Cleaning Delhi

Usha Debi, 37, shuffles through a dumpster near Janpath market. Debi is a wastepicker and gathers garbage in her bag, then dumps it out on the floor of her own rented-out shack, sorts through it and sells what she can. | Photo by Emily Walkenhorst

Story by Kay Kemmet

Trash surrounds Usha Debi. Crinkled chip bags, plastic cups and piles of folded paper.

She sits in a small square building near Connaught Place, one of Delhi’s premier shopping areas.

On a side street is her workshop, her livelihood and her hell.

As she sorts through trash bags she collected from the wealthy, tourist-filled area that morning, she puts the paper in one bin and sorts through different types of plastics, from water bottles to cell phones.

Every time she moves a pile of garbage, flies swarm the room. She alternates between shooing them away and rewrapping her pale blue scarf around her face.

Debi is a soldier in an army of 150,000 waste pickers who collect garbage by hand from the streets of New Delhi and recycle discarded paper and plastics.

She doesn’t like her job. She often gets sick from working with the trash, but can never take a day off. She’s 37 years old and has been working as a trash picker since she was 12.

She performs a public service in this city of about 23 million, but Debi has to pay off a percentage of her income to bribe officials to dig through garbage.

On a good day, she earns about 300 rupees, or $6.50. But before using her earnings to support the seven children she is raising on her own, she must fork out 500 rupees, about $11, a month to bribe local policemen and give 2,000 more rupees, about $45, to her supervisor. The payment assures they won’t lock her out of the small building where she separates recyclables from trash. The leftover income helps pay her 2,000 rupees in rent.

“If the police and everybody won’t let me sit here anymore, then I’m praying to God to help me,” Debi says in Hindi from her small trash-filled room.

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Living in a dirty city

Rani Pandey (center) and her husband Anuj (right) stand in front of their home in Anna Nagar, one of the largest slums in New Delhi. The Pandeys live on the edge of the slum, closer to the polluted water and much of the garbage. | Photo by Emily Walkenhorst

Story by Emily Walkenhorst

Inside her one-room, tin house, Rani Pandey said she resents the media, government and many nongovernmental organizations because they ask a lot of questions, but nothing ever changes.

Rani lives in Anna Nagar, one of the largest slums in New Delhi. The shack she shares with her husband and three children is near a wastewater stream on the edge of the slum.

The murky stream is a dumping ground for their trash and contributes to the slum’s odor.

“(They) just come here and ask questions and then never respond,” said Rani, who’s lived in Anna Nagar since she was 18, in Hindi. “Things are similar for the last 20 years.”

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