Bangalore\'s Female Trash Pickers

Courtesy of Sonia FaleiroShobha, a garbage collector at her home in Bangalore, Karnataka.

New rules that require Bangalore's residents to sort their garbage aim to reduce inefficiencies in a system that has the city teeming with open dumps. The dumps attract cows, stray dogs and rats, and are a surprising sight in a city that prides itself as the Silicon Valley of India.

But an investigation into the work-life conditions of the 14,000 garbage collectors, or pourakarmikas, responsible for cleaning up an estimated 3,000 tons of garbage daily, offer an insight into why this task is a difficult one. It suggests that unless the lives of the pouraka rmikas improve, neither will the city's sanitation.

Shobha, 25, who goes by one name, is a widow who supports her elderly mother and her two children on a salary of 5,000 rupees ($96) a month. The family lives in a tiny room in a Cox Town slum. Shobha owns exactly two pieces of furniture: chairs foraged from the very garbage dump she visits, stuffed with the garbage she's handed most often-paper and plastic bags.

Shobha is clearly poor. But her circumstances are made more acute by the fact that her profession is despised and deemed fit only for people of the so-called low castes. She's a Dalit, as are most of the city's pourakarmikas. And like her, they're illiterate, unskilled and chose garbage collection because their parents were pourakarmikas too. Many feel they're equated with and treated like the garbage they collect. “I tried to explain the new rules to one housewife,” said Shobha. “She replied, ‘You're no one to talk to me.' Then she flung a bottle at my head.”

The impact of Shobha's poverty on her physical wellbeing is clear. The impact on her job is clear too. She signs in for an eight-hour shift at 6:30 a.m. But long before that she joins a queue of people to draw water from a public tap. She could hardly have slept well the previous night - her room doesn't have electricity, so to keep from stifling, she leaves the door open. Fear of intruders keeps her awake. During the monsoon, rain sweeps in.

By the time she reaches work, Shobha is tired and often filled with hopelessness. But she's responsible for manually cleaning approximately 1.5 kilometers (almost 1 mile) of road and collecting garbage from about 500 households.

The Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (B.B.M.P.), or municipal corporation responsible for the city's civic governance, has only 2,000 pourakarmikas on its rolls. These “permanent” workers, as they're known, are protected by labor laws. But si nce the 1990s the B.B.M.P. has hired only temporary pourakarmikas through contractors, and so the majority of pourakarmikas like Shobha aren't covered under labor laws. They're paid irregularly, cannot comfortably afford basic amenities, and are even expected to acquire their work tools.

Shobha goes through four brooms a month, at a personal expense of 160 rupees. To save money, she scoops up trash with pieces of metal, cardboard or Styrofoam, which, like the containers into which she haphazardly empties waste, are foraged from the dump. If she can't find a container, she uses plastic bags.

Even permanent pourakarmikas are only given thin gloves to wear, but Shobha must handle all sorts of waste - wet, dry, and hazardous - with her bare hands. On her feet she wears the sort of slippers most people would consider too flimsy to venture outside with. In these she tramps down roads and wades ankle deep into dumps wet with animal excrement.

The B.B.M.P. does pro vide temporary pourakarmikas with a uniform, a green cotton jacket they're expected to slip over their salwar kameez or sari. But they get just one jacket every five years or so. They're also given a metal cart for their garbage containers. A cart could be broken on all sides, but as long as its wheels move, it's considered usable.

So far this year, according to one news report, the B.B.M.P. has collected 250 million rupees from Bangalore's residents in garbage taxes. And this summer it earmarked 320 crore, or 3.2 billion rupees for solid waste management. Its ambitious plans to recycle and compost garbage include a proposed purchase of 200 acres of land to process waste, new garbage collection centers and new contracts with villages earmarked as dumping grounds.

But even with all the money the city has made, there are no new plans for the people who will, on its behalf, make first contact with the garbage. Far from modernizing its collection system, the city do esn't even plan to expand it. About 14,000 people will continue to clean up after 8.5 million with their hands.

In fact, despite numerous public statements by B.B.M.P. officials describing the pourakarmikas' enlarged role under the new rules, half a dozen garbage collectors interviewed for this story weren't even aware of the changes.

Rani, 33, a pourakarmika from Fraser Town who goes by one name, said it was a housewife who explained them to her. “She handed me three separate bags of waste,” said Rani. “Which was nice of her. But I don't even have one container. So I emptied all three bags straight into my cart.”

Dr. C. Suresh, a B.B.M.P. health officer, said that he doesn't expect real change in Bangalore's garbage disposal and collection habits for another two or three months. But he may have to wait longer than that.

Largely as a result of the B.B.M.P.'s own lack of foresight, the city's pourakarmikas are ill-equipped to handle their work and unlikely to do so successfully. S. Balan, who heads the only registered union of pourakarmikas in Bangalore, rolls his eyes at the irony. “Everyone wants a clean city,” he said. “But the cleanliness and well-being of the cleaners is of concern to nobody.”

Sonia Faleiro is the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars. Read more of her work at www.soniafaleiro.com. She will be appearing in Pop-Up Magazine on Nov. 8 at Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco.