implement a trial across the city whereby they would provide a doorstep collection service direct from the household. Now while it had its problems with the groups involved (the ragpickers, the householders, and the city government), the trial proved that the model was workable. More importantly, it put the ragpickers in the best position to argue that they could provide the service on a permanent basis. After six months of intense negotiations and studies, a new body of ragpickers for this specific task was set up, called the Solid Waste Collection and Handling (SWaCH) cooperative, which won the contract to provide the service to around 60 per cent of the city. While this was less than the full coverage they wanted, it was enough to secure the livelihoods of the city’s ragpickers community. However, this has not only secured their livelihoods but has also meant a shorter working day for the same income (four hours in the morning), and a much cleaner work environment.

Of course this is not the end of the ragpickers union’s struggles. There are always new challenges and battles to be fought to improve the lot of ragpickers. But the progress made in twenty years is truly remarkable. Probably the one of the most potent symbols of the change is that the children of the ragpickers have now been through school, rather than following their mothers to the workplace, and are being employed as the community organisers and the providers of the necessary institutional support that such a large operation requires. It will be quite interesting to return in five years and see what the next chapter in the story of the Pune ragpickers has to tell us.

© 2009 People and Development.