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Making a Living

By Aazamina Rangwala, January '07

"Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will." --Mahatma Gandhi

On the second day of orientation, I walked into one of the largest slums in Gujarat (Rampir Thekro) not knowing that I was going to walk away with one of the most humbling experiences of my life. There I met a widow, Nanda, who was probably in her early thirties. Just recently, her husband and son passed away from typhoid, a communicable disease that is one of the leading causes of death in India. She earns a living as a rag picker so she can support her five children. Rag pickers are generally from lower-caste or untouchable communities marginalized to urban slums, and make a living by sifting through trash found on the streets, separating it into paper, plastic, and other materials which is then sold to recycling barons (the "middle man") for cash. It is common for children of these communities to follow their parents into the trade at a very young age, as seen in Nanda's situation. Instead of going to school, Nanda's eldest daughter takes on the burden of contributing to her mother's earnings. I accompanied Nanda that day in order to gain a better understanding of the informal sector and daily wage laborers. The process was participatory, so I had no intentions to just simply make observations. I opted to roll up my sleeves, push my limits and be uncomfortable. We sifted through yards of trash, dug through the occasional trashcan we would come across, and roamed the streets of various neighborhoods in hopes to find something that would be of value so Nanda could get 25 rupees from the middleman for a bag of trash that was about the size of her. Three hours later, I found myself standing in a landfill next to a railroad. I looked around and was on the verge of vomiting because the stench was so strong. A man was taking a piss just 20 feet from where I was standing. Hungry cows were scrounging for food among the piles of rubbish. Amongst it all, there was Nanda, squatting in a heaping pile of trash with flies swarming all around her, sifting through the trash with her bare hands. This was her livelihood.

The experience shed light on something I never thought about before. We are always so concerned about the environmental degradation of our country that we fail to look at it from a different perspective – there are people out there who earn a living by picking up the very items that we litter our common spaces with. At the end of the day, I realized that changing things is a lot harder than it seems and that there usually is a reason why things are the way they are. We just sometimes fail to recognize it and are quick to make assumptions.

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