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Time to trash injustice

Meena Menon

Every day, before dawn, Anasuya Avte is out of her house, carrying a large, white plastic sack. In her 60s, she works five to eight hours a day to earn a living, collecting and sorting waste. Her neighbour, 80-year-old Ahilyabai Avte, still goes around s orting garbage. Her children do not look after her. ``On the contrary, they take money from me,'' she complains in a frail voice.

Women such as Anasuya and Ahilyabai form part of a large informal sector of scrap collectors who have no social security benefits or health cover and for whom recycling garbage is a means of keeping starvation at bay.

At a recent Maharashtra-level convention in Pune, 3,000-odd scrap collectors packed into a sports stadium and made a forceful demand to the Government that they be included under labour laws which will give them some social security benefits and recognit ion for their valuable contribution.

The meeting was organised by the Kagad Kanch Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (Scrap Collectors Association), a Pune-based trade union of scrap collectors, formed in 1993. It has initiated several processes and programmes with the support of the SNDT Women's U niversity, and has about 5,000 members. The union has also succeeded in extending group insurance cover to 650 scrap collectors.

Lives laid waste by want

It is estimated that there are one lakh scrap collectors in the State and they are mostly Dalit women, constituting a large portion of the unorganised, urban, informal sector, labour force.

A study of scrap collectors, scrap traders and recycling enterprises in Pune, carried out by Poornima Chikarmane, Dr. Medha Deshpande and Lakshmi Narayan, reveals that scrap collectors save the Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporations over a cror e of rupees each year in transport. The total quantum of garbage collected daily by scrap collectors in Pune is 151 tonnes.

Scrap collectors are most likely to be women, married, illiterate and between 19 and 50 years of age. Almost half the waste pickers are the highest income earners in their households, about 27 per cent are in the age group 19-35 years and 33 per cent in the age group 36-50 years have been deserted, are separated or widowed.

The mean monthly per capita income ranges from Rs 126 to Rs 2,233 and one in four scrap collectors falls below the poverty line. Their mean daily income is Rs 60 a day.

According to the Panchayat, since the entire recycling pyramid is based on the labour of the scrap collectors and as they are engaged in economically-productive and environmentally-beneficial work, they should be recognised as unprotected manual workers. Every scrap collector should be registered with the local municipality, it has demanded.

Already, many women who owe allegiance to the union boast of photo identity cards issued by the municipal corporation, which they claim has reduced harassment and abuse from the authorities, including the police or municipal workers. Over 3,000 cards hav e been issued to scrap collectors by the Pune municipal corporation alone.

As scrap collectors are not covered by any legislation and do not enjoy benefits such as provident fund, bonus or paid-leave, the union demands that they be covered under the Maharashtra Hamal Mathadi and Other Unprotected Workers (Regulation of Employme nt and Welfare Act) 1969. It should be made mandatory for traders and industries to contribute to the statutory benefits provided for under the Act.

However, the main difficulty here is that scrap collectors do not have a legally tenable employer-worker relationship with retail scrap traders, says Lakshmi Narayan, General-Secretary of the Panchayat. The Government contends that scrap collectors are s elf-employed and it is difficult to get scrap traders to be responsible for the welfare of the scrap collectors.

The Panchayat has also argued that since municipalities save a great deal of money in transport costs on account of the work done by scrap collectors at the cost of their health, it should be made mandatory for the municipalities to provide medical and l ife insurance cover to waste pickers through the levy of a welfare cess from citizens.

There is also the threat of privatising garbage collection -- scrap collectors have established customary rights to garbage. It should be mandatory for municipalities to integrate scrap collectors in garbage collection schemes. With the proposed segregat ion of garbage schemes going at a snail's pace, this will take a long time.

A fair deal for the fair sex?

At the Pune convention, the Maharashtra Minister of State for Self-employment and Labour, Dr. Hemant Deshmukh, gave a typical Government response to the union's demands, saying that he would look into the matter. However, people have held him to a time-f rame of two months to decide if the existing laws for the unorganised sector could also cover the scrap collectors.

Ulan Kamble has come from Satara. She sells scrap worth Rs 30 everyday to make ends meet for her husband and four children. ``We get very little money, we should at least get minimum wages for this work,'' she demands. Ratnamala Kamble took to scrap coll ecting after her husband deserted her 10 years ago. ``In the monsoon earnings dip, so I have to find other work,'' she says.

For people like these workers, there is no job security or retirement. Sixty-year-old Deu Kamble flops on the ground, exhausted by the heat and exertion of travelling to the venue. She still works for nearly five to eight hours a day to earn a living.

According to Dr Baba Adhav, trade union leader, labour laws must extend to the unorganised sector. The question here is who owns the garbage. The scrap collectors have certain rights which must be recognised.

Older women remember that it was in 1972 that they came to Pune and the surrounding areas and started scrap collection. That was the year of the drought that crippled Marathwada, sparking off large-scale migration. Bhunabai Dhaware, 65, remembers that wh en she collected scrap in those days, she used to get 30 paise a kg.

According to Lakshmi Narayan, 50 per cent of the women earn more than the men and they contributed more towards the household income. Women walk for more than five to eight hours to collect scrap and there are no public spaces for them. While parking for expensive cars is cheap, scrap collectors carrying out a responsible task are abused and not given any space to sort garbage.

Mary Johnson, Director, International Labour Organisation (ILO), India, says that the ILO had asked for a study on the living and working conditions of the scrap collectors and an SNDT study on scrap collectors of Pune is a result of that interest.

The ILO endorses the right to seek legal cover so that social security and welfare benefits are extended to scrap collectors.

Picture: Scene at the scrap collectors' convention in Pune.