A day in the life of an Indian child scavenger

GAUHATI, India (AP) – As soon as classes are over, Imradul Ali, 10, runs home to take off his uniform and start his job as a waste picker in remote northeastern India.

Armed with a bag of machine guns, he goes to a landfill in the Gauhati slum, the capital of the state of Assam. Here, he searches through other people’s piles of garbage, looking for plastic bottles, glass or anything usable that he can recycle or sell. Around it, cows graze in the mountains of garbage lining the place.

There he comes from a family of scavengers, or “garbage collectors” – his father, mother and older brother make money from it. He started doing this more than a year ago to help his family make more money.

The family was hit hard last year by the pandemic COVID-19, as they could not go to the landfill and search through the garbage to sell. They fought during the blockade months in India, but obtained food with the help of humanitarian organizations.

Ali says he doesn’t want to spend his life doing this, but he doesn’t know what the future holds. “I want to continue studying and I would like to be a rich man,” he said.

He earns up to 100 rupees ($ 1.30) a day, while the rest of his family earns about 250 rupees ($ 3.30) each.

“It is very difficult to manage a family by picking rags,” said Ali’s mother, Anuwara Begum.

Cleaning is dirty and dangerous work. Although there is no exact count, humanitarian groups say about 4 million people in India work as waste pickers. It is effectively the main recycling system in the country, but the work is not environmentally friendly. Those who do have few rights and are exposed to deadly poisons every day.

India’s last census in 2011 put the total number of working children between the ages of 5 and 14, including waste pickers, at around 10 million.

Thadeus Kujur, who runs the Snehalaya charity group, says it is always sad to see children collecting garbage instead of going to school. His group runs five childcare institutions, caring for 185 boys and girls, and has helped 20,000 children in seven years. “We carry out motivational programs so that poor parents realize the value of education before putting their children in school,” he said.

According to a new analysis by the World Bank Group and the United Nations Children’s Fund, it is estimated that one in six children, or 356 million worldwide, lived in extreme poverty before the start of the pandemic – and expects the number is expected to worsen significantly.

Ali’s father wants his son to continue studying, hoping that he will have his own store or get a coveted public job when he grows up, putting an end to their suffering.

As for Ali, he wants to drive a car and wants to have one in the future. “I want good food and clothes,” he said.