When the vats are emptied and their contents taken to the municipal garbage dumps, you would expect that there would be nothing left of value worth recovering. Surprisingly, however, the Dhapa dump area on the eastern edge of the city is put to productive use by some 100,000 individuals, who process whatever waste is still recyclable. They belong to a number of separate caste and tribal groups which undertake impure work of this nature and regulate their range of activities through caste-based conventions. Some of them use organic waste to grow vegetables on "garbage farms," which produce cauliflower, gourds, and corn. Up to 25,000 of them pick and sort garbage from the ever-mounting dumps. For this "privilege" they pay regular fees to dump managers and truck drivers and organize themselves to parcel out picking territories. About the same number are engaged in skinning carcasses, tanning skins and hides, shaving wool and hair, while another 10,000 or more are employed in retrieving "offal, dead flesh, bones, and hoofs which are converted into a large variety of products: fertilizers and manures, gelatine, and even high-priced cosmetics for delicate skin."
Back in the city, the ragpickers, most of whom are women and children, have their special areas and deal with particular middlemen, who purchase what they collect and lend them money. They can get one rupee for a kilogram of paper or glass, a little more for cardboard, three rupees for metal, and as much as twelve rupees for plastic, depending upon the quality. They tend to specialize in one or two materials, sorting and segregating what they have collected before turning it in to a local buyer, known as kabidi wallah, with whom they may have been doing business for years. He weighs and buys the materials, arranges for the washing of bottles and other processing, and packs the materials into burlap bundles, which are then sold to wholesalers, who in turn sell to industrialists for recycling. His markup is said to be about 30 percent, and then the wholesaler takes another 45 percent. The kabidi wallah will often give scavengers an advance and usually some cloth to the women at festival times.
The reaction of the American author Paul Theroux was perhaps typical when his Bengali traveling companion said that all of the sidewalk dwellers were ragpickers, and consequently Calcutta's garbage was the most intensively recycled in the world: "It seemed an unusual choice of words and it strayed close to claptrap: vitality in a place where people lay dead in the gutter . . . the overdramatized quarter of a million recycling ragpickers." When the alternative is destitution, can the value of scavenging, however repugnant it may appear, be so easily dismissed? It is an organized way of life in which each patrols his or her own area and deals with a network of contacts. Understandably, scavengers say that they do not like what they have to do and hope that their children will not have to do it. But despite low status, low earnings, and low self-esteem, they regard it as their vocation, allowing them at least to eke out some sort of regular income.
Working with leather, which has always been considered an inferior occupation in the Indian context, remains a niche reserved to certain minorities and castes. The oldest of the tanners are the Chinese. They settled in the Tangra area in east Calcutta, where there are about one hundred big and three hundred small tanneries. All but a few are owned by the Chinese. These tanneries usually have three floors, the ground floor being used as work space, the first floor as living quarters, and the top floor for drying leather. The raw material is supplied mostly by Muslims, while the purchaser and exporters of the finished products are mainly Punjabis. Other Chinese are bootmakers, in addition to being carpenters and cabinetmakers. Their establishments, which are located around Lower Chitpur Road in the center of the city, also combine workshops with residences.
Another group of tanners and shoemakers are Harijans, who occupy the lowest status in the Hindu social hierarchy. Mainly from Bihar, they settled in slum settlements in the Tangra-Tiljala area, where the first slaughterhouse was located. Some of them work in the Chinese tanneries as wage labor. Others own small tanning units and use mostly skin from the heads of cattle or buffaloes, rarely whole hides. They live in tiny huts and use open pits, which they lease, for processing the hides. Another small group manufactures toy drums out of the intestines of slaughtered cattle.
The Harijan bustee in Tiljala developed in the early 1920s when a wealthy person of the Chamar caste acquired the land in order to construct a number of rows of huts to rent out to his fellow caste members. Their huts are small, dark, and windowless, with an average of six persons, mainly males, sharing a single hut, even sleeping in shifts in order to accommodate as many persons as possible. Every year from May to August, they go back to their villages for the planting season, which is also a lean season for the shoe making business. They come back to Calcutta in time for the autumn festive season when new shoes are in demand. When they grow old they retire to their villages, giving way to the younger generation, which takes possession of their huts. To take fresh possession would entail paying some two thousand rupees in key money.
~~Calcutta Poor : Elegies on a City above Pretense -by-Frederic C. Thomas
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